THE UNIVERSE — What is the great attractor and why does it have such massive gravitational pull on the scale that we’ve never seen before?

 via THE UNIVERSE — What is the great attractor and why does it have….

Anonymous asked: What is the great attractor and why does it have such massive gravitational pull on the scale that we’ve never seen before?

Here is one of our posts on the subject! Original post is at the link and the full text has been pasted below the cut.

The “Great Attractor”

Something is pulling the Milky Way Galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, the entire Local Group of galaxies and perhaps tens of thousands of other galaxies towards it at great speed. How does 22 million kilometers per hour sound for rush hour traffic?

NASA/ESA has aimed the Hubble Space Telescope at the Norma Cluster (Abell 3627) and used the Advanced Camera for Surveys to take this image. This supercluster of galaxies appears to lie at the core of the “Great Attractor”. Located 220 million light years away, this massive galaxy cluster has an enormous concentration of mass and thus a huge gravitational attraction, and it dominates our region of the universe.

The Great Attractor is difficult to observe in optical wavelengths. The plane of our own galaxy both outshines (with stars) and obscures (with dust) objects that lie behind it, and the Great Attractor lies in this so-called Zone of Avoidance. This image consists of exposures in blue and infrared light to cut through some of the obscuring dust. The bright stars in the image are from our own galaxy.

The largest galaxy in the image is ESO 137-002, a spiral galaxy seen edge on. In the optical image, we can see large regions of dust across the galaxy’s bulging central disk and another region of dust off to the left of the spiral. This galaxy also has a tail of gas that glows in x-rays, which may be indicative of star formation well away from the galaxy disk.

-JF

Image credit: NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope
Image link: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/720334main_potw1302a.jpg
Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

(Source: facebook.com)

 

Cryosleep: It’s not just science fiction anymore | MNN – Mother Nature Network

via Cryosleep: It’s not just science fiction anymore | MNN – Mother Nature Network.

Putting astronauts into short-term hibernation could make space travel more efficient.

By: Chanie Kirschner Fri, Apr 17, 2015

Here’s what cryosleep could look like for a NASA space crew. (Photo: NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts/SpaceWorks)

 

 

If you’re a sci-fi movie aficionado, you may have heard of cryosleep. Heck, if you haven’t been living under a rock, you know last year’s blockbuster “Interstellar” gives it a starring role. As it turns out, it’s not just the stuff of fantasy anymore. At the end of last year, NASA, together with the Atlanta-based SpaceWorks Enterprises, unveiled plans to dramatically change the way we do space travel through the use of cryosleep.

Though technologically feasible, a mission to Mars has remained out of reach because of the cost and the sheer mass of the human load. In fact, human crew and all of the things that go along with us have a direct impact on mission mass, as well as number of launches required for the trip and complexity. Dr. Bobby Braun, former NASA chief technologist, said, “Anytime you introduce humans, it’s an order of magnitude or two more challenging.”

Scientists believe that they can resolve the problem through the use of torpor, or short-term hibernation, which is found to exist naturally among a number of mammalian species. By creating a torpor stasis habitat in which the space shuttle crew “hibernates” for much of their travel time, a space mission to Mars becomes more feasible. The researchers based their methodology on the use of induced hypothermia in medical situations. In fact, medically induced hypothermia is used to treat a variety of conditions, from neonatal encephalopathy to traumatic brain or spinal cord injury. It lowers a patient’s body temperature to help reduce the risk of ischemic injury to tissue after a period of insufficient blood flow.

Medically-induced hypothermia has only been used in critical patient care. Until now.

How it would work

Standard living quarters in a space shuttle would be replaced with a torpor habitat, in which the pressurized volume would be greatly decreased. The chamber would allow for six crew members to coexist in a torpor state simultaneously. A hypothermic state would likely be induced by cooling the body’s core temperature (induced in one of three ways), which would happen slowly over a few hours.

While the crew members are in a hypothermic state, various sensors would be hooked up to them so that their conditions could be monitored. They would receive nutrition intravenously through TPN — total parenteral nutrition. The liquid would contains all the essential elements for a human body to function. In addition, a catheter would be inserted to drain urine. Because no solids are consumed, the digestive system, and therefore the need for bowel function, would be inactive. Electromagnetic muscle stimulation would protect key muscle groups from atrophy.

The crew would be in this medically induced hypothermic state for 14 days at a time, with crew members taking turns being awake for two or three days at a time to ensure the needs of the crew and ship are met.

