De Acordo Com Os Astrobiólogos Charley Lineweaver E Aditya Chorpa, A Vida Em Outros Planetas Provavelmente

Solar System: 10 Things to Know This Week

January 8: Images for Your Computer or Phone Wallpaper

Need some fresh perspective? Here are 10 vision-stretching images for your computer desktop or phone wallpaper. These are all real pictures, sent recently by our planetary missions throughout the solar system. You’ll find more of our images at solarsystem.nasa.gov/galleries, images.nasa.gov and www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages.

Applying Wallpaper: 1. Click on the screen resolution you would like to use. 2. Right-click on the image (control-click on a Mac) and select the option ‘Set the Background’ or 'Set as Wallpaper’ (or similar).

1. The Fault in Our Mars

This image from our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of northern Meridiani Planum shows faults that have disrupted layered deposits. Some of the faults produced a clean break along the layers, displacing and offsetting individual beds.

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2. Jupiter Blues

Our Juno spacecraft captured this image when the spacecraft was only 11,747 miles (18,906 kilometers) from the tops of Jupiter’s clouds – that’s roughly as far as the distance between New York City and Perth, Australia. The color-enhanced image, which captures a cloud system in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere, was taken on Oct. 24, 2017, when Juno was at a latitude of 57.57 degrees (nearly three-fifths of the way from Jupiter’s equator to its north pole) and performing its ninth close flyby of the gas giant planet.

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3. A Farewell to Saturn

After more than 13 years at Saturn, and with its fate sealed, our Cassini spacecraft bid farewell to the Saturnian system by firing the shutters of its wide-angle camera and capturing this last, full mosaic of Saturn and its rings two days before the spacecraft’s dramatic plunge into the planet’s atmosphere on Sept. 15, 2017.

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4. All Aglow

Saturn’s moon Enceladus drifts before the rings, which glow brightly in the sunlight. Beneath its icy exterior shell, Enceladus hides a global ocean of liquid water. Just visible at the moon’s south pole (at bottom here) is the plume of water ice particles and other material that constantly spews from that ocean via fractures in the ice. The bright speck to the right of Enceladus is a distant star. This image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 6, 2011.

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5. Rare Encircling Filament

Our Solar Dynamics Observatory came across an oddity this week that the spacecraft has rarely observed before: a dark filament encircling an active region (Oct. 29-31, 2017). Solar filaments are clouds of charged particles that float above the Sun, tethered to it by magnetic forces. They are usually elongated and uneven strands. Only a handful of times before have we seen one shaped like a circle. (The black area to the left of the brighter active region is a coronal hole, a magnetically open region of the Sun).

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6. Jupiter’s Stunning Southern Hemisphere

See Jupiter’s southern hemisphere in beautiful detail in this image taken by our Juno spacecraft. The color-enhanced view captures one of the white ovals in the “String of Pearls,” one of eight massive rotating storms at 40 degrees south latitude on the gas giant planet. The image was taken on Oct. 24, 2017, as Juno performed its ninth close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was 20,577 miles (33,115 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet.

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7. Saturn’s Rings: View from Beneath

Our Cassini spacecraft obtained this panoramic view of Saturn’s rings on Sept. 9, 2017, just minutes after it passed through the ring plane. The view looks upward at the southern face of the rings from a vantage point above Saturn’s southern hemisphere.

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8. From Hot to Hottest

This sequence of images from our Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the Sun from its surface to its upper atmosphere all taken at about the same time (Oct. 27, 2017). The first shows the surface of the sun in filtered white light; the other seven images were taken in different wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light. Note that each wavelength reveals somewhat different features. They are shown in order of temperature, from the first one at about 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit (6,000 degrees Celsius) on the surface, out to about 10 million degrees in the upper atmosphere. Yes, the sun’s outer atmosphere is much, much hotter than the surface. Scientists are getting closer to solving the processes that generate this phenomenon.

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9. High Resolution View of Ceres

This orthographic projection shows dwarf planet Ceres as seen by our Dawn spacecraft. The projection is centered on Occator Crater, home to the brightest area on Ceres. Occator is centered at 20 degrees north latitude, 239 degrees east longitude.

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10. In the Chasm

This image from our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a small portion of the floor of Coprates Chasma, a large trough within the Valles Marineris system of canyons. Although the exact sequence of events that formed Coprates Chasma is unknown, the ripples, mesas, and craters visible throughout the terrain point to a complex history involving multiple mechanisms of erosion and deposition. The main trough of Coprates Chasma ranges from 37 miles (60 kilometers) to 62 miles (100 kilometers) in width.

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Explore and learn more about our solar system at: solarsystem.nasa.gov/. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

É um evento único, que ficará em nossas memórias.

📅 Data de registro: 5 de agosto de 2024 às 18:24

Comet C/2016 R2 (now with a biparted tail) passing California Nebula

by Ritzelmut

O Telescópio Espacial que tanto amamos acaba de ser usado para descobrir que a expansão do universo é mais acelerada do que se pensava anteriormente. De acordo com as medidas do Hubble, o universo está expandindo entre 5% e 9% mais rápido do que se pensava. Comparando os seus resultados com os resultados obtidos com medições feitas da radiação cósmica de fundo.

