Space News & Blog Articles

What do extreme icy moons in the Solar System and unruly water behavior have to do with each other? That's what scientists at University of Sheffield in England wanted to know. So, they simulated conditions at Europa and Enceladus in the lab. Europa orbits Jupiter and Enceladus circles Saturn. Both have frozen surfaces and internal oceans of salty water. That water plays a huge role in resurfacing and reshaping these icy moons. That process is called cryovolcanism and it shows that water behaves much differently "out there" than it does here on Earth, where it freezes below 0 C and boils above 100 C.

Sometimes the easiest way to understand the physics of a phenomenon is to make a physical model of it. But how do you make a model of a system as large as, say, a protoplanetary disc? One technique, suggested in a recent paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and the University of Greifswald, would be familiar to any grade schooler who took a science class - spin water around in a circle really fast.

While NASA maintains the lead in human space exploration, other nations have already begun their own projects. Take the China National Space Agency for example, with their CLEP, or Chinese Lunar Exploration Program. If you have any doubts about the objectives of the program, just check out their logo: a stylized crescent moon with two footprints in the middle.

Between September 2003 and January 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope conducted its deepest observations of the cosmos ever. Known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the images produced showed nearly 10,000 galaxies of various ages, sizes, and shapes, including some that existed when the Universe was just 800 million years old. Recently, astronomers were able to revisit this iconic snapshot of the cosmos using two instruments aboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Their observations set a new record for the longest and deepest observations of an extragalactic field to date.

In the northern hemisphere, we're getting on to enjoying summer time which traditionally includes vacationing. Typically, vacations are a time to pause from work and remember life's possibilities beyond work. Now, perhaps you the vacationer want to rekindle a brief fling you had with science or maybe begin a new science tryst. Ersilia Vaudo's book "The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions" could be just the impetus necessary for such a diversion.