NASA’s recent news that the Hubble Space Telescope had spotted liquid water plumes on Jupiter’s moon Europa has raised interest in a planned mission that will study the icy world to confirm the ocean’s presence and search for signs of life.
An instrument being built by Arizona State University will show experts where to start looking.
Read/listen to my full story at KJZZ’s Arizona Science Desk:
ASU Thermal Camera Will Guide Europa Mission’s Search For Water, Life
Scientists studying dwarf planet Ceres have found that a 13,000-foot volcano there arose not from silicic magma, but from muddy, salty ice that rose to the ~160 K surface and quick-froze like Smucker’s® Magic Shell.
Finding such a dramatic cryovolcanic process this close to the sun – in the inner asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter – is unusual, and bolsters the idea that Ceres might have originated in the outer solar system. It also lends credence to the notion that asteroids and comets might be more closely related than once thought.
Read/listen to my full story at KJZZ’s Arizona Science Desk:
13,000-Foot Mountain On Dwarf Planet Ceres May Be An Ice Volcano
Left to our own devices and allowed to live without constant fear of death by hunger or violence, we devise some pretty startling stuff.
Sure, some of our better efforts don’t outlast our calamities, or go obsolete before their time or simply never get their chance to shine because no one yet recognizes the need for them. But you can’t keep a good idea down forever, as I explore in this list of …
In the real world, disasters aren’t just a matter of scale – they’re a question of preparedness and of a society’s capacity to handle the fallout. Vaccines, rapid-response teams and early-warning systems can move the needle from calamity toward recovery, while poverty, corruption and ignorance slide it toward catastrophe. So, cue announcer: “In a world … where real disasters aren’t single events that arise from simple problems that are solvable in 93 minutes …”
Seven to 10 billion years ago, a bunch of galaxies fell in with a bad crowd at the Coma cluster — a galactic group comprising thousands of their ilk. That crash “quenched” the ill-fated galaxies. They’d never again burn with hot, young stars. But the crash should have done more than shut down the unfortunate galaxies’ stellar birth rate. It should have strewn their stars across space.
So what kept these cosmic corpses intact? Read on, if you dare (OK, so the title is a bit of a hint …).
