NASA Unveils New, Close-Up Image Of Ceres’ Bright Spots

New Horizons captures images of water ice and blue skies on Pluto    

New Horizons, the spacecraft that keeps on giving.

Landing site recommended for ExoMars 2018

Oxia Planum has been recommended as the primary candidate for the landing site of the ExoMars 2018 mission.

ExoMars 2018, comprising a rover and surface platform, is the second of two missions making up the ExoMars programme, a joint endeavour between ESA and Russia’s Roscosmos. Launch is planned for May 2018, with touchdown on the Red Planet in January 2019.

The main goal for the rover is to search for evidence of martian life, past or present, in an area with ancient rocks where liquid water was once abundant. A drill is capable of extracting samples from up to 2 m below the surface. This is crucial, because the present surface of Mars is a hostile place for living organisms owing to the harsh solar and cosmic radiation. By searching underground, the rover has more chance of finding preserved evidence.

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May 1, 1979 – The prototype Space Shuttle Enterprise rolls out from the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

(NASA/Kennedy Space Center)

Hiro:... Hey tadashi.

Tadashi: yeah?

Hiro: is that a mirror in your pants?

Tadashi: what?

Hiro: cause i can see me in 'em.

Tadashi:...

Tadashi:...

Hiro: well?

Tadashi:... Get out.

Supermoon Total Lunar Eclipse and Lightning Storm

Life on Mars

Funky Light Signal From Colliding Black Holes Explained

Entangled by gravity and destined to merge, two candidate black holes in a distant galaxy appear to be locked in an intricate dance. Researchers using data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have come up with the most compelling confirmation yet for the existence of these merging black holes and have found new details about their odd, cyclical light signal.

The candidate black hole duo, called PG 1302-102, was first identified earlier this year using ground-based telescopes. The black holes are the tightest orbiting pair detected so far, with a separation not much bigger than the diameter of our solar system. They are expected to collide and merge in less than a million years, triggering a titanic blast with the power of 100 million supernovae.

Researchers are studying this pair to better understand how galaxies and the monstrous black holes at their cores merge – a common occurrence in the early universe. But as common as these events were, they are hard to spot and confirm.

PG 1302-102 is one of only a handful of good binary black hole candidates. It was discovered and reported earlier this year by researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, after they scrutinized an unusual light signal coming from the center of a galaxy. The researchers, who used telescopes in the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey, demonstrated that the varying signal is likely generated by the motion of two black holes, which swing around each other every five years. While the black holes themselves don’t give off light, the material surrounding them does.

In the new study, published in the Sept. 17 issue of Nature, researchers found more evidence to support and confirm the close-knit dance of these black holes. Using ultraviolet data from GALEX and Hubble, they were able to track the system’s changing light patterns over the past 20 years.

What’s causing the changes in light? One set of changes has to do with the “blue shifting” effect, in which light is squeezed to shorter wavelengths as it travels toward us in the same way that a police car’s siren squeals at higher frequencies as it heads toward you. Another reason has to do with the enormous speed of the black hole.

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NASA just released a brand new equirectangular projection of Jupiter, so I thought it would be fun to revisit the surface of some planetary bodies … IN CONTINUOUSLY LOOPING GIF FORM.

So here’s

Mercury

Venus

Earth

Earth’s moon

Mars

Jupiter

Ganymede (one of Jupiter’s moons)

Pluto

Credit: NASA/JPL, USGS