Two new moons found orbiting Uranus

Scientists have discovered two new moons orbiting the planet Uranus, after re-examining data captured by the Nasa space probe Voyager 2 in 1986 found evidence of the small, dark "moonlets" lurking behind the large gas planet and making "waves" in its closest rings.

27 moons are already known to orbit Uranus, which is the third biggest planet in our solar system, but the two new ones appear to be nearer to the ice giant than any others. Little is known about Uranus, which is 20 times further from the sun than Earth is and smaller than similar ringed, gas planets Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter and Saturn are also closer to earth, which has made them easier to investigate. They have 67 and 62 moons respectively.

A lot of the information scientists have at their disposal was gathered by Voyager 2, which flew by 30 years ago, nine years after it was launched in 1977. However, two planetary scientists from the University of Idaho’s Moscow campus, Rob Chancia and Matthew Hedman, have used the old data to show there are wavy patterns in two of Uranus' 13 rings, called Alpha and Beta, consistent with the pulls of two little moons. They also suggested the moons are so tiny and dark - meaning they do not reflect light - they were written off as background noise by the spacecraft.

Analysis of numerical data gathered by Voyager 2 showed similar patterns in the Alpha and Beta rings to those caused by the pull of some of Uranus' other moons, such as Cordelia and Ophelia. The scientists predict if these two new moons exist they would each measure between two and nine miles across.

The discovery is not yet confirmed and the researchers are still in the process of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. Mark Showalter from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in California, who has previously discovered moons around Uranus, told New Scientist the existence of the two new moons is "certainly a very plausible possibility".

To read more, click here.

Picture courtesy: Mail Online

Astronomers find the 'roundest' star in the universe

Stars are not perfect spheres. While they rotate, they become flat due to the centrifugal force. Researchers around Laurent Gizon from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the University of Göttingen have succeeded in measuring the oblateness of a slowly rotating star with unprecedented precision.

The researchers have determined stellar oblateness using asteroseismology - the study of the oscillations of stars. The technique is applied to a star 5000 light years away from Earth and revealed that the difference between the equatorial and polar radii of the star is only 3 kilometers - a number that is astonishing small compared to the star's mean radius of 1.5 million kilometers; which means that the gas sphere is astonishingly round.

All stars rotate and are therefore flattened by the centrifugal force. The faster the rotation, the more oblate the star becomes. Our Sun rotates with a period of 27 days and has a radius at the equator that is 10 km larger than at the poles; for the Earth this difference is 21 km. Gizon and his colleagues selected a slowly rotating star named Kepler 11145123. This hot and luminous star is more than twice the size of the Sun and rotates three times more slowly than the Sun. The periodic expansions and contractions of the star can be detected in the fluctuations in brightness of the star.

To read more about the research and other findings, click here.

Pluto's heart-shaped feature hints at subsurface ocean

New research by astronomers suggests that Pluto's famous heart-shaped feature caused the dwarf planet to roll over the eons, and this reorientation probably wouldn't have been possible without a subsurface ocean.

The cutaway image of Pluto shown here is a section through the area of Sputnik Planitia, with dark blue representing a subsurface ocean and light blue for the frozen crust.

The left lobe of Pluto's "heart" is a 600-mile-wide (1,000 kilometers) plain called Sputnik Planitia (formerly known as Sputnik Planum), which astronomers think is an enormous impact crater. This basin has been filling with nitrogen ice over the years and now contains huge amounts of the stuff. y NASA's New Horizons spacecraft's observations, which flew by Pluto last year, also suggest that Sputnik Planitia's ice may be up to 6 miles (10 km) thick.

Sputnik Planitia is aligned nicely with Pluto's "tidal axis" — the line along which the gravitational pull from the dwarf planet's largest moon, Charon, is said to be the strongest.

If Pluto does have an ocean, how has it managed to avoid freezing up entirely over the past 4.5 billion years? Pluto is big enough that it may have retained a substantial amount of internal heat, Nimmo said. And the dwarf planet's water may contain significant amounts of ammonia or other substances that act as an antifreeze, he added.

Astronomers think subsurface oceans exist on the Saturn moons Enceladus and Titan; the Jovian satellites Europa, Ganymede and Callisto; and a number of other solar system bodies. Such buried water may be abundant in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of frigid objects beyond Neptune's orbit.

To read more or watch a video on the same, click here.

Photo credit: Pam Engebretson

Two colliding spiral galaxies produce rare eyelid-shaped formations

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a high-resolution telescope in the Chilean Andes, astronomers have discovered a rare star formation. The structure, which looks remarkably like two eyelids, was produced by the grazing collision of two spiral galaxies. Far beyond our galaxy, a swirling stellar tsunami has created a pair of watchful cosmic eyes.

