Science News Technology Space NASA Artificial Intelligence Weird Science Science of Sci-Fi Giant Exoplanet With Carbon Monoxide Atmosphere ‘Defies All Expectations’

Applied Technology Institute (ATICourses) is offering a brand new Exoplanets course.  The news below could be of interest to our readers. This is the kind of discovery that reminds you just how little weactually know about space. Scientists have found a mysterious exoplanet 10 times the size of Jupiter—and no one can quite explain it. […]
9ba340aa7f1de69ad6ad7f6ace4d13f9_LApplied Technology Institute (ATICourses) is offering a brand new Exoplanets course.  The news below could be of interest to our readers.
This is the kind of discovery that reminds you just how little weactually know about space. Scientists have found a mysterious exoplanet 10 times the size of Jupiter—and no one can quite explain it.
Wrapped in carbon monoxide and water-free, scientists located inhospitable exoplanet WASP-18b with the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes about 330 light years from Earth.
The exoplanet might be far away, but it’s a giant in its neck of the woods—it has the mass of approximately 10 Jupiters.
NASA researchers note it has a stratosphere, as does Earth, but unlike our stratosphere, where the abundance of ozone absorbs UV radiation and helps protect our planet, WASP-18b’s is loaded with carbon monoxide—a rare discovery.
“We find evidence for a strong thermal inversion in the dayside atmosphere of the highly irradiated hot Jupiter WASP-18b…based on emission spectroscopy from Hubble Space Telescope secondary eclipse observations and Spitzer eclipse photometry,” researcher Kyle Sheppard said. “The derived composition and profile suggest that WASP-18b is the first example of both a planet with a non-oxide driven thermal inversion and a planet with an atmospheric metallicity inconsistent with that predicted for Jupiter-mass planets.”
WASP-18b is a “hot Jupiter,” which unlike the gas giants of our solar system that are positioned with distance from the Sun, are especially close. Our Jupiter takes 12 years to orbit the sun once, WASP-18b circles its star every 23 hours.
Read more here.

NASA Wants Your Help to Name a Space Object, What Could Go Wrong

There’s a small, icy object floating at the outer edge of our Solar System, in the messy Kuiper belt. Or it could be two objects, astronomers are not sure. But NASA is on track to find out more, as that object has been chosen as the next flyby target for the New Horizons spacecraft – the […]
quaoar_animation_dark_crsub_circleThere’s a small, icy object floating at the outer edge of our Solar System, in the messy Kuiper belt. Or it could be two objects, astronomers are not sure. But NASA is on track to find out more, as that object has been chosen as the next flyby target for the New Horizons spacecraft – the same probe that gave us incredible photos of Pluto in 2015. And now they want your help to give that target a catchy name. Currently, the enigmatic Kuiper belt object is designated 2014 MU69, but that’s just the provisional string of letters and numbers any newly discovered object gets. “Yes, we’re going to give 2014 MU69 a real name, rather than just the “license plate” designator it has now,” New Horizons’ principal investigator Alan Stern wrote in a blog post earlier this year. “The details of how we’ll name it are still being worked out, but NASA announced a few weeks back that it will involve a public naming contest.” And now, folks, our time to shine has arrived. NASA has finally extended an invitation for people to submit their ideas for a name, although they note this is not going to be the officially-official name just yet, but rather a nickname to be used until the flyby happens. The team at New Horizons already have a bunch of ideas prepared, which now form the basis of the naming campaign, and anyone can already vote for those. Amongst current choices put forward by the team are Z’ha’dum – a fictional planet from the TV series Babylon 5; Camalor – a fictional city actually located in the Kuiper belt according to Robert L. Forward’s novel Camelot 30K; and Mjölnir – the name of Norse thunder god Thor’s epic hammer. One of the most interesting aspects of MU69 is that we’re not even sure whether the object is one body or two – telescope observations have hinted it could actually be two similarly-sized bodies either in close mutual orbit, or even stuck together. Read more.

It’s official: We are an interstellar species

Applied Technology Institute (ATICourses) offers a variety of Space & Satellite related courses.  We thought the news below could be of interest to our readers. In recent months it has appeared likely that Voyager 1, a probe launched in 1977, has gone beyond our solar system but now it’s official: the spacecraft has left the building. This […]
Applied Technology Institute (ATICourses) offers a variety of Space & Satellite related courses.  We thought the news below could be of interest to our readers. In recent months it has appeared likely that Voyager 1, a probe launched in 1977, has gone beyond our solar system but now it’s official: the spacecraft has left the building. This makes it the first human-made object to move beyond the Sun, its planets and its heliosphere, a region of space dominated by the Sun and its wind of energetic particles. The findings are to be published in Geophysical Research Letters (see abstract). In their article the authors write:
“It appears that [Voyager 1] has exited the main solar modulation region, revealing [hydrogen] and [helium] spectra characteristic of those to be expected in the local interstellar medium.”
And so there you have it, humans are an interstellar species. This is the century in which we have sent a machine on the path to the stars. Will a spacecraft carrying humans join it next century? We can only hope. UPDATENASA says not so fast, reiterating a position it took last December when questions arose about Voyager’s exit from the solar system:
“The Voyager team is aware of reports today that NASA’s Voyager 1 has left the solar system,” said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. “It is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space. In December 2012, the Voyager science team reported that Voyager 1 is within a new region called ‘the magnetic highway’ where energetic particles changed dramatically. A change in the direction of the magnetic field is the last critical indicator of reaching interstellar space, and that change of direction has not yet been observed.”
Well, that’s interesting.


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