The benefits of this scenario? A major reduction in consumables due to an inactive crew, a dramatically lower pressurized volume required for living quarters, and the ability to eliminate things like a food galley, exercise equipment, entertainment, et cetera. Indeed, SpaceWorks says the mass of a shuttle with a crew in torpor would be 19.8 tons, less than half the mass of the reference habitat.

Sounds enticing — at least for those of us on the ground. Still, plenty more research needs to be done and many more questions remain to be answered, but the groundwork for turning the stuff of science fiction into a practical reality is there.

To find out more about the torpor stasis habitat, be sure to check out NASA and SpaceWorks’ full presentation.

NASA Data Reveals Mega-Canyon Under Greenland Ice Sheet

via Always better together, electricspacekoolaid: NASA Data Reveals….

Data from a NASA airborne science mission reveals evidence of a large and previously unknown canyon hidden under a mile of Greenland ice.

The canyon has the characteristics of a winding river channel and is at least 460 miles (750 kilometers) long, making it longer than the Grand Canyon. In some places, it is as deep as 2,600 feet (800 meters), on scale with segments of the Grand Canyon. This immense feature is thought to predate the ice sheet that has covered Greenland for the last few million years.

“One might assume that the landscape of the Earth has been fully explored and mapped,” said Jonathan Bamber, professor of physical geography at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and lead author of the study. “Our research shows there’s still a lot left to discover.”

Bamber’s team published its findings Thursday in the journal Science.

The scientists used thousands of miles of airborne radar data, collected by NASA and researchers from the United Kingdom and Germany over several decades, to piece together the landscape lying beneath the Greenland ice sheet.

A large portion of this data was collected from 2009 through 2012 by NASA’s Operation IceBridge, an airborne science campaign that studies polar ice. One of IceBridge’s scientific instruments, the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder, operated by the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas, can see through vast layers of ice to measure its thickness and the shape of bedrock below.

In their analysis of the radar data, the team discovered a continuous bedrock canyon that extends from almost the center of the island and ends beneath the Petermann Glacier fjord in northern Greenland.

NASA – IceBridge

 

NASA’s Spitzer Spots Planet Deep Within Our Galaxy | NASA

via NASA’s Spitzer Spots Planet Deep Within Our Galaxy | NASA.

April 14, 2015

This artist’s map of the Milky Way shows the location of one of the farthest known exoplanets, lying 13,000 light-years away. Most of the thousands of exoplanets discovered to date are closer to our solar system, as indicated by the pink/orange areas. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

 

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has teamed up with a telescope on the ground to find a remote gas planet about 13,000 light-years away, making it one of the most distant planets known.

The discovery demonstrates that Spitzer — from its unique perch in space — can be used to help solve the puzzle of how planets are distributed throughout our flat, spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy. Are they concentrated heavily in its central hub, or more evenly spread throughout its suburbs?

“We don’t know if planets are more common in our galaxy’s central bulge or the disk of the galaxy, which is why these observations are so important,” said Jennifer Yee of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a NASA Sagan fellow. Yee is the lead author of one of three new studies that appeared recently in the Astrophysical Journal describing a collaboration between astronomers using Spitzer and the Polish Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE.

OGLE’s Warsaw Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile scans the skies for planets using a method called microlensing. A microlensing event occurs when one star happens to pass in front of another, and its gravity acts as a lens to magnify and brighten the more distant star’s light. If that foreground star happens to have a planet in orbit around it, the planet might cause a blip in the magnification.

This plot shows data obtained from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE, telescope located in Chile, during a “microlensing” event. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Warsaw University Observatory

Astronomers are using these blips to find and characterize planets tens of thousands of light-years away in the central bulge of our galaxy, where star crossings are more common. Our sun is located in the suburbs of the galaxy, about two-thirds of the way out from the center. The microlensing technique as a whole has yielded about 30 planet discoveries so far, with the farthest residing about 25,000 light-years away.

“Microlensing experiments are already detecting planets from the solar neighborhood to almost the center of the Milky Way,” said co-author Andrew Gould of The Ohio State University, Columbus. “And so they can, in principle, tell us the relative efficiency of planet formation across this huge expanse of our galaxy.”

Microlensing complements other planet-hunting tools, such as NASA’s Kepler mission, which has found more than 1,000 planets closer to home. But it faces one key problem: This method can’t always precisely narrow down the distance to the stars and planets being observed. While a passing star may magnify the light of a more distant star, it rarely can be seen itself, making the task of measuring how far away it is challenging.

