The image above is Jupiter seen through a different spectral filter, and as you can see the bands defined by CH4 (methane) absorption are still as prominent as ever. This indicates the change in visible light colours is due to some trace compound that normally colours the clouds – but what? NB Notice how bright
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Jupiter lost a cloud stripe, new photos reveal – Space.com- msnbc.com. Jupiter’s missing stripe might be related to this… The impact of a large object with Jupiter in July 2009 Authors: A. Sánchez-Lavega, A. Wesley, G. Orton, R. Hueso, S. Perez-Hoyos, L. N. Fletcher, P. Yanamandra-Fisher, J. Legarreta, I. de Pater, H. Hammel, A. Simon-Miller,
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Jupiter loses a stripe – 11 May 2010 – New Scientist. Losing a stripe seems rather careless for a Giant Planet, but that’s what Jupiter has done. Why? First let’s look at what Jupiter’s bands are made of. The white, almost featureless cloud deck that has replaced the stripe is composed probably of ammonia ice-clouds
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Is Halley’s comet an alien interloper? – space – 10 May 2010 – New Scientist. New simulations of the evolution of the Opik-Oort Cloud indicate it might be anomalously heavy for its cometoids to have come from our Sun’s forming Outer Planet disk. Instead the majority of OOC objects formed in the same star-forming nebula
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Getting between the planets isn’t easy if you want to stop at multiple destinations on one tank of propellant. Currently the only probe able to do so – unless they do some orbital gymnastics with Cassini – is NASA’s DAWN. Currently DAWN is seemingly within spitting distance (~0.48 AU) of Vesta, its first port-of-call, but
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Weird, Ultra-small Microbes Turn Up in Acidic Mine Drainage …at On Orbit …a reiteration of this Astrobiology Magazine piece …itself a re-echo of this U.Cal Berkeley News Bite. Basically the ARMAN (Archaeal Richmond Mine Acidophilic Nanoorganisms) microbes, classified with the Archaea, are very small, but still independently subsisting organisms, perhaps even predated upon by Thermoplasma
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[1004.4584] Persistent Evidence of a Jovian Mass Solar Companion in the Oort Cloud. John Matese & Daniel Whitmire discuss more evidence for a possible supra-Jovian somewhere in the Oort Cloud – they pin down a possible region to search, which WISE should be able to do as part of its all-sky IR imaging mission. We
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Titan is cold, so cold that bottled BBQ gas (methane & ethane) are liquid in lakes around its poles and it rains (pours really) the stuff periodically in regions closer to the equator. Methane-Ethane lakes on Titan (Credit: Copyright 2008 Karl Kofoed) But chemical disequilibrium, as found on Titan, is one pre-requisite for interesting long-chain
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A recent preprint by Charles Lineweaver & Marc Norman, of ANU, proposes that dwarf planets can be defined physically by the “Potato Radius” – the size at which gravity overcomes the strength of their constituent materials and makes them into a sphere. Why “Potato”? Because below that radius objects are often ellipsoids with three different
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ScienceShot: Summer on Triton – ScienceNOW. Triton’s troposphere is a COLD mix of nitrogen and methane, currently at a pressure of roughly 40-65 microbars (4-6.5 Pa @ 38 K, near surface.) Interestingly JP Aerospace claims an ultra-high altitude airship can get to ~200 kilo-feet. At that height the pressure is a mere 17.76 Pa and
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