Outer Space

[Blue Frost]

They have been giving out a lot of info the last week, about the solar winds effects, the features, and effects of the four moons.
I posted some on it in the space thread in the main forum.

[Gary Oak]

Jupiter has purple northern lights ? That would be something to see but you would have to dress real warmly.

Jupiter dazzles with ‘Northern Lights’ after solar storms (PICTURES)

https://www.rt.com/viral/336940-jupiter ... rn-lights/

[Blue Frost]

Looks a bit more of a plasma from the high energy charge it has.

[Blue Frost]

[Gary Oak]

Astronomers Recorded This Eerie Music From a 13-Billion-Year-Old Star

http://gizmodo.com/astronomers-recorded ... 1780874453

[Blue Frost]

Cool sounds, and if you like that stuff our own sun, and planets have sounds. You can find them on Youtube.

[Gary Oak]

I think that it is really neat that we now have such high tech probes going out and checking out these far flung planets and the amazing photos. I wonder how Voyageur is doing now that it is past our solar system ? Has it seen anything of interest ?

It's Official! NASA Pluto Probe to Fly by Another Object in 2019

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/official-nasa ... 29862.html

[Blue Frost]

Voyager is still in the solar system, the news was wrong.

[Blue Frost]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science ... r-all.html

[Gary Oak]

Thanks for the update. So they don't know yet and think it may still be in the outskerts of our solar system. I wonder if it's cameras have seen anything that they aren't telling us about. it is going into realm never reached before bu humans.

[Blue Frost]

Things are so spread out out there likely not seeing a lot.

[Gary Oak]

This 35 second video looks bizarre with those moons at different orbits and I imagine different speeds circling about Jupiter.

Juno's view as it closed in on Jupiter

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/juno-s ... to-jupiter

[video][/video]

[Blue Frost]

Pretty cool views, I wonder what they will discover from this mission.

[Gary Oak]

Could this be the fabled Nibiru I didn't really believe actually existed ?

Ice world with insane 20,000-year orbit discovered in solar system

An icy planet with a staggering 20,000-year orbit has been discovered passing through our solar system, leading to the re-emergence of theories touting the existence of the fabled and mystical Planet 9.
L91, as the icy rock is called, is an enigma defying previously established gravitational patterns, and its discovery has added to mounting evidence that there are gravitational disruptions going on beyond what we can see, according to scientists working on the Outer Solar System Origins Survey.

Although L91 orbits our solar system’s sun, it never comes closer than 50 astronomical units, and at its farthest extreme it is a whopping 1,430 AU away. Each AU equals the distance between the Sun and Earth.

Read more
Voyager 2 points out unknown dark moons lurking behind Uranus “It’s right at the limit of what we can detect,” said Michele Bannister, an astrophysicist at Queen’s University, Belfast, who introduced L91 to the world at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science meeting held there on Monday.

Wandering bodies like L91 have contributed to the idea that planetary systems aren’t static. It used to be the common school of thought that every celestial body in our solar system has followed a relatively unchanged path for the more than four billion years since its birth.

It has only been in the past decade that scientists have learned that even Jupiter and Saturn constantly wobble in distance from the sun.

At present, scientists still can’t determine L91’s size, and have conflicting views on what is disrupting its orbit. One theory is that it is influenced by Neptune.

L91 is believed to have been born with a far less exotic orbit, but current knowledge of Neptune’s trajectory, when taken together with L91’s, shows the orbit might have evolved over time to pass through the Oort cloud, then change again from interacting with something in our galaxy at large. This over time nudged L91 into its current orbit, the Neptune theory goes.

Other scientists from places as prestigious as Caltech still insist on a more mysterious explanation, but one they maintain is no less plausible than Neptune. Konstantin Batygin believes the Neptune analogy “is not needed,” and points to the arcane Planet 9 – a supposed ice giant with an orbit far more distant than Neptune’s.

Batygin and another Caltech astronomer, Mike Brown, believe Planet 9’s gravitational pull is behind the trajectories of the minor planets orbiting beyond Neptune. They jointly published their hypothesis in January of this year.

The discovery of L91 comes amid a whole series of recent scientific revelations about space – from our plans to colonize Mars in the near future, to the discovery of Earth-like and potentially habitable planets within our galactic reach.

Perhaps even more exciting is the next step, which involves photographing these worlds and learning more about their climates and chemical compositions. The privately-funded Project Blue – the first telescope that hopes to photograph planets in the habitable zone of our space neighborhood – may play a key role in this. Our nearest hope is in the Alpha Centauri constellation, which is a modest 4.22 light years from Earth and home to the most recently discovered potentially habitable planet.

https://www.rt.com/news/363339-planet-nine-orbit-l91/

[Blue Frost]

It could be just a rogue planet passing by, and not part of the solar system.
Our suns weak gravity out that far might affect it a little enough to make it look like it's revolving around it.

[Gary Oak]

From that many light years away it seems impossible to me that they are alien messages meant for us.

6 more mysterious radio signals have been detected coming from outside our galaxy

http://www.sciencealert.com/6-more-myst ... our-galaxy

[Blue Frost]

There is quasar, and other things that put out signals, some quite strange, and elaborate.
If it is a civilization of some sort, they could be all dead by now with how long the signal gets through space distance.