Of the approximately 30 planets discovered with microlensing so far, roughly half cannot be pinned down to a precise location. The result is like a planetary treasure map lacking in X’s.

That’s where Spitzer can help out, thanks to its remote Earth-trailing orbit. Spitzer circles our sun, and is currently about 128 million miles (207 million kilometers) away from Earth. That’s farther from Earth than Earth is from our sun. When Spitzer watches a microlensing event simultaneously with a telescope on Earth, it sees the star brighten at a different time, due to the large distance between the two telescopes and their unique vantage points. This technique is generally referred to as parallax.

“Spitzer is the first space telescope to make a microlens parallax measurement for a planet,” said Yee. “Traditional parallax techniques that employ ground-based telescopes are not as effective at such great distances.”

Using space telescopes to observe microlensing events is tricky. Ground telescopes send out alerts to the astronomy community when an event starts, but the activity can quickly fade, lasting on average about 40 days. The Spitzer team has scrambled to start microlensing campaigns as soon as three days after receiving an alert.

In the case of the newfound planet, the duration of the microlensing event happened to be unusually long, about 150 days. Both Spitzer and OGLE’s telescopes detected the telltale planetary blip in the magnification, with Spitzer seeing it 20 days earlier.

This infographic explains how NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope can be used in tandem with a telescope on the ground to measure the distances to planets discovered using the “microlensing” technique. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This time delay between viewing of the event by OGLE and Spitzer was used to calculate the distance to the star and its planet. Knowing the distance allowed the scientists also to determine the mass of the planet, which is about half that of Jupiter.

Spitzer has eyed 22 other microlensing events in collaboration with OGLE and several other ground-based telescopes. While these observations have not turned up new planets, the data are essential to learning the population statistics of stars and planets at the heart of our galaxy. Spitzer will watch approximately 120 additional microlensing events this summer.

“We’ve mainly explored our own solar neighborhood so far,” said Sebastiano Calchi Novati, a Visiting Sagan Fellow at NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. “Now we can use these single lenses to do statistics on planets as a whole and learn about their distribution in the galaxy.”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Spacecraft operations are based at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Spitzer, visit:

http://spitzer.caltech.edu

http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

Whitney Clavin
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-4673
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

Felicia Chou
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0257
felicia.chou@nasa.gov

2015-128

 

NASA says finding alien life almost certain within next two decades

via NASA says finding alien life almost certain within next two decades | Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building.

by Colin Payne, 04/12/15

NASA recently gave a definitive answer to one of the biggest collective questions humanity has ever asked: are Earth’s inhabitants alone in the universe? NASA says the answer is “almost certainly no,” according to Phys.org. And while we could meet our alien neighbors within the next two decades, they may not take the form of what you’re used to seeing in science fiction.

“I believe we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth in the next decade and definitive evidence in the next 10 to 20 years, NASA chief scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Ellen Stofan said at a public panel in Washington earlier this week. “We know where to look, we know how to look, and in most cases we have the technology.

NASA interim director of heliophysics, Jeffery Newmark added that finding life beyond Earth is “definitely not an if, it’s a when.”

What do they expect to find? Don’t think Klingon or Ewok, think much smaller – microscopically smaller down to the microbe level. “We’re not talking about little green men,” Stofan noted. “We’re talking about little microbes.”

Related: NASA sending probe to Europa in search of ancient sub-glacial life

Mars is the main hot spot for NASA’s search for microbial life, as a study that analyzed the atmosphere above Mars’ polar caps suggests half of the planet’s northern hemisphere once had oceans a mile deep that contained water for as long as 1.2 billion years.

However, confirming life on the Red Planet might hinge on the ability to get boots on the ground in the form of field geologists and astrobiologists.

Another key location for life exploration is Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, which a recent study confirmed has a large liquid ocean underneath its icy surface. NASA believes the ocean may be a “habitable zone” where life could exist.

Via Phys.org

Images via Shutterstock and NASA, Flickr Creative Commons

For asteroid-capture mission, NASA picks a boulder | MNN – Mother Nature Network

via For asteroid-capture mission, NASA picks a boulder | MNN – Mother Nature Network.

The plan is to drag a boulder into lunar orbit, where astronauts will visit it beginning in 2025.

