Philip Plait's Blog, page 9

The history of Mars may have been more explosively volcanic than we thought

In the deep past, Mars was wildly volcanic. 

In some ways this is obvious. The Tharsis region, somewhat smaller than the continental U.S., boasts 12 large volcanoes, including Olympus Mons, the largest volcano known in the entire solar system. It’s 22 km high and 600 km wide, as wide as Colorado. 

How to create a massive black hole: Let it feed on a very dense star cluster

One of the most pernicious mysteries in astronomy right now is easy to state but proving ridiculously hard to answer: How do supermassive black holes form?

Arrakis it ain’t, but Jupiter’s moon Io may create volcanic explosive steam-driven dunes

Dunes are seen on a lot of solar system bodies. Earth, of course, in our deserts, but they’re also everywhere on Mars. They’ve been spotted on Venus, and even Saturn’s moon Titan.

A baby binary star may be forming three different planetary systems around it

I have being doing astronomy for a long, long time, and I still think one of the coolest things we can do now is see stars literally forming, coalescing from disks of gas and dust around them.

Even cooler than that, we can see planetary systems forming around them.

Jupiter's moon Europa is covered in weird double ridges. Now one's been spotted in Greenland

Europa is one of the most intriguing worlds in the solar system.

Incredible video of a solar eclipse… from the surface of Mars!

Look up - Look down
Look out - Look around
Look up - Look down
There's a crazy world outside

-Yes, “It Can Happen”

Mars has two moons, Deimos and Phobos — Greek for “terror” and “fear”, apropos for the planet named after the god of war — which are small, lumpy spuds of rock. 

Hubble looks at a planet where vaporized rock may rain out as molten rock at night

I used to live on the East Coast, and one of the reasons I moved away was because of the summer humidity. I couldn’t take it. It always felt like I was slowly melting.

Given that, I will be crossing WASP-178 b off my vacation spot list. The humidity there is arguably worse, if by humidity you mean atmospheric content of vaporized rock.

A black hole may be munching on the dying body of a star

Astronomers have found an odd star, with behavior that suggests it may have a dark companion: Either a very massive neutron star, or a very low-mass black hole. 

Over a dozen voracious supermassive black holes seen in a distant galaxy protocluster

How do galaxies in clusters behave differently then ones that are loners?

In some ways this is pretty well understood. Some galaxies, like our Milky Way, exist in small groups, some are relatively isolated in space, and some are in enormous clusters: vast, sprawling collections of hundreds of galaxies that all orbit their mutual center of gravity. 

Confirmed: An interstellar meteoroid - a rock from another star! - burned up in Earth’s atmosphere in 2014

In 2017, astronomers confirmed the first interstellar visitor to the solar system ever observed: 1I/2017 U1 (‘Oumuamua), a frozen shard from another star system that passed relatively close to Earth.