What is New Horizons? When it begins work in , Roman will yield results that would be impossible to achieve using existing telescopes.
A hypnotizing vortex? A peek into a witch's cauldron? A giant space-spider web? Do you see a monster in this picture? Do the bright spots near the top of the image look like the piercing eyes and elongated snout of Godzilla?
Signs of a planet transiting a star outside of the Milky Way galaxy may have been detected for the first time. The lives and accomplishments of both women aviation pioneers have now been honored with the naming of landmarks on Pluto.
A discovery followed the release of a Hubble photo of a striking example of a deep-space phenomenon dubbed an "Einstein ring.
JPL's lucky peanuts are an unofficial tradition at big mission events. Researchers will use Webb to observe 17 actively forming planetary systems. The telescopes found something odd: six "dead" galaxies that had run out of the cold hydrogen gas needed to make stars. This star-studded Hubble image shows NGC , which is more than 20, light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius.
Hubble Captures a Sparkling Cluster. The discovery could have consequences for how astronomers measure the ages of star clusters, which contain the oldest known stars in the universe. This striking image features a relatively rare celestial phenomenon known as a Herbig-Haro object. Hubble Snaps Speedy Star Jets. Clustered at the center of this image are six brilliant spots of light. Appearances can be deceiving, however. Hubble Sees Cosmic Quintuple. Gene Roddenberry would have been years old on Aug.
Nestled among the vast clouds of star-forming regions like this one lie potential clues about the formation of our own solar system. Hubble Peers into a Dusty Stellar Nursery. Exploding stars generate dramatic light shows. Converting the AU scale to one we are more familiar with, New Horizons is now almost 5 billion miles 7.
This means communicating with the spacecraft takes a lot of time. At the time of the Pluto flyby, two-way communication between New Horizons and Earth required a nine-hour round trip — 4.
And at its current distance, signals take 7 hours to reach the far flung spacecraft, and another 7 hours before its control team on Earth finds out if the message was received. The probe found large bubbles of charged particles, or plasma, and also revealed variations in the stream of particles. At the time, astronomers said the observations could help with understanding the environment around " hot Jupiter " planets found at other stars, or planets the size of Jupiter that orbit very close the equivalent orbit of Mercury , or even closer to their stars.
To conserve energy and lessen the chance of anything breaking, controllers kept the Pluto-traveling spacecraft in hibernation, aside from periodic wake-ups for navigation and systems checks. NASA had the probe emerge from hibernation in December , so it could get ready for the Pluto encounter and send data back to Earth.
New Horizons was so busy gathering data in its July encounter that, as planned, the spacecraft didn't communicate with Earth during its closest approach to Pluto and the dwarf planet's largest moon, Charon.
Controllers celebrated when New Horizons phoned home, as they knew that data was on the way. Pluto's distance, about 3 billion miles 5 billion km from Earth, presented power challenges for the New Horizons designers since the sun's rays at that distance are too weak to generate power.
There are also long communications delays for those staying in touch with the 1,lb. When New Horizons reached Pluto, it took 4.
This was because New Horizons could only transmit about kilobits of data per second and there were about 6. It was undoubtedly worth the wait.
Early pictures from New Horizons showed a surprisingly young surface on Pluto, with a mountain range as high as 11, feet 3, meters. Believed to be about million years old at most, this range likely points to recent geological activity on the surface, but it's unclear what caused it. More youthful terrain — such as a huge plain bereft of craters, just north of the mountainous range — popped up in pictures sent back in mid-July of The zone has been informally named Sputnik Planitia and is a region of intense scrutiny, given that geologists are still trying to figure out what caused it.
Fortunately, the moons were found well ahead of the Pluto encounter, and New Horizons faced no obstacles while whizzing through Pluto's system. Some of New Horizons' other scientific discoveries included evidence of a past subsurface ocean on Charon and strange water-ice hills on Pluto floating in frozen nitrogen.
In , one study suggested that there may be an asphalt layer on Pluto , just beneath the world's surface. Some scientists have also suggested that Pluto could have the ingredients for life on its surface, even at its great distance from the sun.
Related: Meet the unknown female mathematician whose calculations helped discover Pluto. New Horizons was already in space when the International Astronomical Union voted to change Pluto's status to "dwarf planet" in , following the discovery of several similar-size objects in the Kuiper Belt.
0コメント