[Gary Oak]

I didn't know that there was a photo from Venus's surface. It doesn't look like a nice place fro a visit though. That yellowish sky looks surreal.

Sulfuric acid clouds on Venus hide a 'bizarre' anomaly that spans the entire planet

http://www.businessinsider.com/venus-gr ... uki-2017-1

[Blue Frost]

It's some kind of shockwave, maybe geological, or high pressure.
I saw it this morning, kind of crazy on a planitery level like that.

I think the Russian probes took some photos before the probes died.

[Gary Oak]

I remember reading decades ago that scientists were wondering if there could be life on Europa. It appears that they are finally going to try and find out. Maybe they will only find microbes and maybe even small creatures. Maybe they will find some things not yet even imagined. I suspect that they will only find a lifeless world though. The video is very well done and interesting too.

NASA Plans to Drill Into Europa's Crust In Search of Life

Since early 2016, a NASA-employed Science Definition Team (SDT) of 21 researchers has been crafting a plan to send a robotic probe to Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter, located over 390 million miles from Earth. On February 7th, that team delivered their first report to NASA, detailing their recommendations for that future mission, which will search for life by drilling toward the subterranean ocean scientists strongly suspect to exist beneath the icy moon’s surface. The team hopes to launch as soon as 2031.

This is not to be confused with NASA’s Europa flyby mission, which is slated to take place in the early 2020s. That said, the flyby mission will play a key role in the later lander mission, as it will use its cameras to scout out plumes or cracks where material from Europa’s subterranean might ooze out. The lander will later visit these locations in order to take samples. Understanding Europa’s surface and subsurface will help researchers plan for future lander missions to the moon.

Our first strong evidence for a subterranean ocean on Europa came from NASA’s Galileo mission, which explored Jupiter and its moons in the late 1990s. But samples have never been collected from the ocean itself, which is thought to be buried beneath 11 to 15 miles (19 to 27 kilometers) of ice. The ocean, comprised of liquid water and an unknown amount of salt, is an estimated 62 miles deep.


In this new report, the SDT worked with NASA engineers to design a probe that would be capable of drilling about four inches into Europa’s icy crust to collect samples that could be analyzed on the spacecraft for signs of life. If the lander is successful, a future mission to Europa could drill even further, maybe even reaching the subterranean ocean.

“I think it’s a great design,” astronomer and SDT member Jonathan Lunine told Gizmodo. “I was skeptical that we could in fact design a payload with a reasonable technological maturity and relative simplicity. Thanks to the engineers, a very practical solution was found and the payload we put together is not overly ambitious. The bottom line is I became much more of a believer that this is a mission that can be done in a time frame I’d be interested, in the next 20 years or so.”

In addition to a drill or cutter to extract samples, the team recommends that the lander include a camera system to see what’s going on outside, instruments for analyzing the chemistry of Europa’s icy crust, and something to monitor geologic activity, like a geophone.

“The important thing to remember is that this is intended to be a ‘bug hunt,’ this is designed to land in a place where based on the Europa flyby mission, there would be deposits from the ocean, organic materials, that sort of thing,” Lunine said. “So the intent is to use instruments that can detect the signs of life on those samples.” The team is especially interested in finding biosignatures— isotopes or molecules that suggest past or present life.

There are a few reasons why scientists have long been keen to hunt for life on Europa.

“Europa provisionally is a great place to go,” Lunine said. “It has a very large amount of rocks, it’s got a lot of heat [at its core], so at the base of the oceans there are undoubtedly hydrothermal systems. Everything we know about it makes this a good [place] to look for life.”

Doug Vakoch, president of METI International, which focuses on seeking out radio signals from more advanced extraterrestrial life, agrees that Europa is a great place to look, but feels that scientists probably won’t get many answers until they can extract samples straight from the ocean.

“To have the best chance of finding life on Europa, we’d love to be able to drill beneath the icy crust,” Vakoch told Gizmodo. “That won’t happen with the first lander that NASA is now discussing, which would dig down only four inches.”

That said, Vakoch is still very supportive of the 2031 mission and what it could find.

“The top priority of this lander mission will be to search for evidence of life on Europa,” he said. “But even if that main goal isn’t met, we will learn a great deal about the potential habitability of this icy moon, which will be essential for future, even more ambitious missions.”

“To have the best chance of finding life on Europa, we’d love to be able to drill beneath the icy crust.”
Both Vakoch and Lunine noted the similarities between Europa and Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Enceladus also has a subterranean ocean beneath its crust, but unlike the Jovian moon, its south pole features geysers that constantly spew ocean water out into space—offering free samples, so to speak. Cassini discovered these geysers in 2005, and has since made several flybys through Enceladus’ south polar plume.

There are rumors that NASA is considering a mission to search for life on Enceladus, which could launch as early as 2025. With all these missions occurring over the next few decades, our chances of finding beyond outside Earth are looking better than ever.

“Where do we have a better chance of finding life—Europa or Enceladus?” Vakoch said. “At this point, it’s a tossup. Both deserve exploration, and I’d hate to have to choose between them. If we really want to understand the prospects for life arising in subsurface oceans, some day we need to go to both.”

http://gizmodo.com/nasa-plans-to-drill- ... 1792233535