Tag Archives: Planets

NASA’s Juno spacecraft strips Jupiter down to its underwear

An illustration depicting the U.S. space agency's Juno spacecraft in orbit above Jupiter's Great Red Spot. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via REUTERS

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The interior of Jupiter is just as intriguing as the planet’s dazzling surface, with a swirling mixture of liquid hydrogen and helium at its center, vast atmospheric jet streams and exotic gravitational properties, scientists said on Wednesday.

Data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, orbiting the solar system’s largest planet since 2016, is providing researchers with what they called unprecedented insight into Jupiter’s internal dynamics and structure. Until now, scientists have had scant information about what lies below Jupiter’s thick red, brown, yellow and white clouds.

“Juno is designed to look beneath these clouds,” said planetary science professor Yohai Kaspi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who led part of the research using Juno’s new measurements of Jupiter’s gravity.

“On Jupiter, a gaseous planet without a solid surface, we can only gather information from orbit,” added aerospace engineering professor Luciano Iess of Sapienza University of Rome, who also led part of the research.

Jupiter is a type of planet called a gas giant, as opposed to rocky planets like Earth and Mars, and its composition is 99 percent hydrogen and helium. Juno’s data showed that as you go deeper under the surface, Jupiter’s gas becomes ionized and eventually turns into a hot, dense metallic liquid.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is shown in this photo taken July 10, 2017. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstadt/Sean Doran/Handout via REUTERS

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is shown in this photo taken July 10, 2017. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstadt/Sean Doran/Handout via REUTERS

The scientists said Jupiter’s jet streams, related to the familiar stripes on its surface, plunge some 1,800 miles (3,000 km) below cloud level, and that its deep interior is comprised of a fluid hydrogen and helium mixture that rotates as if it were a solid body.

“The very center may contain a core made of high-pressure and high-temperature rocks and perhaps water, but it is believed to be fluid as well, not solid,” said planetary scientist Tristan Guillot of the Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, another of the research leaders.

Juno’s data showed a small but significant asymmetry between the gravitational field of Jupiter’s northern and southern hemispheres, driven by the immense jet streams. The deeper the jets streams go, the more mass they contain, exerting a strong effect on Jupiter’s gravitational field, Kaspi said.

Jupiter, the fifth planet from the sun, dwarfs the solar system’s other planets, measuring about 89,000 miles (143,000 km) in diameter at its equator, compared with Earth’s diameter of about 8,000 miles (12,750 km). It is big enough that 1,300 Earths could fit inside it.

The research was published in the journal Nature.

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Record 1,284 planets added to list of worlds beyond solar system

An artist's concept depicts select planetary discoveries made to date by NASA's Kepler space telescope

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) – Astronomers have discovered 1,284 more planets beyond our solar system, with nine possibly in orbits suitable for surface water that could bolster the prospects of supporting life, scientists said on Tuesday.

The announcement brings the total number of confirmed planets outside the solar system to 3,264. Called exoplanets, the bulk were detected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which searched for habitable planets like Earth.

The new planets were identified during Kepler’s four-year primary mission, which ended in 2013, and previously had been considered planet-candidates.

Scientists announcing the largest single finding of planets to date used a new analysis technique that applied statistical models to confirm the batch as planets, while ruling out scenarios that could falsely appear to be orbiting planets.

“We now know there could be more planets than stars,” Paul Hertz, NASA’s astrophysics division director, said in a news release. “This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe.”

Of the new planets, nearly 550 could be rocky like Earth, NASA said. Nine planets are the right distance from a star to support temperatures at which water could pool. The discovery brings to 21 the total number of known planets with such conditions, which could permit life.

Kepler looked for slight changes in the amount of light coming from about 150,000 target stars. Some of the changes were caused by orbiting planets passing across, or transiting, the face of their host stars, relative to Kepler’s line of sight.

The phenomenon is identical to Monday’s transit of Mercury across the sun, as seen from Earth’s perspective.

The analysis technique, developed by Princeton University astronomer Tim Morton and colleagues, analyzed which changes in the amount of light are due to planets transiting and which are due to stars or other objects.

The team verified, with a more than 99 percent accuracy, that 1,284 candidates were indeed orbiting planets, Morton said.

The results suggest that more than 10 billion potentially habitable planets could exist throughout the galaxy, said Kepler lead scientist Natalie Batalha, with NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The nearest potentially habitable planet is about 11 light years from Earth.

“Astronomically speaking, that’s a very close neighbor,” she said.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz; Editing by Letitia Stein and James Dalgleish)

NASA Discovers “Mother Lode” Of New Planets

NASA said that man’s concept of the galaxy was made woefully obsolete yesterday with the discovery of 715 newly discovered planets outside our solar system.

The Kepler telescope almost doubled the number of known planets in the universe.  NASA scientist Jack Lissauer said that many of the planets are in multiple grouping around stars making them similar to our galaxy.

Four of those planets orbit in what NASA scientists call a “habitable zone” and believe it’s a major step toward their desire to find “Earth 2.0.”   However, the scientists admitted because the planets are twice the size of Earth, they’re likely gas giants that cannot harbor life.

The Kepler telescope has suffered damage and NASA officials say it’s unlikely they will discover more planets in the same time frame.