Many of the outer moons of Jupiter are so tiny you couldn't see them with the naked eye from one of the inner moons!
And their orbits go all over the place -- all held in place by Jupiter's enormous gravity. sites.google.com/carnegiescienc #Jupiter #moons
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Corey S. Powell
@coreyspowell
Opening minds . Unfolding research . Casting pods with . Not an AI. I'm also on Mastodon: @coreyspowell@mastodon.social
Corey S. Powell’s Tweets
Jupiter has 92 moons, more than any other planet, according to the latest study. They range from giant Ganymede (bigger than Mercury) to tiny captive asteroids to one, Valetudo, that's likely headed for a catastrophic end. skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news #Jupiter #astronomy #space
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Today for , I have a big new essay about #longcovid, #mecfs, and how we’ve surpassed a historic pivot point in the scientific understanding of post-infectious disease.
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Personally, I'd rather see a balloon exploring Venus.
(Story by me, art by ) wsj.com/articles/nasas #balloon #venus #explore
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Another great view of Comet 96/P skimming close past the Sun. This comet is a weird one: strange composition, highly eccentric & tilted orbit, and associated with 2 meteor showers on Earth.
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A clip from today's LASCO C3 data that I've processed manually. Working on something nicer (with an added surprise 
), but that can wait until 96P exits the field of view and I can write something up about it.
Again, these are those long (90s) exposure orange filtered images.
), but that can wait until 96P exits the field of view and I can write something up about it.
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Comet 96P/Machholz just passed extremely close to the Sun. The intense glare made it invisible from Earth, but the SOHO craft got an impressive view...with the Sun erupting at the same time! spaceweather.com #comet #sun
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What time is it on the Moon?
The growing number of Moon missions will require a creative answer: There's currently no standard lunar time, and clocks tick a tiny bit faster there than they do on Earth. nature.com/articles/d4158 #time #relativity
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Remembering #SpaceShuttle #Columbia & the #STS107 crew 20 years after the tragedy, #OTD 2/1/2003. Per aspera ad astra. We will always remember Kalpana, Rick, Laurel, Ilan, David, William & Michael.
nasa.gov/feature/20-yea
(📷:)
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HAM the chimpanzee became the first hominid in space #OTD in 1961, launched on a sub-orbital flight aboard Mercury-Redstone 2. His name was an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center and a nod to its commanding officer Lt Col Hamilton Blackshear.
Image: NASA (Photo AA-984)
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The evidence for Population III stars is far from certain. This work is testing the capabilities of JWST, pushing science to the limit. If you want the hard details, the research paper is openly available here:
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The Webb space telescope may have revealed the very first generation of stars -- the "Population III" stars that lit up the universe & seeded space with heavy elements. quantamagazine.org/astronomers-sa #JWST #space #cosmology
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NEW from NOAA SOS: This dataset shows the tsunami wave caused by the asteroid that hit Earth 66 million years ago. The wave was so impressive because the asteroid is estimated to have been 6+ miles (10+ km) in diameter! Want to learn more? sos.noaa.gov/catalog/datase
#dataviz #Data
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The CSIRO website appears to be having issues. You can also read about the majestic new radio portraits of the Milky Way here: mq.edu.au/faculty-of-sci
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Our galaxy is full of ghosts, the invisible remains of long-dead, exploded stars. A remarkable new radio survey is now bringing them into view: csiro.au/en/news/News-r #astronomy #LifeAndDeath
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Sometime around 2030, this robotic arm will pick up Mars samples collected by NASA's Perseverance rover. It will load them in to a little rocket & send them on a trip to Earth. And then we may get some solid answers about life on Mars.
esa.int/ESA_Multimedia #Mars #Life
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You hear more about close encounters with asteroids these days because astronomers are getting better at finding them -- which means it's increasingly unlikely that a small asteroid could catch us by surprise. (Big ones are already ruled out.)
eyes.nasa.gov/apps/asteroids
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If you had 2,500-mile-long arms you could reach up and touch a small space rock right now. Asteroid 2023 BU, about the size of an SUV, made its closest approach to Earth just a few minutes ago.
jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-syst #asteroid #HeadsDown
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NASA's Parker Solar Probe has already completed another pass by the Sun. It's been winding its orbits tighter & faster (green) to get to its current, Icarus-like path (red). parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Sh #ParkerSolarProbe #Sun
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More info about the Parker probe & Phaethon here:
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I'll also note that the dust trail related to near-Sun asteroid "(3200) Phaethon" can be clearly seen sweeping through the field of view towards the end of the sequence.
