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Nasa announces major press conference on a 'discovery beyond our solar system'

Attending the press conference will be astronomers and planetary scientists from across the world.

Nasa is to host a major press conference on a “discovery beyond our solar system”.

The event will see the revelation of major information about exoplanets, or planets that orbit stars other than our sun, according to a release. It made no further mention of the details of what would be revealed.

Exoplanets are the major hope for life elsewhere in the universe, since many have been found that resemble our own Earth and could have the building blocks of life. More of them are being discovered all the time.

The event will take place on 22 February at 1pm New York time, it said. It will be streamed live on Nasa’s television station and on its website.

Attending the press conference will be astronomers and planetary scientists from across the world.

Nasa said that the public will be able to ask questions using the hashtag #AskNasa during the conference. The agency will also hold a Reddit AMA, or ask me anything, session straight after the briefing.

January is national Braille literacy month. Did you know that Braille actually started out as military code developed so the French soldiers could read important messages without light? In fact, the code was known as night writing. It was the schoolboy Louis Braille who developed the more streamlined version of the alphabet used today. #WorldBrailleDay

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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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EARTH HURICANE

Travelling to other solar systems is not as far away as you might think...

Mammals switched to daytime activity after dinosaurs died out, says study

Earliest mammals were nocturnal to avoid dinosaurs, which may be why there are relatively few modern daytime-active mammals, say researchers

The earliest mammals were night creatures which only emerged from the cover of darkness after the demise of the daytime-dominating dinosaurs, according to new research.

This would explain why relatively few mammals follow a daytime-active – or “diurnal”– lifestyle today, and why most that do still have eyes and ears more suitable for living by night.

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Flying cars are coming soon, yes really. Flying cars are no longer restricted to the realms of science fiction. Check out our article on the flying cars currently under development.