Lead author Michele Kaufman, an astronomer formerly with The Ohio State University in Columbus, said, “Finding one in such a newly formed state gives us an exceptional opportunity to study what happens when one galaxy grazes another.”

When IC 2163’s outer arm clipped NGC 2207’s spinning disk, the collision produced brilliant formations of stars, dust, and gas. Kaufman and colleagues spotted the two spiral galaxies some 114 million light-years from Earth, utilizing ALMA’s high sensitivity and resolution to track the movement of carbon monoxide gas at the intersection of the two.

New research suggests that gas from IC 2163’s outer “eyelid” is spiraling inward at over 100 kilometers per second. But the gas slows down as it approaches the center, and begins to follow the normal rotation of the galaxy.

To read more about the research, click here.

November full moon to be the closest, biggest and brightest in decades!

Sky watchers and moon lovers will be getting to a rare astronomical treat on November 14. So you may want to mark the date on your calendar.

NASA says, the full moon will be the closest moon to date in the twenty-first century, on November 14. The full moon coming up this month will not only be a “supermoon” but also be the biggest supermoon to grace our skies in decades.

Our full moon will be 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than usual, according to NASA. This will make it the biggest “supermoon” in almost 70 years! You can watch the You Tube video here in which NASA explains how it is the biggest.

This month, the full moon reaches complete fullness at 8:52 a.m. on Nov. 14, which means the moon might actually appear brighter and fuller the evening of Nov. 13 rather than the 14th. The moon will begin to rise at 5:13 p.m. on Nov. 13, just seven minutes before sunset. It will be completely dark that evening by 5:51 p.m.

A moon is considered a “supermoon” when it passes slightly closer to Earth in its orbit. According to NASA, “full moons vary in size because of the oval shape of the Moon’s orbit. It is an ellipse with one side (perigee) about 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other (apogee).”

This year’s pass will be especially close, making the moon appear extra-spectacular. A “closer than usual” pass to the Earth can happen even when the moon isn’t full, but the effect is much more noticeable when it is.

The next time the moon will be so close, full and bright is in 2034, November 25, 2034, to be precise.

The next supermoon will be visible on Dec. 14, and is expected to wipe out the view of the geminid meteor shower.

To read more and see more photos, click here 

You can watch the You Tube video here

Can NASA deflect the orbital paths of deadly asteroids hurtling towards the Earth?

There are more than 1000 deadly asteroids found hurtling towards Earth, and NASA is struggling to deflect their orbital paths. So far, the paths of only four might be diverted.

A huge meteor about the size of a mountain could totally demolishing our planet, say astronomers. And it could happen anytime in the coming decades. 

A report released by Nature World News explains that about 1,000 asteroids are hurtling towards the Earth at 60,000 miles per hour and that some of them could hit our planet. A number of the near-Earth asteroids have been identified. There are more of them waiting to be discovered in the next two years!

With powerful telescopes, experts are trying to gauge how close 2000 ET70 is going to get to the Earth. This two-mile wide space rock stirred astronomers from a number of American universities, who called it a "potentially hazardous asteroid". However, not much is known about this fist-shaped asteroid, says NASA. The huge asteroid can decimate the Earth, leading to massive earthquakes, tidal waves and widespread "apocalyptic scenes."

The asteroid is said to have already brushed past the Earth in 2012, when it came within 18 lunar distances. That was pretty close! And it might revisit our planet soon, coming so close that it could hit us.

To read more, click here.

Don't miss Thursday's bright Orionid meteor showers!

Bright Orionid meteors are set to light up the sky Thursday night, as Earth passes through debris left behind by Halley's Comet. But whether the moon will spoil the view is the question. 

On the night of Thursday, October 20, to Friday, October 21, the sky is expected to light up with streaks of light due to the Orionid meteor shower.

Although the Orionids - the second of two meteor showers during the year that originate from Halley's Comet- go on for over a month, from early October to early November, the shower typically reaches its peak somewhere around October 20-24.

This year, the peak is expected on the night of October 20-21, as Earth passes through the greatest concentration of comet debris in Halley's trail.

Wait for the constellation of Orion - The Hunter - to rise that night to find the meteor shower's radiant, which is the point in the sky from which all the meteors appear to radiate out.

The Orionids, under ideal conditions, produces about 20 meteor streaks per hour. In other words, there should be zero light pollution, including no moon in the sky. Compared to meteor showers like the Perseids and the Geminids, which can produce over 100 meteors per hour, the Orionids are weaker.

Earlier, this happened during the 2007 shower, when the meteor rate jumped up to 70 per hour!

