You’ve seen the planets, now let’s look at some of the best moons to visit in the solar system, ala the romanticized art deco style! Ceres is like a gas station for that long trip to Jupiter, treated as an icy rock that is not the best tourist destination. Enceladus is a lot like the spacefarer’s version of Yellowstone park, with the southern hemisphere geysers being the appeal. My two favourites are Titan and Europa. Titan’s colour scheme and view of Saturn are gorgeous, but the best part is the paddle boats in the hydrocarbon seas. The most interesting visit...
We know that solar systems form in a disk shape, with the star forming in the middle and any other rocks, presumably planets, form out from the center in whatever dust and gas remains. But what about the space between stars? Is it truly empty? And if there is something out there, how could we find it? How did it get there? For years, astronomers and chemists (believe it or not) have been trying to answer these questions and more. The specific problem is that when we take a spectrum of a distant star, we see a collection of 400...
Some of the moons of gas giant planets have a unique property: They are worlds that have a source of heat other than the Sun. The huge tidal forces imparted by their host planet and fellow moons cause their crust to grow and shrink, creating huge friction and heating the rock. It means that even if these moons are far from the warmth of the Sun, they can still host liquid water. There are two moons in our own solar system that are especially enticing: Jupiter’s second moon Europa, and the icy moon of Saturn known as Enceladus. Each host...
