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A few curiosities of astronomy and astrophysics

Astronomy and Astrophysics: Facts

Here is a list of some curiosities of astronomy and astrophysics. From our solar system to interstellar space.

Rings of Saturn: With an estimated local thickness of as little as 10 m and as much as 1 km, they are composed of 99.9% pure water ice with a smattering of impurities that may include tholins or silicates. The main rings are primarily composed of particles ranging in size from 1 cm to 10 m.

Valhalla (crater): Valhalla is the largest multi-ring impact crater on Jupiter’s moon Callisto and in the Solar System. It is named after Valhalla, the God Odin’s hall in Norse mythology where warriors are taken after death. 

Europa (lineae):  Europa’s most striking surface features are a series of dark streaks crisscrossing the entire globe, called lineae (English: lines). Close examination shows that the edges of Europa’s crust on either side of the cracks have moved relative to each other. The larger bands are more than 20 km (12 mi) across, often with dark, diffuse outer edges, regular striations, and a central band of lighter material. The most likely hypothesis states that the lineae on Europa may have been produced by a series of eruptions of warm ice as the Europan crust spread open to expose warmer layers beneath. The effect would have been similar to that seen in Earth’s oceanic ridges.

Tartarus Dorsa: The western part of Pluto’s northern hemisphere consists of an extensive, highly distinctive set of 500-meter-high mountains informally named Tartarus Dorsa; the spacing and shape of the mountains looks similar to scales or tree bark. 

Mountain in Ceres: Ahuna Mons is the largest mountain on the dwarf planet and asteroid Ceres. It protrudes above otherwise smooth terrain, it is not an impact feature, and it appears to be the only mountain of its kind on Ceres. Bright streaks run top to bottom on its slopes; these streaks are thought to be salt, similar to the better known Cererian bright spots, and likely resulted from cryovolcanic activity from Ceres’s interior. It is named after the traditional post-harvest festival Ahuna of the Sumi Naga people of India.

Pluto has a tenuous atmosphere consisting of nitrogen (N2), methane (CH4), and carbon monoxide (CO), which are in equilibrium with their ices on Pluto’s surface. According to the measurements by New Horizons, the surface pressure is about 1 Pa(10 μbar), roughly one million to 100,000 times less than Earth’s atmospheric pressure. It was initially thought that, as Pluto moves away from the Sun, its atmosphere should gradually freeze onto the surface; studies of New Horizons data and ground-based occultations show that Pluto’s atmospheric density increases, and that it likely remains gaseous throughout Pluto’s orbit.  

Sagittarius A*: Sagittarius A*  is a bright and very compact astronomical radio source at the center of the Milky Way, near the border of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius. It is part of a larger astronomical feature known as Sagittarius A. Sagittarius A* is thought to be the location of a supermassive black hole, like those that are now generally accepted to be at the centers of most spiral and elliptical galaxies.

Double Pulsar: PSR J0737−3039 is the only known double pulsar. It consists of two neutron stars emitting electromagnetic waves in the radio wavelength in a relativistic binary system. The two pulsars are known as PSR J0737−3039A and PSR J0737−3039B. It was discovered in 2003 at Australia’s Parkes Observatory by an international team led by the radio astronomer Marta Burgay during a high-latitude pulsar survey.

IC 1101: IC 1101 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy at the center of the Abell 2029 galaxy cluster, approximately 320 megaparsecs (1.04 billion light-years) from Earth. IC 1101 is among the largest known galaxies, but there is debate in the astronomical literature about how to define the size of such a galaxy.

A rogue planet (also termed an interstellar planet, nomad planet, free-floating planet, orphan planet, wandering planet, starless planet, sunless planet, or Planemo) is a planetary-mass object that orbits the galaxy center directly. Such objects have been ejected from the planetary system in which they formed or have never been gravitationally bound to any star or brown dwarf. The Milky Way alone may have billions of rogue planets.

souce: wikipedia

Image credit: NASA/JPL/SwRI, Ted Stryk, John Rowe Animations, commons.wikimedia 

A.I. could produce ‘a new sector that we probably don’t know about yet,’ Nasdaq vice chair says http://ift.tt/2hdo7tX

Beavers are fascinating, learn about these “furry engineers”

Beavers have done more to shape North American landscapes than any animal beside humans. We don’t notice them much today because there aren’t many left, but before colonization, North America was home to hundreds of millions of these furry engineers. 

Carbon dioxide in atmosphere hits highest level in 800,000 years, study says

Carbon dioxide levels surged at record breaking speeds last year, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached its highest level in 800,000 years in 2016, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Monday.