This year is not expected to be an outburst, and the waning gibbous moon will be in the sky that night, tracking along right next to the radiant from the time they both rise (about 10:30 p.m. local time) until dawn. So, unfortunately, the moon's light will end up washing out many of the meteors, making this particular shower difficult to see.

The shower originates from the point near the constellation Orion, which rises in the east around 10:30 p.m. and then traces a path towards the south, climbing higher in the sky with each passing hour, until dawn. 

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The universe has 10 times more galaxies than scientists thought

There are almost 10 times more galaxies in the universe than we once thought, according to a new analysis by Hubble Space Telescope. Counting all the galaxies in the universe is hard. So hard, it seems, that it's possible to miss billions of them.

The new analysis shows that there are about 2 trillion of them, up from about 200 billion.

It's the first major revision to the number since 1995, when scientists turned Hubble's gaze on one section of sky for 10 days and created an image, unveiled in 1996, that NASA called "mankind's deepest, most detailed optical view of the universe."

Based on the single section of sky and the galaxies that showed up in it, astronomers extrapolated that the entire universe should have about 200 billion galaxies. But that far from settled the question. Twenty years later, the new analysis begins by noting that the number of galaxies in the universe is still "a fundamental question."

The study was led by Christopher Conselice of the University of Nottingham and accepted for publication in the latest issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

To know more about the study, click here.

Our solar system may soon have a ninth planet

Researchers from the University of Michigan have recently discovered a new planet that exists in our solar system. This newly discovered "dwarf" planet, dubbed as 2014 UZ224 is just beyond the orbit of Pluto. Astronomers believe that the solar system may soon have a ninth planet.

The newly discovered planet, 2014 UZ224 is approximately 330 miles across, which is much smaller than Ceres, another dwarf planet which has a diameter is 580 miles. This makes the new planet remarkably small and it also fits the definition of a dwarf planet, as considered by NASA.

Scientists are still not sure about the exact orbital path of this new dwarf planet but they believe that a single orbit around the sun would be roughly 1100 Earth years. Moreover, the distance of the new dwarf planet and the Sun is approximately 8.5 billion miles.

The team of researchers from the University of Michigan, led by David Gerdes found this new dwarf planet, using "Dark Energy Camera (DECam)," a specialized camera that Gerdes developed. The scientific community is hopeful that this specialized camera will explain the role of dark energy that is leading to an accelerated expansion of the universe.

So far, five dwarf planets have been recognized in the solar system, namely, Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake. But, scientists feel that there are more out there that are yet to be discovered.

It was previously believed that beyond Pluto, the solar system is composed of icy small objects. But now studies emphasise that the area houses a ninth planet that is much larger than the Earth.

According to astronomer Mike Brown who discovered Eris in collaboration with Konstantin Batygin, the orbital discrepancy beyond Neptune is due to the presence of an unseen planet that is about 10 times the size of Earth.

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Fresh data reveals no sign of bands around Jupiter

After scientists recently reported exciting new discoveries about Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft sent images of the planet taken during a trek from its north to south poles last month. The images were released recently.

Juno made the journey on Aug. 27 at a range of about 2,500 miles above the planet’s clouds. NASA wrote on its website that the JunoCam transmitted six megabytes of data from its six-hour journey. The early results have produced fresh data on the planet that have scientists excited.

It’s bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms. Also, there is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts -- this image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter. The clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features.

NASA said all eight of Juno’s science instruments collected data. Joining the mission was the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), supplied by the Italian Space Agency. The JIRAM transmitted infrared images of the planet’s poles. The JIRAM is said to be the first of its kind to see the southern aurora on Jupiter

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Milky Way's 'dark twin' discovered

Scientists have recently found something entirely new -- a galaxy with the same mass as the Milky Way but with only 1 percent of our galaxy's star power. About 99.99 percent of this other galaxy is made up of dark matter, and scientists believe it may be one of many.

The galaxy Dragonfly 44, is said to be 300 million light years away. If scientists can track down a similar galaxy closer to home, however, they may be able to use it to make the first direct detection of dark matter.

Dark matter is the name given to a mysterious form of matter that we know must be there. Without something adding to the mass of the universe, things would tear apart. The laws of physics require some unknown, unseen kind of something to hold the universe together (while dark energy pushes it farther and farther apart). All we really know about dark matter is that it barely interacts with anything, including its own ilk.

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Proxima Centauri, our neighbour, could have earth-sized planet

Scientists' investigations of the closest star, Proxima Centauri, has show that there is an Earth-sized planet orbiting about it. What is more, this rocky globe is moving in a zone that would make liquid water on its surface a possibility. 

Proxima is 40 trillion km away but the discovery of a planet potentially favourable to life in our cosmic neighbourhood is likely to fire the imagination.

