Even after a decade of interloping among the Saturnian system, the Cassini spacecraft is still doing great science. It helps that there are lots of places to visit, since Saturn has 62 moons and the largest ring system of the gas giants. Arguably the best science has come from Saturn’s largest moon Titan, second largest moon in the solar system (behind Ganymede) and the only moon known to have an atmosphere. Since Cassini has been in orbit around Saturn and it’s system of moons, it’s been revealed that over 1.6 million square kilometers of Titan’s surface are covered in liquid...
It’s been nine months since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto. Time sure does fly. And even though the spacecraft is moving further from Pluto and Earth, it’s still sending back the massive amounts of data it gathered during closest approach. As this data is received, the huge team of scientists that are part of the mission use it to characterize Pluto so humanity can begin to understand just how strange the distant dwarf Planet is. Five new papers characterize some of the latest science done on the enigmatic world. Here’s a quick summary of each: The first paper from...
Cryovolcano is a cool word, literally and figuratively. You hear about it a lot when talking about solar system moons like Enceladus, and it’s one of those words that would make a heck of a great Hollywood disaster movie title, like ‘Sharknado’ or ‘Armageddon.’ I do not, however, endorse either of those movies, they were both terrible. At any rate, a real cryovolcano seems like an interesting thing. It’s a volcano in the sense that it looks a little like a mountain and spews out material when the pressure builds from beneath the surface, but it’s not your traditional Earth-like volcano...
Every so often we see a new set of images from Pluto, giving us a chance to rediscover it multiple times. It’s like we are experiencing the July fly-by over and over again, and each new set of images reveals something new and exciting. I feel the same sense of excitement and discovery each time I see a new image, realizing that it spent 6 hours as a beam of light crossing the 5 Billion Kilometres of the solar system to connect us to the New Horizons probe, a lonely little piece of human ingenuity flying through the darkness. Here...
If there’s one true fact about every single gas giant planet ever observed, around the Sun or other stars in the Galaxy, it’s that they all are mainly composed of Hydrogen. Even though the giants of our solar system such as Neptune and Jupiter seem very different, it is Hydrogen that primarily composes them. The difference is in the details though. The blue colour of Neptune is due to the presence of Methane, and even then it only makes up 1.7% of Neptune’s mass. But Hydrogen is light. Wouldn’t giant planets like hot Jupiters lose their Hydrogen from being blasted...
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...
Since the Huygens probe dropped down to the surface of Saturn’s largest moon Titan, astronomers have pondered the idea of life on the distant world. With a liquid cycle not unlike Earth’s water cycle in form, but consisting of frigid liquid hydrocarbons, could a new variation of life exist, not as we know it? Jonathan Lunine, director for Cornell’s Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, is an expert on Saturn’s Moons and is a scientist on the Cassini-Huygens mission, which originally discovered the Methane-Ethane lakes on Titan a decade ago. Given a grant to study non-aqueous life, he needed help....
