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Categories: Offbeat: Paleontology and Archeology, Space: The Solar System

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     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

An active region on the sun, numbered AR 1504, rotated into view over the left side of the sun on June 10, 2012. The region fired off two M-class flares and two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) on June 13 and June 14, 2012.

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It's the final opportunity of the century to witness the rare astronomical reunion of the sun, Venus and Earth. On Tuesday, June 5 or 6, 2012, depending on your location, Venus will make its presence in the solar system visible from Earth's day side. Using special eye safety precautions, viewers may see Venus as a small dot slowly drifting across the golden disk of the sun.

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When Venus transits the sun on June 5-6, an armada of spacecraft and ground-based telescopes will be on the lookout for something elusive and, until recently, unexpected: the arc of Venus.

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With the new data obtained during the Venus transit on June 5-6, 2012, the RHESSI team hopes to improve the knowledge of the exact shape of the sun and provide a more accurate measure of the diameter than has previously been obtained.

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On June 5, 2012, at 6:03 PM EDT, the planet Venus will do something it has done only seven times since the invention of the telescope: cross in front of the sun. This transit is among the rarest of planetary alignments and it has an odd cycle. Two such Venus transits always occur within eight years of each other and then there is a break of either 105 or 121 years before it happens again.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

A Venus transit across the face of the sun is a relatively rare event -- occurring in pairs with more than a century separating each pair. There have been all of 53 transits of Venus across the sun between 2000 B.C. and the last one in 2004. On Wednesday, June 6 (Tuesday, June 5 from the Western Hemisphere), Earth gets another shot at it -- and the last for a good long while. But beyond this uniquely celestial oddity, why has Venus been an object worthy of ogling for hundreds of centuries?

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More than 2 billion years ago, a much fainter sun should have left the Earth as an orbiting ice ball. Why we avoided the deep freeze is a question that has puzzled scientists, but one astronomer might have an answer.

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For the first time, scientists have captured images of auroras above the giant ice planet Uranus, finding further evidence of just how peculiar a world that distant planet is. Detected by means of carefully scheduled observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the newly witnessed Uranian light show consisted of short-lived, faint, glowing dots - a world of difference from the colorful curtains of light that often ring Earth's poles.

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In 1977, Jimmy Carter was sworn in as president, Elvis died, Virginia park ranger Roy Sullivan was hit by lightning a record seventh time and two NASA space probes destined to turn planetary science on its head launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The identical spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, were launched in the summer and programmed to pass by Jupiter and Saturn on different paths. Voyager 2 went on to visit Uranus and Neptune, completing the "Grand Tour of the Solar System," perhaps the most exciting interplanetary mission ever flown. Scientists who designed and built identical instruments for Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were as stunned as anyone when the spacecraft began sending back data to Earth.

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Just as an expert chess player sacrifices a piece to protect the queen, the solar system may have given up a giant planet and spared the Earth, according to a new article.

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In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, astronomers have hunted for radio signals and ultra-short laser pulses. Astronomers suggest a new technique for finding aliens: Look for their city lights.

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Astronomers have measured the diameter of the dwarf planet Eris by catching it as it passed in front of a faint star. This was seen by telescopes in Chile, including the TRAPPIST telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory. The observations show that Eris is an almost perfect twin of Pluto in size and appears to be covered in a layer of ice.

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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected signs of icy bodies raining down in an alien solar system. The downpour resembles our own solar system several billion years ago during a period known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment," which may have brought water and other life-forming ingredients to Earth.

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Uranus' highly tilted axis makes it something of an oddball in our solar system. The accepted wisdom is that Uranus was knocked on its side by a single large impact, but new research rewrites our theories of how Uranus became so tilted and also solves fresh mysteries about the position and orbits of its moons.

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Searching for extra-solar planets -- which are planets outside of our solar system -- is very popular these days. About 700 planets are known at the moment, a number that is continuously rising due to refined observational techniques. Astronomers have just made a remarkable discovery: they were able to establish proof of so-called debris discs around two stars. The debris discs are remnants of the formation of the planets.

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A University of Toronto-led team of astronomers has observed extreme brightness changes on a nearby brown dwarf that may indicate a storm grander than any seen yet on a planet. Because old brown dwarfs and giant planets have similar atmospheres, this finding could shed new light on weather phenomena of extra-solar planets.

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Usually, running five minutes late is a bad thing since you might lose your dinner reservation or miss out on tickets to the latest show. But when a planet runs five minutes late, astronomers get excited because it suggests that another world is nearby. NASA's Kepler spacecraft has spotted a planet that alternately runs late and early in its orbit because a second, "invisible" world is tugging on it.

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Astronomers have discovered that the dwarf planet 2007 OR10 -- nicknamed Snow White -- is an icy world, with about half its surface covered in water ice that once flowed from ancient, slush-spewing volcanoes. The new findings also suggest that the red-tinged dwarf planet may be covered in a thin layer of methane, the remnants of an atmosphere that's slowly being lost into space.

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Today, Neptune has arrived at the same location in space where it was discovered nearly 165 years ago. To commemorate the event, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken these "anniversary pictures" of the blue-green giant planet.

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By tracking atmospheric features on Neptune, a planetary scientist has accurately determined the planet's rotation, a feat that had not been previously achieved for any of the gas planets in our solar system except Jupiter.