#planetarysciences

Jupiter's Formation Clues Revealed by ESO's VLT and ALMA A fascinating new snapshot captured by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has set the astronomical community abuzz with excitement. The image offers intriguing insights into the potential formation of planets as massive as Jupiter. Utilizing the powerful tools of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), researchers have stumbled upon […]

NASA MESSENGER Mission Data Reveals Surprising Chromium Abundance on Mercury Mercury, the enigmatic planet closest to the sun, has long puzzled scientists with its unusual characteristics. Now, a groundbreaking study led by Arizona State University scientist Larry Nittler has shed light on the planet’s composition, unveiling fascinating insights into its origin and geological history. The research, conducted using data acquired during NASA’s MESSENGER mission, focuses […]

From a distance, Saturn's rings look flawlessly smooth, as if they've been in their current state indefinitely. But as the Voyager and Cassini probes have witnessed, the rings are incredibly dynamic. Small moons shepherd the ice and dust that comprise the rings, providing them with structure. At the same time, the passing of the moons creates gravitational distortions in the rings: spokes, ripples, and gaps within the ring material. As the ring material gets pushed together or pulled apart, smaller bodies can form within the ring, or be pulled apart into tiny ring particles. While watching one of Saturn's moons, Prometheus, shepherd the edges of the F ring, researchers were surprised to find what they've termed "minijets," trails of ring particles that can be over 100 kilometers long. Although they don't have the ability to image the objects causing these jets, researchers think that they're simply large snowballs that have been aggregated under the influence of gravity, and were gradually pushed out of the plane of the ring, pulling some of the ring material with them as they left. These aren't violent events—the objects that create the minijets are probably only moving at about four miles an hour (that's two meters a second). So, NASA's title for the article describing these results as "blazing a trail" is a bit of an overstatement. But it does have a very good video describing the discovery of these events. Read the comments on this post http://dlvr.it/1TQv0F