By: Mike Wall, Space.com Thu, Mar 26, 2015

Asteroids are known to harbor multiple boulders, so the mission will have a number of targets to choose from when it gets to the big space rock. (Photo: NASA)

 

NASA’s bold asteroid-capture mission will pluck a boulder off a big space rock rather than grab an entire near-Earth object, agency officials announced today (March 25).

NASA intends to drag the boulder to lunar orbit, where astronauts will visit it beginning in 2025. The space agency decided on the boulder snatch — “Option B,” as opposed to the whole-asteroid “Option A” — Tuesday (March 24) during the mission concept review of the asteroid-redirect effort, NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot told reporters during a teleconference today.

Option B will probably cost about $100 million more than Option A would have, but its advantages are worth the price-tag bump, Lightfoot said.

For example, large asteroids are known to harbor multiple boulders, so the mission will have a number of targets to choose from when it gets to the big space rock. Option A is riskier; the capture probe would likely have no recourse if its chosen asteroid proved too large to handle, or otherwise unsuitable.

Option B will also help develop more of the technologies humanity needs to extend its footprint beyond Earth, Lightfoot said.

“We are really trying to demonstrate capabilities that we think we’re going to need in taking humans further into space, and ultimately to Mars,” Lightfoot said. “That’s what we’re looking at.”

The asteroid plan

As currently envisioned, NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) will launch a robotic probe in December 2020.

After about two years of spaceflight, the craft will rendezvous with a large near-Earth asteroid. NASA hasn’t decided yet which space rock to target, and the decision doesn’t have to be made until a year before launch, but the leading contender at the moment is the roughly 1,300-foot-wide (400 meters) 2008 EV5, agency officials said today.

The capture probe will assess the chosen asteroid’s boulders, grab one up to 13 feet (4 m) wide and then retreat to a “halo orbit” around the big space rock. The spacecraft will stay in this orbit for 215 to 400 days, long enough for the boulder-toting probe’s subtle gravitational tug to influence the orbit of the larger space rock.

This aspect of the mission should help researchers learn more about how to deflect asteroids that may pose a threat to Earth, Lightfoot said.

“Once we understand we’ve actually influenced the larger asteroid, then that gives us an idea — OK, how much more do we want to do that, or do we want to start heading back?” he said.

The capture probe will then turn around and head toward lunar orbit, where it should end up by late 2025. Two NASA astronauts will then journey out to meet the robotic spacecraft and the boulder, using the agency’s Orion capsule and Space Launch System megarocket, both of which are in development. This manned mission will likely last 24 or 25 days, Lightfoot said.

The cost of the robotic component of ARM — that is, the capture/redirect mission, without any astronaut visits —will be capped at $1.25 billion, not including the launch vehicle.

Getting the show on the road

Now that the mission-concept review is done and NASA has settled on Option B, the next big milestone for ARM is an “acquisition strategy meeting” in July.

“This is where we’ll decide how we’re going to procure all these systems,” Lightfoot said, citing the solar-electric propulsion system that will power the ARM capture probe as one prominent example. “We’ve got to get those pieces moving.”

He’s happy that ARM has put the design uncertainty in the rearview mirror.

“Let’s get on with it, so we can get this next key step in our journey to Mars moving on,” Lightfoot said.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. This story was originally written for SPACE.com and was republished with permission here. Copyright 2015 SPACE.com, a Purch company. All rights reserved.

• NASA to Pick Boulder Off an Asteroid |Conceptual Animation
• Asteroid Basics: A Space Rock Quiz
• How Sending Humans to an Asteroid Would Work
• MNN: 8 asteroids in our solar system

For an alternative concept:

water, water everywhere…

THE UNIVERSE — howtobeafuckinglady: nickisverse:….

Scientists Discover The Oldest, Largest Body Of Water In Existence—In Space

Scientists have found the biggest and oldest reservoir of water ever—so large and so old, it’s almost impossible to describe.

The water is out in space, a place we used to think of as desolate and desert dry, but it’s turning out to be pretty lush.

Researchers found a lake of water so large that it could provide each person on Earth an entire planet’s worth of water—20,000 times over. Yes, so much water out there in space that it could supply each one of us all the water on Earth—Niagara Falls, the Pacific Ocean, the polar ice caps, the puddle in the bottom of the canoe you forgot to flip over—20,000 times over.

The water is in a cloud around a huge black hole that is in the process of sucking in matter and spraying out energy (such an active black hole is called a quasar), and the waves of energy the black hole releases make water by literally knocking hydrogen and oxygen atoms together.