Carbon dioxide levels “surged” at record breaking speeds last year, with globally averaged concentrations of CO2 hitting 403.3 parts per million in 2016 compared to 400 parts per million in 2015, according to the WMO’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.

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Knowledgeiskey would like to thank all our followers, readers and supporters who have joined on this journey thus far. 2017 was just the beginning and we big plans for 2018!

Market for humanoid robots set to grow ten times by 2023

A new report claims the market for humanoid robots will expand tenfold by 2023. Current estimates put its value at $320.3 million, but it’s projected to reach $3.9 billion within the next six years. Read more here.

We had a visitor from outside the solar system, check out this video about the interstellar asteroid

An asteroid from another star system visited us!

An Erupting Solar Prominence from SOHO

Credit: SOHO-EIT Consortium, ESA, NASA

Surprisingly erratic X-ray auroras discovered at Jupiter

ESA and NASA space telescopes have revealed that, unlike Earth’s polar lights, the intense auroras seen at Jupiter’s poles unexpectedly behave independently of one another.

Auroras have been seen in many places, from planets and moons to stars, brown dwarfs and a variety of other cosmic bodies. These beautiful displays are caused by streams of electrically charged atomic particles – electrons and ions – colliding with the atmospheric layers surrounding a planet, moon or star. Earth’s polar lights tend to mirror one another: when they brighten at the North pole, they generally brighten at the South pole, too.

The same was expected of auroras elsewhere, but a new study, published today in Nature Astronomy, reveals that those at the gas giant Jupiter are much less coordinated.

The study used ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-ray space observatories to observe the high-energy X-rays produced by the auroras at Jupiter’s poles. While the southern auroras were found to pulse consistently every 11 minutes, those at the planet’s north pole flared chaotically.

“These auroras don’t seem to act in unison like those that we’re often familiar with here on Earth,” says lead author William Dunn of University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UK, and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA.

“We thought the activity would be coordinated through Jupiter’s magnetic field, but the behaviour we found is really puzzling.

“It’s stranger still considering that Saturn – another gas giant planet – doesn’t produce any X-ray auroras that we can detect, so this throws up a couple of questions that we’re currently unsure how to answer.

“Firstly, how does Jupiter produce bright and energetic X-ray auroras at all when its neighbour doesn’t, and secondly, how does it do so independently at each pole?”

With the data at hand, William and colleagues identified and mapped X-ray hot spots at Jupiter’s poles. Each hot spot covers an area half the size of Earth’s surface.

As well as raising questions about how auroras are produced throughout the cosmos, Jupiter’s independently pulsing auroras suggest that there is far more to understand about how the planet itself produces some of its most energetic emissions.

Jupiter’s magnetic influence is colossal; the region of space over which the Jovian magnetic field dominates – the magnetosphere – is some 40 times larger than Earth’s, and filled with high-energy plasma. In the outer edges of this region, charged particles ultimately from volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon, Io, interact with the magnetic boundary between the magnetosphere and interplanetary space. These interactions create intense phenomena, including auroras.

“Charged particles have to hit Jupiter’s atmosphere at exceptionally fast speeds in order to generate the X-ray pulses that we’ve seen. We don’t yet understand what processes cause this, but these observations tell us that they act independently in the northern and southern hemispheres,” adds Licia Ray, from Lancaster University, UK, and a co-author.

The asymmetry in Jupiter’s northern and southern lights also suggests that many cosmic bodies that are known to experience auroras – exoplanets, neutron stars, brown dwarfs and other rapidly-rotating bodies – might produce a very different aurora at each pole.

Further studies of Jupiter’s auroras will help to form a clearer picture of the phenomena produced at Jupiter; auroral observing campaigns are planned for the next two years, with X-ray monitoring by XMM-Newton and Chandra and simultaneous observations from NASA’s Juno, a spacecraft that started orbiting Jupiter in mid-2016.

ESA’s Juice will arrive at the planet by 2029, to investigate Jupiter’s atmosphere and magnetosphere. It, too, will observe the auroras and in particular the effect on them of the Galilean moons.

“This is a breakthrough finding, and it couldn’t have been done without ESA’s XMM-Newton,” adds Norbert Schartel, ESA project scientist for XMM-Newton.

“The space observatory was critical to this study, providing detailed data at a high spectral resolution such that the team could explore the vibrant colours of the auroras and figure out details about the particles involved: if they’re moving fast, whether they’re an oxygen or sulphur ion, and so on.

“Coordinated observations like these, with telescopes such as XMM-Newton, Chandra and Juno working together, are key in exploring and further understanding environments and phenomena across the Universe, and the processes that produce them.”

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