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Explanation: What created this large mountain on asteroid Ceres? No one is yet sure. As if in anticipation of today being Asteroid Day on Earth, the robotic spacecraft Dawn in orbit around Ceres took the best yet image of an unusually tall mountain on the Asteroid Belt's largest asteroid. Visible at the top of the featured image, the exceptional mountain rises about five kilometers up from an area that otherwise appears pretty level. The image was taken about two weeks ago from about 4,400 kilometers away. Although origin hypotheses for the mountain include volcanism, impacts, and plate tectonics, clear evidence...

Scientists have recreated the conditions inside a young planet, with magma and hydrogen, and uncovered a surprising way water might form. In the early chaos of planetary formation, before crusts cooled or atmospheres settled, water might already have been bubbling into existence. Not from icy comets or far-flung asteroids, but from the blistering union of magma and hydrogen gas. That’s the picture emerging from a new study led by Carnegie Science researchers, who’ve managed to reproduce the extreme conditions of young rocky planets in a lab. Their results suggest that planets may be able to make their own water, deep...

JUICE might be bound to Jupiter, but it is fortuitously in place to peek at this object from beyond the stars. Comet 3I/ATLAS looking stunning! Image credit: International Gemini Observatory /NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Shadow the Scientist, Image Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) (CC BY 4.0) ================================================================ Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is about to be studied from not one but two locations in deep space. The comet has just gone through perihelion, the closest approach to the Sun, but unfortunately, it is on the opposite side of our star....

Explanation: Blown by fast winds from a hot, massive star, this cosmic bubble is huge. Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,200 light-years away toward the constellation of the Big Dog (Canis Major) and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon. That corresponds to a diameter of 60 light-years at its estimated distance. The massive star that created the bubble, a Wolf-Rayet star, is the bright one near the center of the nebula. Wolf-Rayet stars have over 20 times the mass of the Sun and are thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova phase of massive...

A meteorite discovered in Northwest Africa... Scientists say this ancient rock -- formed more than 4.56 billion years ago -- proves that planet-building processes in the outer reaches of the solar system began just as quickly as they did closer to the Sun.In a study published in Communications Earth & Environment, researchers analyzed a rare meteorite known as Northwest Africa (NWA) 12264, revealing that the body it originated from -- a fully formed protoplanet beyond Jupiter -- was already active during the very dawn of the Solar System.The findings challenge the prevailing assumption that outer Solar System planets formed more...

Türk called for an immediate investigation into the strikes against narco terrorists in what is the first such condemnation of its kind from the globalist organization. AP reports Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for Türk’s office, relayed his message on Friday at a regular U.N. briefing: These attacks and their mounting human cost are unacceptable. The U.S. must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats. She said Türk believed “airstrikes by the United States of America on boats in the Caribbean and in the Pacific violate international human rights law.”...

Defying expectations that binary systems are unlikely areas for planet formation, an international team of researchers has now identified a trio of Earth-sized exoplanets 190 light-years away in the TOI-2267 system.How these planets could form and maintain their stability in such an environment is a significant question for astronomers. The stars within this system are only separated by eight astronomical units (AU), far closer than the tens to hundreds of AU theoretically demonstrated to provide a stable planet-forming environment in earlier work...The system in question is unusual not just for its planets but also for the extremely tight orbit of...

Explanation: "Beautiful Nebula discovered between the Balance [Libra] & the Serpent [Serpens] ..." begins the description of the 5th entry in 18th century astronomer Charles Messier's famous catalog of nebulae and star clusters. Though it appeared to Messier to be fuzzy and round and without stars, Messier 5 (M5) is now known to be a globular star cluster, 100,000 stars or more, bound by gravity and packed into a region around 165 light-years in diameter. It lies some 25,000 light-years away. Roaming the halo of our galaxy, globular star clusters are ancient members of the Milky Way. M5 is one...

Space news

The space environment would provide natural radiative cooling, as well as unlimited solar energy. With the generative AI boom in full force, scientists have warned of the immense power requirements of data centers used to train and utilize these systems. Now, a team of researchers from NTU Singapore has joined the call to place data centers in space. Doing so would pave the way for sustainable computing, the claim. According to the team, space data centers would be powered by round-the-clock solar energy and would harness free cooling. Crucially, all of this is possible using existing technologies. Sending AI infrastructure...

© Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizon ================================================================= A blue dune captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has raised new questions about wind, sediment, and geological diversity on the Red Planet. Though the coloring is artificially enhanced, the unique features of this formation, located in two distinct craters, are anything but ordinary. NASA scientists recently released two detailed images taken by the MRO’s HiRISE camera, showing separate dune fields inside Lyot Crater and Gamboa Crater. These images don’t just offer stunning visuals; they open a rare window into the complex interactions between Martian winds and surface materials. The unusually shaped and...

