[Source: @mrlovenstein]
Stay Cool and Save Big: Get an 8000 BTU AC at an Unbeatable Price of Less Than $200!
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Witness John Williams Composing the Score for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Watch as legendary 91-years-old composer John Williams works on recording the music for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. I haven’t heard the full score yet, but from what I’ve read online, his work on the new movie is just as amazing as what we’ve come to expect from him.
Step Inside the Barbie Dreamhouse with Margot Robbie as Your Guide
Join Margot Robbie as she takes us behind the scenes of the highly anticipated film ‘Barbie,’ offering an exclusive tour of the famous Barbie Dreamhouse. Barbie hits theaters on July 21.
5 incredible craters that will make you fall in love with the grandeur of our Solar System
Helen Brand, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and Natasha Stephen, Imperial College London
Impact cratering happens on every solid body in the Solar System. In fact, it is the dominant process affecting the surfaces on most extraterrestrial bodies today.
On Earth, however, such craters are often lost over time by active geological processes, but elsewhere in the Solar System there are some truly majestic examples of impact craters preserved for all to see.
Here, we pick our highlights of what the Solar System has to offer.
1. South Pole–Aitken basin, the Moon
Our first crater is a big one: the biggest, deepest and oldest impact crater on the Moon. It is 2,500km diameter, 6.2 to 8.2km deep and formed roughly 4.2 billion years ago. As the name suggests, it is at the south pole on the far side of the Moon, although the crater rim can be seen from Earth as a dark mountain range, just on the border between the light and dark side of the moon.
It is a prime site favoured by lunar scientists to visit and learn about our Moon’s geology. The depth excavated by the crater is almost as deep as the deepest ocean trenches on Earth. It gives us a unique view of the interior of the Moon’s crust, with 4.2 billion years of history exposed.
In 2019, a rover from the Chinese space agency, Chang’e 4, touched down in the basin and carried out the first scientific experiments there. One of the most interesting of these was the Lunar Micro Ecosystem, a collection of seeds and insect eggs designed to see if life could flourish in a tiny biosphere on the surface.
2. Unnamed Crater (S1094b), Mars
There are many famous craters on Mars, from the homes of Mars rovers (Gale Crater for Curiosity or Jezero for Perseverance) to the hypothesised source regions of Mars meteorites (Tooting or Mojave). But one of the newest craters on the red planet is actually quite a dramatic one.
While Mars rovers claim all the glory for exploring the Martian surface, the satellites orbiting Mars have been making discoveries of their own for decades. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) was launched in 2005 but is still operational, and its 16+ years of Mars’s surface images allow us to make comparisons year on year, highlighting differences between data sets.
On Christmas Eve 2021, NASA’s InSight mission detected a large “Marsquake” on the red planet, which MRO data later helped to identify as a new impact on the other side of Mars.
The vibrant, fresh impact ejecta (“blankets” of material thrown aside by the impact) can be seen clearly from space using the context camera data aboard the orbiter, and thanks to InSight we even know what it sounded like.
3. Enki Catena, Ganymede
Enki Catena is a chain crater on Ganymede, one of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter. At latest count, Jupiter has more than 90 moons, a mini planetary system of its own.
Jupiter’s gravity creates tidal forces which shape the moons and give us some of the most interesting geological features we have yet found, from the volcanoes of Io to the subsurface ocean of Europa. There are also strings of craters found on two of the moons, Callisto and Ganymede.
These crater chains were first spotted when the Voyager 1 spacecraft gave us some of the first pictures of the surface of these moons in 1979. They were thought to potentially be collapsed lava tubes, features that have been observed on Mars and the Moon.
However, their origin remained under debate until the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet was observed as it smashed into Jupiter. The comet was seen breaking into multiple pieces and this gave an idea as to how these chains might form – the gravity from Jupiter pulls apart objects into many pieces that all impact close together.
Enki Catena is a chain of 13 craters which crosses from an area of dark to bright terrain on Ganymede. It is 162km in length and about 10km wide.
The European Space Agency’s Juice mission will visit the Jovian system in the 2030s and allow us to see the surfaces in greater detail than ever before. We might even find more of these crater chains.
