This is an artist's impression of a large star known as HD and its much smaller red dwarf companion in a binary star system.
The large star appears to pulsate on one side only, and it's being distorted by the gravitational pull of its companion star into a teardrop shape. This is an artist's impression of two white dwarfs in the process of merging. While astronomers expected that this might cause a supernova, they have found an instance of two white dwarf stars that survived merging.
A combination of space and ground-based telescopes have found evidence for the biggest explosion seen in the universe. The explosion was created by a black hole located in the Ophiuchus cluster's central galaxy, which has blasted out jets and carved a large cavity in the surrounding hot gas. This new ALMA image shows the outcome of a stellar fight: a complex and stunning gas environment surrounding the binary star system HD The red represents hot gas, while the blue regions are interstellar dust.
A white dwarf, left, is pulling material off of a brown dwarf, right, about 3, light-years from Earth. This image shows the orbits of the six G objects at the center of our galaxy, with the supermassive black hole indicated with a white cross. Stars, gas and dust are in the background. After stars die, they expel their particles out into space, which form new stars in turn. In one case, stardust became embedded in a meteorite that fell to Earth. This illustration shows that stardust could flow from sources like the Egg Nebula to create the grains recovered from the meteorite, which landed in Australia.
Galaxy UGC , nicknamed the "Godzilla galaxy," may be the largest one in the local universe. The host galaxy of a newly traced repeating fast radio burst acquired with the 8-meter Gemini-North telescope. Story highlights Snowstorms can occur on Mars only at night High pressure turns carbon and hydrogen into solid diamond rain on ice giants.
No, these aren't images from Prince or David Bowie's lyric journals or scenes from some galactic version of "Game of Thrones. Martian snow by night. The Phoenix Mars Lander detected snowfall on the Red Planet in using a laser instrument to observe how the atmosphere and surface interact. But the other rovers and landers that we've sent to Mars haven't been equipped with this tool. Read More. Why, and how, did snow fall on Mars? And why wasn't there more evidence for it? During the Martian day, cloud particles absorb visible light to warm the atmosphere.
But at night, in areas where the conditions are just right for water-ice clouds to form, it can lead to icy precipitation. Spiga's study was published in the journal Nature Geoscience. By combining computer models and the lander's observations, Spiga and his colleagues discovered that this nighttime phenomenon results in "microbursts" of snowstorms, some of which could last hours.
This creates a very cold layer of air on top of a warmer layer of air. This causes convection and strong winds and mixing ensue. So why haven't the rovers captured images of snow piled on the Martian surface? In the instance of the Phoenix Lander's detection, the snow evaporated before it hit the ground.
So no snowmen or ski station on Mars! Spiga likened this phenomenon to microbursts on Earth, often seen as clouds with little streaks on the bottom. This is called virga: rain that evaporates before reaching the ground.
Going forward, Spiga and his colleagues want to explore the diversity of snowstorms that might happen on Mars and how they would impact the planet's water cycle. This could also help them take a look into Mars' past and the history of its water ice deposits, as well as look ahead by applying their models to exoplanets. Diamond layers on icy planets. Farther out in the solar system are Uranus and Neptune, two ice giants that get their distinct blue color from methane atmospheres.
Although both planets are largely made up of fluids and gases, they have rocky cores. Weather-wise, high winds are associated with these ice giants, and Voyager 2 once tracked a storm on Neptune that was large enough to contain the entire Earth, according to NASA.
Here comes the sun: NASA's first mission to the star set for Scientists have hypothesized that high-pressure conditions on Uranus and Neptune could squeeze hydrogen and carbon together, creating diamond rain. For the first time, an experiment was able to directly measure this diamond formation, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The team of 15 people spent five days underground in the confined space, fueled by little sleep and a lot of curiosity. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. A deformed diamond matrix is seen in the Almahata Sitta meteorite. The black scale bar in the lower left corner is nanometers. By Deborah Netburn Staff Writer. The scale bar in the lower right corner is nanometers. A colorized image shows the diamond phase blue , inclusions yellow and the graphite region.
A chemical map shows sulfur red and iron yellow inside the inclusions in the diamond matrix. Deborah Netburn. Follow Us twitter instagram email facebook. More From the Los Angeles Times.
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Outside our solar system, there may be rubies and sapphires too. But the gems that form within Earth still might be the most dazzling.
Roger Clark , a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, explains that to come to these kinds of conclusions, scientists work backward, starting with the size and mass of a planet.
They use that information to estimate density, and then work to determine what kind of materials could produce that density.
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