Daily Archives: April 5, 2024

Differences Between the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt

There are as many comets in the sky as fishes in the ocean. -Johannes Kepler Going into this class I knew that comets came from the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, however, I never put much thought into why comets are in these two areas. For some context, comets are considered “dirty snowballs” because […] Continue reading

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Some things never change…

Asteroids are rocky leftover pieces from the planetary formation era that never ended up becoming planets. They orbit our Sun out in the asteroid belt, but they are too small and weirdly shaped (thanks to impacts!) to be classified as planets. To give a sense of the size range of asteroids, the largest asteroid, Ceres, […] Continue reading

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Titan’s Tremendous Atmosphere and its Striking Similarity to Earth

One of the most fascinating things that I have learned from this unit was the diversity that are the jovian moons. Originally, I believed moons to be rocky, non geologically active objects that orbited planets. Although this is the case for some moons, especially the smaller ones, some moons hold very unique characteristics, such as […] Continue reading

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Blog 6: Io!

In this blog post, I’d like to talk about the BEST Galilean moon: Io. As I’m sure we all know, Io is known as the volcanic world of Jupiter’s moons. It holds large numbers of volcanoes, and frequent eruptions that repave the surface. In fact, its surface is relatively young with no impact craters. As […] Continue reading

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Blog 5: Jovian Magnetospheres

For this blog post, I’m going to be talking about the relative magnetospheres of the Jovian planets. As we have learned with terrestrials, magnetic fields are generated by motions of charged particles deep in their planet’s interiors. These magnetic fields create magnetospheres, which are like huge bubble that surround the whole planet and shield it […] Continue reading

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