Tag: geo astronomy

  • Science & Tech

    Sulfur dioxide may have helped maintain a warm early Mars

    Sulfur dioxide (SO2) may have played a key role in the climate and geochemistry of early Mars, geoscientists at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggest in the Dec. 21 issue of the journal Science. Their hypothesis may resolve longstanding questions about evidence that the climate of the Red Planet was once…

    3–4 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Astronomers nab culprit in galactic hit-and-run

    The Andromeda galaxy, the closest large spiral to the Milky Way, appears calm and tranquil as it wheels through space. But appearances can be deceiving. Astronomers have new evidence that Andromeda was involved in a violent head-on collision with the neighboring dwarf galaxy Messier 32 (M32) more than 200 million years ago. “Like a CSI…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Strange new planet baffles astronomers

    Using a network of small automated telescopes known as HAT, Smithsonian astronomers have discovered a planet unlike any other known world. This new planet, designated HAT-P-1, orbits one member of a pair of distant stars 450 light-years away in the constellation Lacerta. “We could be looking at an entirely new class of planets,” said Gaspar…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Alien treasures in our backyard

    Astronomers have gained an important clue to guide their hunt for extrasolar worlds. And that clue points to the unlikeliest of places — our own backyard. “It’s possible that some of the objects in our solar system actually formed around another star,” says astronomer Scott Kenyon (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory). How did these adopted worlds join…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    New moons found around Neptune

    Astronomers have discovered three new moons of Neptune, boosting the number of known satellites of the gas giant to 11. These moons are the first to be discovered orbiting Neptune since the Voyager II flyby in 1989, and the first discovered from a ground-based telescope since 1949. It now appears that each member of the…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Atmosphere detected on distant world orbiting another star

    One-hundred-and-fifty light years away from Earth, in the constellation Pegasus, is a star known as HD 209458. Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a research team was able to detect the atmosphere of a planet orbiting the star. This marks the first time that scientists were able to observe the atmosphere of a planet outside our…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Stellar apocalypse yields first evidence of water-bearing worlds beyond our solar system

    The first evidence that planetary systems beyond our own contain water, a molecule that is an essential ingredient for known forms of life, was discovered recently by using the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS), a small radio observatory that NASA launched into space in December 1998. The discovery was reported in an article published in…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    21 moons ‘swarm’ planet Uranus

    In 1999 three new moons were discovered orbiting Uranus, a great gasball of a planet about 2 billion miles from Earth. The discovery raised the number of Uranian moons to 21, the most, as far as is known, in the skies of any planet. Researchers believe the moons were “captured” billions of years ago. “We…

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