The record-breaking plume reached nearly 6,000 miles into space – covering the distance between Ireland and Japan – and poured water into the void at an estimated rate of 300 litres a second.
Note that the water jetted out into space nearly 40 times longer than the actual size of the moon (about 500 in diameter, or as the Gurdian puts it “500-mile-wide” for those who forgot the meaning of “diameter).
Enceladus is probably the best bet for life elsewhere in the solar system due to its water — and while whipping around Saturn once per day, which is likely the reason for underwater volcanos and other vents that may provide the proper chemistry for life.
Of all the asteroids they modeled, the one with the largest risk of impact was a kilometer-wide asteroid known as 1994 PC1. Over the next thousand years, the probability that 1994 PC1 will cross within the orbit of the Moon is a paltry 0.00151%, hardly worth worrying about.
Thanks to Glen Hill over at Engagin’ Science (formerly Scientia, which apparently was far too Latin- and science-esque for search engines to handle) for bringing this (not-so Earth-shattering) info to my attention.
Sorry, folks. Hollywood was once again wrong (sigh).
The astronauts will be the first humans to fly in the vicinity of the moon in more than 50 years. They will also be the first to launch aboard NASA’s next-generation megarocket and Orion space capsule. The crew will not land on the moon but will swing around the celestial body, testing the performance of the Orion spacecraft, before returning to Earth.
Mercury is a planet that just doesn’t make sense. It’s incredibly small yet hosts a relatively massive core. Mercury is so strange that astronomers have not been able to explain its properties with simulations of the solar system’s formation. But now, researchers have found an important clue, and Mercury’s weirdness appears to be the fault of the giant planets.
Basically, Mercury is nearly as dense as the Earth despite being less than 6% the size. This is due to the gas giants in our solar system yanking material (“planetesimals” and protoplanets) and ejecting it from the solar system, leaving Mercury with very little material left to form itself.
For the program, the 9- to 12-year-old students designed an experiment in which epinephrine samples were placed into tiny cubes and sent to the edge of space via either a high-altitude balloon or a rocket. Once back on Earth, researchers from the John L. Holmes Mass Spectrometry Facility at the University of Ottawa tested the samples and found that only 87% contained pure epinephrine, while the other 13% had been “transformed into extremely poisonous benzoic acid derivatives,” according to a University of Ottawa statement(opens in new tab).
So…uh…why would an astronaut have this thing in space to begin with? NASA should know the full medical history of all its astronauts before even considering sending them into space.
The mysterious object’s lovely silver metallic hue stands out like a sore thumb in the surrounding, rust-colored landscape, a sulfate-bearing region of the Red Planet’s Mount Sharp.
Until the new Soyuz pulls up, emergency plans call for Rubio to switch to a SpaceX crew capsule that’s docked at the space station. Prokopyev and Petelin remain assigned to their damaged Soyuz in the unlikely need for a fast getaway. Having one less person on board would keep the temperature down to a hopefully manageable level, Russian engineers concluded.
“I was quite surprised by how simple the story hiding behind the curtain of complexity in the data,” Sneppen continued. “You have this immensely complex physics, unimaginable dense stars and the birth of a black hole — and then it all reduces to this beautiful sphere.”
The neutron stars that crashed into each other are “dense and compact,” Sneppen said. They only measured around 20 km in diameter — about 12 miles — but they are “heavier than the sun,” he said. “A teaspoon of neutron star matter weighs more than Mount Everest.”
First reported in 2017, a new study in Nature gives more details about a “kilo nova” only detected by using gravitational waves. The collision led to the formation of a black hole.
Fortunately, this sort of cosmic event doesn’t occur too often. But..
…if a kilonova were to occur in the Milky Way — less than 30,000 light- years away — it would be the brightest star in the night sky, making it discoverable to the human eye…
Still, it’d be safer for Earth if it never happened…
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