The official NASA news release describes the amount of water as “140 trillion times all the water in the world’s oceans,” which isn’t particularly helpful, except if you think about it like this.

That one cloud of newly discovered space water vapor could supply 140 trillion planets that are just as wet as Earth is.

Mind you, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has about 400 billion stars, so if every one of those stars has 10 planets, each as wet as Earth, that’s only 4 trillion planets worth of water.

The new cloud of water is enough to supply 28 galaxies with water.

Truly, that is one swampy patch of intergalactic space.

Equally stunning is the age of the water factory. The two teams of astrophysicists that found the quasar were looking out in space a distance of 12 billion light years. That means they were also looking back in time 12 billion years, to when the universe itself was just 1.6 billion years old. They were watching water being formed at the very start of the known universe, which is to say, water was one of the first substances formed, created in galactic volumes from the earliest time. Given water’s creative power to shape geology, climate and biology, that’s dramatic.

“It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,” says Matt Bradford, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and leader of one of the teams that made the discovery. (The journal article reporting the discovery is titled, without drama, “The Water Vapor Spectrum of APM 08279+5255: X-Ray Heating and Infrared Pumping over Hundreds of Parsecs.”)

It is not as if you’d have to wear foul-weather gear if you could visit this place in space, however. The distances are as mind-bogglingly large as the amount of water being created, so the water vapor is the finest mist—300 trillion times less dense than the air in a typical room.

And it’s not as if this intergalactic water can be of any use to us here on Earth, of course, at least not in the immediate sense. Indeed, the discovery comes as a devastating drought across eastern Africa is endangering the lives of 10 million people in Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. NASA’s water discovery should be a reminder that if we have the sophistication to discover galaxies full of water 12 billion light years away, we should be able to save people just an ocean away from drought-induced starvation.

The NASA announcement is also a reminder how quickly our understanding of the universe is evolving and how much capacity for surprise nature still has for us. There’s water on Mars, there’s water jetting hundreds of miles into space from Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, there are icebergs of water hidden in the polar craters of our own Moon. And now it turns out that a single quasar has the ability to manufacture galaxies full of water.

But it was only 40 years ago, in 1969, that scientists first confirmed that water existed anywhere besides Earth.

A young star takes centre stage | ESA/Hubble

via A young star takes centre stage | ESA/Hubble.

With its helical appearance resembling a snail’s shell, this reflection nebula seems to spiral out from a luminous central star in this new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image.

The star in the centre, known as V1331 Cyg and located in the dark cloud LDN 981— or, more commonly, Lynds 981 — had previously been defined as a T Tauri star. A T Tauri is a young star — or Young Stellar Object — that is starting to contract to become a main sequence star similar to the Sun.

What makes V1331Cyg special is the fact that we look almost exactly at one of its poles. Usually, the view of a young star is obscured by the dust from the circumstellar disc and the envelope that surround it. However, with V1331Cyg we are actually looking in the exact direction of a jet driven by the star that is clearing the dust and giving us this magnificent view.

This view provides an almost undisturbed view of the star and its immediate surroundings allowing astronomers to study it in greater detail and look for features that might suggest the formation of a very
low-mass object in the outer circumstellar disc.

Credit:

ESA/Hubble, NASA, Karl Stapelfeldt (GSFC), B. Stecklum and A. Choudhary (Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg, Germany)

Dawn Spacecraft Sees Spots as It Approaches Mysterious Ceres – Scientific American

via Dawn Spacecraft Sees Spots as It Approaches Mysterious Ceres – Scientific American.

Spectacular new images are trickling in from NASA’s mission to a dwarf planet in the Asteroid Belt

March 2, 2015 |By Lee Billings

The largest and most mysterious resident of the debris belt between Mars and Jupiter is an icy world called Ceres, and it’s on the threshold of being explored up close for the first time by NASA’s Dawn mission, which is scheduled to enter Ceres’s orbit on March 6.

Discovered in 1801 by the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, Ceres was initially thought to be a full-fledged planet. That began to change when one of Piazzi’s rivals, the astronomer William Herschel, noted that Ceres only appeared as a point of light in his telescope rather than a resolved disk, like the other known planets. To Herschel that meant Ceres was probably too small to be considered a planet, and he coined the term “asteroid” to describe its starlike appearance. Ceres received a minor upgrade to “dwarf planet” in 2006, part of the same process that demoted Pluto to the same status.

