Oct 8, 2018 The Universe keeps getting bigger. A recent press release announced that astronomers, combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope, found a galaxy they believe is 13.3 billion light-years from Earth, making it the most distant object ever detected. According to the report,…
Oct 5, 2018 More Cassini data analysis. Saturn’s magnetosphere is an electrical environment, causing dark-mode plasma discharges and lightning bolts that flash across the ring plane. As previously written, when Cassini entered orbit around the giant planet, mission specialists were shocked to discover lightning of immense power, up to a million times more powerful than anything…
Oct 3, 2018 Many phenomena could be due to something astronomers do not expect. Some things are familiar, even though they are not easily explained. The aurorae at each of Earth’s poles are familiar to most people, although the way they form is not completely understood. Similarly, lightning bolts…
Oct 3, 2018 Stars are not neutral entities existing in a medium that isolates them from one another. In an Electric Universe, stars are not powered by hydrogen fusion, but by incoming electric charge. If any fusion takes place, it is not in the core, but in the stellar photosphere,…
Oct 2, 2018 Magnetic reconnection does not drive electromagnetic events. Upper regions of Earth’s atmosphere are influenced by solar emissions, because the ionosphere is connected to the Sun by filaments of electric charge. At 150 kilometers altitude, Earth’s electromagnetic field exhibits the greatest conductivity in what is called the…
Oct 1, 2018 A ring of gas and stars is said to be orbiting the Milky Way. Galaxies are mysterious. Astronomers are still not sure if they are a rotating collection of individual stars held together by gravity, or if they are a discrete object, behaving as a whole. Consensus…
Sep 28, 2018 Hot spots on the gas giant planets are really very cold. NASA scientists have been puzzled by Saturn’s hot north pole, although the term “hot” is relative. The average temperature at the pole is around minus 200 Celsius. The northern latitudes of Saturn were hidden from…
Sep 27, 2017 Martian meteorites are most likely a few thousand years old, at most. The Martian lithosphere is composed of iron and silicon, although they are primarily bound with oxygen. Silicon dioxide and iron oxides are the main constituents of Martian regolith. The atmospheric density on Mars is…
Sep 26, 2018 Methane dust on Titan? NASA launched the Cassini-Huygens mission on October 15, 1997. The six ton orbiter was the largest satellite ever deployed, entering orbit around Saturn on June 30, 2004. Its name was changed twice during its run: Cassini Equinox Mission on July 1, 2008, following…
Sep 25, 2018 The search for water on Mars continues. According to a recent press release, Mars may not possess the large quantities of water-ice that previous observations suggested. Data provided by the Mars Express orbiter points to, “ice-free, porous, windblown sand” and not subsurface ice. Thomas R. Watters,…