Os astrônomos usaram a WFC3 do Hubble para observar galáxias contendo as duas réguas que comentamos no início, estrelas variáveis Cefeidas e supernovas do Tipo Ia. Unindo essas observações com técnicas avançadas de processamento de dados eles conseguiram definir com maior precisão a chamada constante de Hubble e chegar a conclusão de que o universo está se expandindo mais rápido do que o esperado.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtLM_o8xRTM)

The Faint Rings of Uranus

Taken in January, 1986 by Voyager 2. Uranus assembled using orange, simulated green, and violet light. The rings were taken in clear (white) light, but colored red here.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Kevin M. Gill

Conjunction: Mars, Venus and Moon

by Stefan Grießinger

This is not just an incredible view of Earth, it’s also a fantastic illustration of the terminator. (No not that one!) The terminator is the moving line that separates the day side from the dark night side of a planetary body. From this vantage point you can make out the gradual transition to darkness that is experienced as twilight on the surface. This image was captured on Aug. 31 by astronaut Jeff Williams (@Astro_Jeff) while on board the ISS.

Solar System: 5 Things To Know This Week

This month you can catch a rare sight in the pre-dawn sky: five planets at once! If you look to the south (or to the north if you’re in the southern hemisphere) between about 5:30 and 6 a.m. local time you’ll see Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter lined up like jewels on a necklace. They’re beautiful in the sky, and even more fascinating when you look closely.

This week we’re taking a tour of the planets with recent information about each:

1. Artistic License

Craters on Mercury are named for writers and artists of all kinds. There are Tolstoy, Thoreau and Tolkien craters, for example, as well as those that bear the names of the Brontës, photographer Dorothea Lange and dancer Margot Fonteyn. See the complete roster of crater names HERE.

2. Lifting the Veil of Venus

A thick covering of clouds made Venus a mystery for most of human history. In recent decades, though, a fleet of robotic spacecraft has helped us peer past the veil and learn more about this world that is so like the Earth in some ways — and in some ways it’s near opposite.

3. Curious?

Have you ever wanted to drive the Mars Curiosity rover? You can take the controls using our Experience Curiosity simulation. Command a virtual rover as you explore the terrain in Gale Crater, all using real data and images from Mars. Try it out HERE.

4. Now That’s a Super Storm

Winter weather often makes headlines on Earth — but on Jupiter there’s a storm large enough to swallow our entire planet several times over. It’s been raging for at least three hundred years! Learn about the Great Red Spot HERE.

5. Ring Watcher

This week, the Cassini spacecraft will be making high-resolution observations of Saturn’s entrancing rings. This is a simulated look at Saturn, along with actual photos of the rings from the Cassini mission.

Want to learn more? Read our full list of the 10 things to know this week about the solar system HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

We Just Identified More Than 200 New (Potential) Planets

The Kepler space telescope is our first mission capable of identifying Earth-size planets around other stars. On Monday, June 19, 2017, scientists from many countries gathered at our Ames Research Center to talk about the latest results from the spacecraft, which include the identification of more than 200 potential new worlds! Here’s what you need to know:

We found 219 new planet candidates.

All of these worlds were found in a patch of sky near the Cygnus constellation in our Milky Way galaxy. Between 2009 and 2013, Kepler searched more than 200,000 stars in the region for orbiting planets. The 219 new planet candidates are part of the more than 4,000 planet candidates and 2,300 confirmed planets Kepler has identified to date.

Ten of these worlds are like our own.

Out of the 219 new planet candidates, 10 are possibly rocky, terrestrial worlds and orbit their star in the habitable zone – the range of distances from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet.

Small planets come in two sizes.

Kepler has opened up our eyes to the existence of many small worlds. It turns out a lot of these planets are either approximately 1.5 times the size of Earth or just smaller than Neptune. The cool names given to planets of these sizes? Super Earths and mini-Neptunes.

Some of the new planets could be habitable. 

Water is a key ingredient to life as we know it. Many of the new planet candidates are likely to have small rocky cores enveloped by a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, and some are thought to be ocean worlds. That doesn’t necessarily mean the oceans of these planets are full of water, but we can dream, can’t we?

Other Earths are out there.

Kepler’s survey has made it possible for us to measure the number of Earth-size habitable zone planets in our galaxy. Determining how many planets like our own that exist is the big question we’ll explore next.

The hunt for new planets continues.

Kepler continues to search for planets in different regions of space. With the launch of our Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2018, we’re going to search for planets nearest the sun and measure the composition of their atmospheres. In the mid-2020s, we have our sights on taking a picture of small planets like Earth with our Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST).

*All images of planets are artist illustrations.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Citizen scientist Rick Lundh created this abstract Jovian artwork using data from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Rick Lundh