Whatever you call may call it, Ceres is one of the most geologically interesting and strange objects in the solar system. Its shape, size and composition—round, roughly the size of Texas and at least 20 percent water ice—place it at the poorly understood transition point between rocky worlds like Earth and icy worlds like Jupiter’s Europa, Saturn’s Enceladus, and other large moons of the outer solar system. Other than blurry Hubble Space Telescope images from 2004, its surface had scarcely been glimpsed until Dawn’s approach. As the spacecraft’s ion engines slowly push it toward Ceres, the dwarf planet’s details are now coming into focus, revealing tantalizing new details with practically every new image.

>>View a slide show of the best images of Ceres

In the latest images, taken from 46,000 kilometers away and released on February 25, Dawn has sharpened its view of mysterious bright spots dotting Ceres’s crater-pocked surface, some of which were previously seen in the Hubble images. What used to appear as Ceres’s brightest blotch now appears to be two—a brighter, larger spot next to a smaller, dimmer one, both in the same crater. “Bright” is a relative term—all the bright spots are actually quite dark but still far brighter than the rest of Ceres, which is blacker than coal. No one knows what the bright spots are but guesses abound: Perhaps they are scars from recent impacts or minerals deposited by active geysers or water ice erupted by “cryovolcanoes”—or something even wilder. In 2014 the Herschel space telescope spied transient plumes of water vapor tentatively linked to the approximate locations of the white spots in Hubble images.

“Ceres’s bright spot can now be seen to have a companion of lesser brightness, but apparently in the same basin,” says Chris Russell, Dawn’s principal investigator, based at the University of California, Los Angeles. “This may be pointing to a volcanolike origin of the spots but we will have to wait for better resolution before we can make such geologic interpretations.”

“The images now are just at that intriguing resolution that lets you make stuff up,” says Mike Brown, the California Institute of Technology astronomer whose work helped motivate the reclassification of Pluto and Ceres as dwarf planets. The white spots would seem to be exposed ice, Brown says, but observations of Ceres with ground-based telescopes don’t show any evidence of ice at the bright spots’ locations.

But ice shouldn’t be stable at Ceres’s surface, says Andy Rivkin, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “So its presence there would mean it’s only gotten there recently, either by having impacts expose it or…. Well, probably that’s the only way,” Rivkin says. “I suppose cryovolcanism could also bring it to the surface, but impacts would be the safer bet.”

All anyone really knows for sure right now is that the spots are getting brighter as Dawn’s view sharpens, says Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute and a Dawn mission scientist. And the brighter they become “the more interesting they get,” because water ice is one of the brightest things researchers could possibly see on Ceres. “If we discover something like cryovolcanism on Ceres, that would be spectacular because it would be an indicator that there are subsurface reservoirs of water,” Sykes says. “This isn’t what you normally think of as an asteroid, a dead potato just being smacked around by its neighbors out in space. There is a lot happening on this object, and that could make Ceres very astrobiologically important.”

If Ceres proves to be a possible home for extraterrestrial life and is venting water into space, Sykes says, “this raises the possibility that we could send another spacecraft there in the near future to go down to one of these spots, scoop up soil, take a look and ask whether there are any dead bugs in there.” Such a mission would be relatively inexpensive, Sykes says, because Ceres is so close by and accessible. “It’s between Mars and Jupiter, it’s not a nasty radiation environment like Jupiter’s Europa, it’s not really far away like Saturn’s Enceladus and it’s got low gravity so it doesn’t require lots of energy to land on! It’s too early to say whether this stuff is there, but the prospect is very exciting.”

Dawn is still in the earliest phases of investigating Ceres, and the best images and scientific data are yet to come. It will eventually swing down to within about 400 kilometers of the surface to study its composition and to generate high-resolution maps. The spacecraft will spend at least the next 16 months studying Ceres, but because the dwarf planet could potentially be an abode for subsurface life Dawn will not be crashed into it at the end of its life, as is the usual procedure. Instead, it will be left in orbit, becoming a long-lived mechanical moonlet of Ceres once its mission ends.

 

Saturn’s Streaming Hexagon

via A Jug Of Wine, A Loaf Of Bread, And Virtual Thou • unknownskywalker: Saturn’s Streaming Hexagon ….

unknownskywalker:

This colorful view from NASA’s Cassini mission is the highest-resolution view of the unique six-sided jet stream at Saturn’s north pole known as “the hexagon.” This movie, made from images obtained by Cassini’s imaging cameras, is the first to show the hexagon in color filters, and the first movie to show a complete view from the north pole down to about 70 degrees north latitude.