4. Occator Crater, Ceres
Ceres is the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is large and round enough to be considered a “dwarf planet” (along with Pluto and three less famous examples, Eris, Makemake and Haumea).
The Occator crater on Ceres is impressive because it contains a bright spot in the centre that has been observed both from space, and from Earth at Mauna Kea Observatory, Hawaii.
NASA’s Dawn mission entered an orbit around Ceres in 2015, and imaged the bright spot in Occator crater known as “Spot 5”. It’s a three kilometre wide dome covered in bright salts on the crater floor, likely resulting from hydrothermal activity.
Occator crater itself is 92km in diameter and 3km deep. Simulations indicate that the impactor (the space rock that created the crater) was rougly 5km across, striking Ceres between 20–25 million years ago.
5. Aurelia, Venus
Venus is sometimes called Earth’s twin. It is when it comes to size, but the surface images we have of Venus show the planets have very different features.
The best such images were taken in the 1990s by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft. Venus has a thick cloudy atmosphere, and visible-light cameras can’t see through to the surface. Magellan was equipped with a radar which can “see” the surface – but the images can be harder to interpret.
In radar, dark terrain is very smooth and bright terrain is very rough. This makes impact craters stand out really well in radar images. The ejecta are very rough, especially against the surrounding volcanic plains, so they appear bright in the images.
This is Aurelia, a 32km impact crater on Venus.
You can see it stands out against the grey plains that surround it. The black terrain on the edges of the bright white ejecta are smooth flows of rock that melted when the impact hit.
Speaking of volcanoes on Venus, recently a group from the University of Alaska Fairbanks used this Magellan data to find the first active volcano on Venus
NASA has three Venus missions in development over the next 10 years, so hopefully soon we will know much more about our enigmatic twin.
Helen Brand, Senior Beamline Scientist – Powder Diffraction, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and Natasha Stephen, Director of Science & Engagement, The Geological Society of London, and Honorary Lecturer, Imperial College London
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Virtually Extinct [Comic]
Mutant Yelling: Quite Possibly The Greatest T-Shirt of All Time
Inspired from the rivalry between Cyclops and Wolverine for the love of Jean Grey and the “Woman Yelling at a Cat” meme, “Mutant Yelling” is one of the funniest t-shirt designs I’ve seen in a while! Available from The Neatoshop in sizes S to 10XL. Available in vertical or horizontal orientations.
Also available: Batman Yelling at Catwoman:
[Other T-Shirts by WEAPONX5205]
Please note that Geeks are Sexy might get a small commission from qualifying purchases done through our posts.
Isn’t Banner supposed to be the smart one? [Comic]
[Source: @spaceboycsntlol]
Spider-Man’s Villain Kraven the Hunter Gets a R-Rated Origin Movie, and Here’s the First Trailer [Video]
Kraven the Hunter delves into the tale that unveils the origins and motivations behind one of Marvel’s legendary villains. Portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the r-rated film takes place prior to his infamous clash with Spider-Man. The hunt debuts exclusively in theaters this October.
There could still be a ninth planet in our Solar System – here’s why
Héctor Socas-Navarro, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and Ignacio Trujillo Cabrera, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
We all used to think there were nine planets. But in 2006 the solar system was left with only eight planets, when Pluto was no longer classified as such. Is it still possible there is a planet out there beyond Neptune – possibly way beyond it?
In the last 20 years, we have made significant strides in exploring the outer solar system.
We are talking about what is known as Trans-Neptunian Space, the eternal night beyond the realm of the giant planets. And in this exploration we have come across a surprising population of inhabitants, the so-called Extreme Trans-Neptunian Objects, whose peculiar characteristics have given rise to intense debate in the scientific community.
Some researchers see in this population the manifestation of an invisible presence, a new planet not yet discovered in the dark and cold confines of our solar system. Others, however, think that there is no such planet and that these Extreme Trans-Neptunian peculiarities are due to the incompleteness of our limited observations, so-called “observational biases”.
A hypothetical huge and distant world
This hypothetical planet is provisionally known as Planet 9. Planet 9 is thought to not be a small object like Pluto or like many other Trans-Neptunian Objects that have been discovered in recent years. Detailed simulations have been created to theorise about the characteristics that the body might have in order to produce the effects observed, and the conclusion is that it must be a very large planet, consisting of between 4 and 8 times the mass of the Earth.
