This site may earn chapter commissions from the links on this folio. Terms of use.

Hubble in orbit

Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, died on Monday, Jan sixteen. He was 82. NASA didn't state the cause of Cernan'southward death, but they did notation that he had been ill for some time, and was surrounded by family at the end. In tribute, NASA wrote of Cernan, "A helm in the U.Southward. Navy, [he] left his marking on the history of exploration by flying three times in infinite, twice to the moon." Permit'due south not let the story of homo lunar exploration end with Capt. Cernan. I accept go out to speculate that he wouldn't want to be the last man ever to walk on the moon.

Elsewhere in the solar arrangement, the latest data from Pluto shows u.s.a. show of jagged, spiky, needle-like surface features chosen "penitentes." If their presence is confirmed, this would be the first time these icy formations have been found anywhere other than Earth. On our home planet, we know these icy spikes can grow upward to several anxiety tall. They course in higher-altitude environments, where the atmosphere is thinner and melting water ice can sublimate directly away into h2o vapor, without ever becoming liquid. Sometimes yous can also meet them in melting snowbanks, with all their little points aimed at the sun.

Lead author John Moores says these penitentes may well be plant in other locations beyond the solar system. Europa is a prime suspect, because we have radar signatures from the Galileo spacecraft suggesting like fields of ice pungees. But Moores says penitentes may even lurk in places more than familiar and closest to habitation — similar Mars.

Venus, in its turn, has shown u.s. some notable surface features likewise, simply instead of fields of ice spikes, now there'southward a contender for the largest wave in the solar arrangement hanging out on the Venusian surface. The researchers explicate in their written report: "The present study shows direct evidence of the existence of stationary gravity waves, and it further shows that such stationary gravity waves tin have a very large scale – peradventure the greatest e'er observed in the Solar System."

The standing moving ridge stretches almost from pole to pole. Credit: JAXA/Planet-C/Fukuhara et al., 2017

Observed by the prodigal Japanese spacecraft Akatsuki, the behemothic wave is thought to be broadly similar to the way surface ripples form as water flows over rocks on a stream bed. In this case, the moving ridge may grade as the lower atmosphere flows over mountains on Venus' surface. The mammoth waveform is called a gravity moving ridge. Not gravitational waves; gravity waves. In brusque, gravity is pulling fluid whose surface has been disturbed, back to a position of lower gravitational potential.

Why don't we see waves like this elsewhere? Why practise nosotros think this one is the biggest? Dr. Alvin Wilson, of the ESA's Venus Express mission, explained to the BBC that considering Venus rotates more than slowly than Jupiter, its surface tin back up a continuing fluid-dynamic feature similar this, where Jupiter's temper is "broken upwardly into belts" and would have destroyed the wavefront with turbulence on a planet-wide scale.

Last but non least, scientists are puzzling over something bright, shiny and new in the elliptical galaxy Cygnus A. We actually constitute it some years agone, but everyone thought it was but an artifact, perhaps of the enormous black hole at the center of the galaxy. Part of the problem was with the imaging tech; the bright spot is such a deep red that it barely shows up in the visible spectrum, so instead of relying only on Hubble's snapshots of the region, astronomers compared information from Hubble and Keck with new observations from the NRAO'south Very Large Array. Certain enough, information technology's not an artifact. But we don't actually know what information technology is. It's twice equally vivid equally whatsoever supernova we know of, which makes it puzzling.

Fifty-fifty more puzzling is that the object shows upward in certain shots from Hubble, simply not others. Commonly, flares this bright only come from black holes eating something really large. Like another (much smaller) milky way. And then astronomers are pooling and circulating their data, trying to go everyone's eyes on the readings from that region of the sky so that we tin showtime making hypotheses. Equally with so many "nosotros found a thing in space!" stories, the final word: more than telescope time will tell for sure.