JCC The All-New, All-Different JCC Astronomy Thread

Underneath Jupiter's surface:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/juno-gives-us-look-happening-211300680.html

 

In only 1.3 million years, our solar system will have TWO stars

http://www.thescinewsreporter.com/2018/03/in-13-million-years-our-solar-system.html

 

Here's the water

 

The Milky Way

200,000 light years across.

 

4k moon footage, incl Apollo 17 landing site.

http://www.thespaceacademy.org/2018/06/nasa-releases-4k-video-of-moon-ending.html

 

Does anyone own a Schmidt Cassegrain? I have an old reflector that is 440x. Ive thought about getting an upgrade. What is the best model today? Ive been out of the latest and greatest loop for a while.

 

I'm posting this in a few places, I just love this map, it really puts the rest of the Solar System in perspective.

 

Something huge went into Uranus and left it absolutely ruined

I didn't write the headline, just passing the info along.

 

Rob Waugh, please act your age, not like an immature teenager. That article only exists for him to make jokes. No new information whatsoever.

 

A nice big comet for 2018

 

Ganymede may have a layered ocean

 

For stargazing - there's a couple of good things this week - the lunar eclipse on Thurs 27 evening (longest lunar eclipse of the century) and the Mars opposition, same day (closest opposition in 15 years). Mars will actually be slightly closer after the opposition though - July 31 being the day of closest approach.

The eclipsed moon with a very bright Mars "underneath" it (from the point of view of Northern hemisphere observers) will be quite a sight if the sky is clear.

 

Yeah, Mars is beautiful in the sky at the moment. Such a red colour. I'm looking forward to getting some good photos of the Lunar eclipse.

 

Mars. Liquid water

We finally know where all that Martian water has been hiding! This latest epic discovery was achieved using a radar instrument on a Mars orbiter, with Italian scientists finding a huge liquid reservoir hidden 1.5 kilometres (0.93 miles) under the southern polar ice cap, extending 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) across.

 

A very large rogue planet

At just 20 light years from home, this marks the first planetary-mass object that has ever been detected using radio telescopy. But only just.

At 12.7 times more massive than Jupiter, it's right on the upper limit for planets - verging into brown dwarf territory.

And, although it's 12.7 times more massive than Jupiter, it's only a little bit bigger, with a radius 1.22 times that of our gas giant.

But its magnetic field is something worth a closer look. It's a massive 200 times the strength of Jupiter's magnetic field.

 

Could this "solve" the Planet X hypothesis that's been around for decades?

 

It's 20 light years away. So no.

 

Ah ok. At first I thought it might be an answer to this:

Following the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846, there was considerable speculation that another planet might exist beyond its orbit. The search began in the mid-19th century and culminated at the start of the 20th with Percival Lowell's quest for Planet X. Lowell proposed the Planet X hypothesis to explain apparent discrepancies in the orbits of the giant planets, particularly Uranus and Neptune,[1] speculating that the gravity of a large unseen ninth planet could have perturbed Uranus enough to account for the irregularities.[2]

In 2014, based on similarities of the orbits of a group of recently discovered extreme trans-Neptunian objects, astronomers hypothesized the existence of a super-Earth planet, 2 to 15 times the mass of the Earth and beyond 200 AU with possibly a high inclined orbit at some 1500 AU.[7] In 2016, further work showed this unknown distant planet is likely on an inclined, eccentric orbit that goes no closer than about 200 AU and no farther than about 1200 AU from the Sun. The orbit is predicted to be anti-aligned to the clustered extreme trans-Neptunian objects.[8] Because Pluto is no longer considered a planet by the IAU, this new hypothetical object has become known as Planet Nine.[9]​

 

It is just the first one discovered though. If these rogue gas giants can now be detected by this auroral radio emissions, we can expect more to come. Maybe there is one much closer? Maybe it is smaller with less extreme aurora?

 

Oh I understand. I misread thinking he meant said world could be PlanetX that far away. So sure, a means of detection looking beyond the orbit of Neptune could potentially show any worlds out there I would think.

 

You might be able to see a comet over the next 2 nights

 

Wow. That’s very interesting. No idea Ganymede had that much water compared to Europa and Earth.

 

One Kilometer bubble telescope

They have simulated that a one-kilometer telescope would be able to image Jupiter and its four largest moons from a distance of 7 parsecs.

 

Which would mean direct spectroscopic analysis of exoplanet atmospheres. What's more we could predict when they'd experience solar storms from their central star (if the observations were in real-time).