It must also be extremely far from the Sun: something like ten times the distance to Pluto. Probably even more.
If it exists, it would be a new type of planet, different from the others we know of at present in the solar system. Our planetary neighbours are basically classified into two types. They are either small, rocky worlds with a solid surface (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) or they are gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune).
Planet 9 would fall somewhere in between these categories. It could be what is known as a Super-Earth, a rocky planet larger than our own, or a Sub-Neptune, a gaseous world less massive and slightly smaller than Neptune.
We have located planets like this around other stars but, being so far away, we know very little about them. Discovering one in our own solar system would open the door to studying in detail a category of planets that is almost unknown today.
The long journey of asteroid CNEOS14
How could we detect this Planet 9? It is not easy. Being so far away, its brightness would be extremely dim and we would need powerful telescopes. The problem is that these telescopes usually have a very small field of view. It is like using a microscope to scan a very large area for something small that we have dropped. In recent years, significant observational efforts have been made to try to discover this elusive world – so far without success.
A few months ago, a scientific article by two Harvard researchers was published stating that a meteorite (CNEOS14) that fell into the Pacific in 2014 was not an object from our solar system. This would be the first interstellar object that we have detected, a small asteroid approximately one metre in diameter that impacted our planet while travelling through the solar system at 60 kilometres per second.
This high speed is precisely what led researchers to determine its provenance as a visitor from other stars. To do that, they first had to rule out that the object had been accelerated or deflected by the gravity of a planet in our solar system, which is easy to verify by reconstructing its trajectory and seeing if it had passed close to any of the known planets or not – in this case, the asteroid had not passed near any known planets.
But, what if CNEOS14 had interacted with a planet not yet known during its journey through the solar system? This was the question that we asked ourselves and that opened up a new line of work.
An amazing coincidence
The first clue that there might be a connection between the CNEOS14 meteorite and Planet 9 appeared when we plotted on a sky map the orbit that the planet would have to have, according to the most detailed simulations, and then superimposed the origin of CNEOS14. We found a striking coincidence (see figure below) between the origin of the meteorite and the region where simulations predict that Planet 9 is most likely to be found. The probability that such a coincidence is the result of chance is of the order of 1%.
Following this line of thought, we did simulations reconstructing the trajectory of CNEOS14 and found three other statistical anomalies that would be highly improbable in an object that came directly from the interstellar medium.
Combining the probability of these irregularities, we find that either there is something we don’t understand about objects in the interstellar medium or there is a 99.9% chance that CNEOS14 ran into an unknown planet in the outer solar system – and that new world would be located right in the region predicted by the simulations.
These coincidences and statistical anomalies have led us to formulate the “messenger hypothesis”, referring to the use of the term “messenger” in astrophysics to denote particles that bring us information from celestial bodies. According to this hypothesis, CNEOS14 was perhaps deflected in our direction by an unknown massive object in the outer solar system, possibly Planet 9, between 30 and 60 years ago.
If the conjecture is correct, by tracing the trajectory of CNEOS14 backward in time, we would find the location of Planet 9 which, according to our calculations, would be very close to the point where the constellations Aries, Taurus, and Cetus meet.
We have an observation campaign underway at the Javalambre Observatory (Teruel) to carry out this search. The task is still difficult and it will take time and work, because the field to be scanned is still large and the object sought is very dim, but it does now seem doable.
Of course, today our hypothesis is no more than speculation, just like the existence of Planet 9 itself. However, it is a well-founded speculation that meets the three requirements to be taken seriously in science: a) it is physically plausible; b) it is well motivated; and c) it is empirically verifiable.
CNEOS14 could be indicating the position of Planet 9 to us. Or maybe it’s just a great cosmic coincidence. In any case, it is a beautiful story to which we could apply the old Italian saying that se non è vero è ben trovato (even if it is not true, it is well conceived) – an expression that, by the way, is attributed to an astronomer, Renaissance Friar Giordano Bruno.
Héctor Socas-Navarro, Investigador científico en astrofísica. Director del Museo de la Ciencia y el Cosmos de Tenerife, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and Ignacio Trujillo Cabrera, Investigador científico en astrofísica, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.