Inscrutable but not immutable (Image: NASA/JPL/SSI) 14 October 2009 by Rachel Courtland, Puerto Rico SATURN’S rings seem almost immutable. These planetary jewels, carved by moonlets and shaped by gravity, could well have looked much the same now as they did billions of years ago – but only from afar. Now it is emerging that an …
The Pale Blue Dot 1. At the moment, the hottest talk in Astronomy circles is the Cassini spacecraft in orbit round Saturn. As Saturn is side on to the Sun and therefore eclipsing the rings and its moons on the far side, amazing shadows are occurring hence amazing pictures are being relayed back to Earth. …
EPSC Abstracts, Vol. 4, EPSC2009-xxxx (will be included after acceptance), 2009 European Planetary Science Congress, © Author(s) 2009 D. Tirsch (1) and R. Jaumann (1,2) (1) German Aerospace Center (DLR), Berlin, Germany, (2) Institute of Geological Sciences, Free University Berlin, Germany (Daniela.Tirsch@dlr.de /Fax: +49-30-67055402) Introduction The localization of former potentially habitable zones on Mars is …
Water on Mars – Constraining Volume to Time Relations Read More »
The inner, yellow portion of HD 61005’s disc spans 8,7 billion km, or about the width of Neptune’s orbit in our own solar system. This false-colour Hubble view masks the star’s direct light to bring out detail in the disc. Image credit: Nasa/ESA/D Hines (Space Science Inst., New Mexico) and G Schneider (Univ. of Arizona) …
Warped debris discs around stars are blowing in the wind Read More »
The latest vista from ESO’s GigaGalaxy Zoom project homes in on the central parts of our Milky Way Galaxy. Click for link to high resolution image. Image: ESO/S Guisard. DR EMILY BALDWIN ASTRONOMY NOW Posted: September 21, 2009 The European Southern Observatory has today released the second of three new breath-taking portraits showing the Milky …