The distance between the star and its planet is considerably smaller than Earth's separation from the Sun (149 million km). But Proxima Centauri is what is termed a red dwarf star. It is much reduced in size and dimmer compared with our Sun, and so a planet can be nearer and still enjoy conditions that are potentially as benign as those on Earth.

Scientists have found that this planet is at 5% of the Earth's distance from the Sun. However, Proxima is 1,000 times fainter than the Sun. So the flux - the energy - reaching Proxima b is about 70% of what the Earth receives. It's like taking Earth a bit further away, but it's comparable.

Whether the temperatures on Proxima b are favourable for life to exist is going to depend on the presence of an atmosphere. An envelope of greenhouse gases would warm surface conditions and provide sufficient pressure to keep water - essential for biology - in a liquid state.

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Astronauts install new parking spot

Two NASA astronauts successfully installed a new parking spot at the International Space Station, marking a key step toward accommodating new commercial space taxis that arrive at the orbiting lab.

Jeff Williams, commander of Expedition 48, and flight engineer Kate Rubins ventured outside of the space station, one minute ahead of schedule. The spacewalk came to an early end at 2:02 p.m. EDT (1802 GMT) due to a minor communication problem.

"The view is phenomenal," Rubins said, as she exited the space station's Quest airlock. Today's spacewalk marked a first for Rubins and the fourth of Williams' career.

The installation of the IDA means the space station will be able to accommodate various space taxis, including SpaceX and Boeing vehicles. Before now, only Russian vehicles were able to dock with space station. 

Due to broken communication with Williams' right ear piece, additional minor "go ahead" tasks were called-off and the two astronauts headed back to the space station's airlock.

On Sept. 1, Williams and Rubins are likely to perform a second 6.5-hour spacewalk to retract one of the station's thermal radiators, among other tasks. Williams will return home Sept. 6 with Russian cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin. Williams is set to surpass Scott Kelly's record for the most total cumulative time spent in space by an American, with a total of 534 days.

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The Milky Way has a giant void of young stars

A team of Japanese, South African, and Italian astronomers recently found that there is a massive region around the center of the Milky Way that is devoid of young stars. 

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, and the Sun is almost 26,000 light-years from the center in one of its spiral arms. Measuring the distribution of stars within the galaxy is very important in understanding how our galaxy formed and evolved.

Young, pulsating stars called Cepheid Variable stars, or Cepheids for short, are the perfect candidate for this. They are between 10 and 300 million years old, younger than our Sun at 4.6 billion years old, and pulsate in their brightness in a repeating cycle. As this pulsation time is related to its luminosity, astronomers can monitor them to determine their actual brightness; after comparing this with the brightness as seen from Earth, a distance can be determined.

Finding these stars is difficult as the center of the galaxy is full of interstellar dust that obscures the light and hides many stars from view. Using near-infrared observations from the South African Large Telescope (SALT), the team was able to see past the dust; to their surprise they found hardly and Cepheids around a region about 1,000 light-years wide from the core of the galaxy.

The recent findings suggest that the extreme inner disk has virtually no young stars and that no significant amount of star formation has occurred in this area for hundreds of millions of years. The chemical makeup and movement of the Cepheid Variable stars are guiding the team in understanding the formation of the galaxy.

Mostly Cepheids have been used to measure distances of objects in far off in the universe, but this new study shows that the same technique can be used in revealing information a lot closer to home.

To know more about the research, click here.

Giant asteroid Bennu could destroy earth

In a few weeks, scientists could be one step closer to understanding fundamental questions about the origins of our planet and the human race; from an asteroid that could threaten to destroy us.

The OSIRIS-REx Mission, headed by NASA and the University of Arizona, plan to launch an unmanned spacecraft on September 8 in the efforts to reach Bennu, a large near-Earth asteroid in August 2018.

The spacecraft will survey Bennu until a small vacuum-like device is capable of hovering above the asteroid and sucking up somewhere between 60 and and 400 grams of "gravel and soil" to bring back to Earth in the year 2023, according to Dante Lauretta, a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, and the principal investigator on the OSIRIS-REx mission.

As a near-Earth asteroid, Bennu once existed in what he described as a main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter. There, it was likely dislodged by a gravitational pull towards Saturn, sending it closer to us. The asteroid could indeed strike Earth, and cause tremendous destruction.

Bennu has a one in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth, and such an event wouldn't take place for 150 years. People living in the year 2135 would know whether the asteroid posed a threat to hit Earth. Bennu would enter a "keyhole" located between the Earth and the moon that would send it in the direction of Earth.

A one in 2,700 chance isn't too insignificant. But by the time it would strike, we would likely have the technology to destroy Bennu.

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