[Shameless plug: arxiv.org/abs/2207.12239]
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Look closely at the images from the Parker Solar Probe and you can see a few small comets & 6 planets, including Earth. You can also see the dusty trail of Phaethon, a strange "rock comet." HT
#ParkerSolarProbe
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Last September, the Parker Solar Probe swooped 5.3 million miles (8.5 million km) from the Sun & passed through an exceptionally powerful solar storm.
The video is out now -- watch what happens at the 16-second mark. wispr.nrl.navy.mil/encounter13-su #sun #SpaceWeather
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To study Chariklo, the JWST team waited for a rare moment when its rings passed in front of a distant star. The telescope was able to detect a faint shadow, indicating the exact size and thickness of the rings. webbtelescope.org/contents/early #timing #SolarSystem #JWST
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Chariklo is a solar system oddity, 250-km-wide ringed world skulking between Saturn and Uranus. Now it's a bit less mysterious: The Webb telescope just mapped its rings and detected patches of ice on its surface. webbtelescope.org/contents/early #JWST #astronomy
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It's official: NASA will partner with DARPA to develop & test a nuclear-thermal rocket. The 2027 mission will dust off decades-old nuclear tech, with the goal of faster spaceflight and bigger payloads. darpa.mil/news-events/20 #rocket #space #NASA
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New photo of Comet ZTF by Gregg Ruppel beautifully captures its eerie green hue & complex tail/antitail.
Throw a kilometer-wide clump of frozen gas and dust toward the Sun, and you get all kinds of surprises.
spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.p #CometZTF
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Bottom line: Earth's core cannot just stop rotating and reverse itself! We're talking *tiny* variations, with the rotation period of the core running less than one second faster or slower than it is up top. Enough to be fascinating, but not enough to do this: #TheCore [fin]
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Why would Earth's core spin (slightly!) faster or slower than the surface? 1) the gravity of the mantle is pulling on it. 2) magnetic fields from the outer core grab onto it. If we can measure these effects, we learn a lot about the geomagnetic field that keeps us all safe. #Core
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The first hint that Earth's core goes its own way came in 1996. The core appeared to be turning 1 part in 100,000 faster than the surface. That small difference would case it to drift by 10s of kilometers a year -- a big effect by geophysical standards.
nature.com/articles/38222
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What's interesting here is that Earth's inner core rotates *almost* the same as the surface, but not *exactly* the same. It may rotate a tiny bit faster or slower -- and that's not apocalyptic, but it sure is interesting.
sciencenews.org/article/earth- #Earth #Core
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Key point: Earth's core rotates at almost exactly the same rate as the rest of the planet. Did in the past, still does so now. It rotates at the same speed to within 0.001%!
But even the research paper is confusing on that point: #RealityCheck
nature.com/articles/s4156
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If you saw this headline, or one like it, you might reasonably have thought the world has gone mad. The inside of the Earth is spinning backwards?
*But that is not at all what the actual research says.*
[a short thread] #RealityCheck
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* I didn't want to promote the junk account that Andrew posted this in response to.
** If Saturn were the distance of the Moon, we might have some issues. For one thing, we'd be tidally locked, with a day about 70 hours long.
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Here's what Saturn would look like in the sky if it were the same distance from us as the Moon.
Artwork by Andrew McCarthy ()
#perspective
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Over India looking past the Himalayas into Nepal and Tibet. Mt. Everest is in this photo, though for being the world’s tallest mountain, it is not easy to spot. Taken on Expedition-30 from the .
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Huge thanks to the researchers who provided crucial information for my article on off-world flight, including , Zibi Turtle, Theodore Tzanetos, Geoff Landis, , and .
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NASA's Ingenuity helicopter has opened a new era of flying on other worlds. Coming soon, a pair of choppers to move samples on Mars & a nuclear-powered octocopter for Titan. My first piece for :
wsj.com/articles/nasas #space #flight
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Here’s my first effort at capturing the “Green Comet”, Comet c/2022 E3 (ZTF). This was a particular challenge due to humid conditions and clouds, but I’m thrilled I was able to capture it at all!
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Ever wanted to take a virtual trip around the Milky Way? Away you go: You can explore 3.32 billion objects in our galaxy using the interactive LegacySurveyViewer. decaps.legacysurvey.org/viewer #exploration #space #galaxy
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A new astronomical survey combines 21,400 images (10 terabytes of data in total) to map 3.32 billion stars & nebulae all across our galaxy.
If you tried to count everything in the image, one object per second, it would take 100 years.
pweb.cfa.harvard.edu/news/10108/ima #astronomy #space
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