Explanation: Three objects stand out in this thoughtful telescopic image, a view toward the mostly stealthy constellation Lynx. The two brightest (the spiky ones) are nearby stars. The third is the remote globular star cluster NGC 2419, at distance of nearly 300,000 light-years. NGC 2419 is sometimes called "the Intergalactic Wanderer", an appropriate title considering that the distance to the Milky Way's satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, is only about 160,000 light-years. Roughly similar to other large globular star clusters like Omega Centauri, NGC 2419 is itself intrinsically bright, but appears faint because it is so far away. NGC...

A bipartisan group of lawmakers sought unanimous consent approval for a bill that would stop the changing of the clocks. ============================================================== Sen. Tom Cotton wasn’t fast enough in 2022 to block Senate passage of legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent. Three years later, he wasn’t about to repeat that same mistake. The Arkansas Republican was on hand Tuesday afternoon to thwart a bipartisan effort on the chamber floor to pass a bill that would put an end to changing the clocks twice a year, including this coming Sunday. “If permanent Daylight Savings Time becomes the law of the...

Explanation: Large spiral galaxy NGC 4945 is seen edge-on near the center of this cosmic galaxy portrait. In fact, NGC 4945 is almost the size of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Its own dusty disk, young blue star clusters, and pink star forming regions standout in the sharp, colorful telescopic image. About 13 million light-years distant toward the expansive southern constellation Centaurus, NGC 4945 is only about six times farther away than Andromeda, the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. Though the galaxy's central region is largely hidden from view for optical telescopes, X-ray and infrared observations indicate...

Explanation: NGC 6240 offers a rare, nearby glimpse of a cosmic catastrophe in its final throes. The titanic galaxy-galaxy collision takes place a mere 400 million light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. The merging galaxies spew distorted tidal tails of stars, gas, and dust and undergo fast and furious bursts of star formation. The two supermassive black holes in the original galactic cores will also coalesce into a single, even more massive black hole and soon, only one large galaxy will remain. This dramatic image of the scene is a composite of narrowband and near-infrared to visible broadband data from...

Explanation: Follow the handle of the Big Dipper away from the dipper's bowl until you get to the handle's last bright star. Then, just slide your telescope a little south and west and you might find this stunning pair of interacting galaxies, the 51st entry in Charles Messier famous catalog. Perhaps the original spiral nebula, the large galaxy with well defined spiral structure is also cataloged as NGC 5194. Its spiral arms and dust lanes clearly sweep in front of its companion galaxy (right), NGC 5195. The pair are about 31 million light-years distant and officially lie within the angular...

Jinlin Crater A team of scientists has uncovered evidence that a massive asteroid strike created a prominent crater in southern China’s Guangdong province roughly 10,000 years ago, during a period of rapid human development. The Jinlin crater, situated near Zhaoqing city, marks only the fifth confirmed impact site in China and the very first identified in the country’s southern region. Measuring approximately 2,950 feet across, the tilted, bowl-shaped formation suggests it was formed by an extraterrestrial object roughly 100 feet in diameter, unleashing an explosion comparable to dozens of atomic bombs. Researchers believe the impact would have had a profound...

Explanation: This popular group is famous as the Leo Triplet - a gathering of three magnificent galaxies in one field of view. Crowd pleasers when imaged with even modest telescopes, they can be introduced individually as NGC 3628 (left), M66 (bottom right), and M65 (top). All three are large spiral galaxies but they tend to look dissimilar because their galactic disks are tilted at different angles to our line of sight. NGC 3628 is seen edge-on, with obscuring dust lanes cutting across the plane of the galaxy, while the disks of M66 and M65 are both inclined enough to show...

There's no way around it, so I'm just going to say it, we can laugh, laugh some more, and move on. Then share it with our friends and family and laugh again. Uranus smells like farts. Seriously. That's not some childish joke (but come on, it's kinda funny). That's straight from scientists at the University of Oxford, who published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy on Monday. Researchers studied Uranus using a giant telescope in Hawaii known as Gemini North. What they found was - ahem - unfortunate for the planet that is already the butt (hehe) of...

Researchers have long wondered about the composition of the clouds high up in Uranus' sky — specifically, whether they're dominated by ammonia ice, as at Jupiter and Saturn, or by hydrogen sulfide ice. The answer has proved elusive, because it's tough to make observations with the required detail on distant Uranus. (Not only are Jupiter and Saturn closer to Earth, they have also hosted dedicated orbiter missions. Uranus has been visited just once — a brief flyby by NASA's Voyager 2 probe in January 1986.) Irwin and his colleagues studied Uranus' air using the Near-Infrared Integral Field Spectrometer (NIFS), an...