Uranus was my favorite planet in the solar system. From childhood, I was first attracted by its fabulous faint blue color. After learning astronomy, I recognized more fascinating facts about this mysterious planet which made me love it more! Uranus was famous for its large tilting angle, and this was probably due to a collision between Uranus and an earth-sized object. The tilt angle of 97.7 degrees created the most extreme seasons in the solar system. Therefore, Uranus was the coldest planet within the solar system though its distance from the Sun was not the furthest. Uranus had an average temperature of 72K, and the lowest temperature was 55K. Even not spectacular as the Saturn rings, Uranus obtained the second most dramatic set of rings in the solar system. Nevertheless, Uranus rings were composed of extremely dark and invisible. Among the 13 rings detected and known by scientists, the epsilon ring was the brightest. Like Pluto, Uranus was only visited once by humans.
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In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the capital of the fire nation is a city built inside the crater, or caldera, of a volcano. The idea of this got me thinking, what would a city look like inside of the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons?
The picture shows Olympus Mons compared to Arizona. Clearly, it is a massive volcano and its caldera is over 80 km wide. For reference, Manhattan is about 18 km long and 3.5 km wide. That means that around 80 Manhattans would be able to fit inside of the caldera of Olympus Mons, and around 130 million people would be able to call it home.
While there would obviously be problems with such a large population density in that immense of an area, I still think that it is an interesting exercise in trying to scale the size of this massive geological feature.
As I learn more about the solar system, I get increasingly fascinated by their different landscapes, and it inspires me to learn as much as I can about them.
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For centuries, humans have been observing the stars and the planets searching to understand more about the sky. As our technology becomes more sophisticated, so do the problems that we try and solve. Currently, there is a cluster of extreme trans-Neptunian objects with unexplained phenomena in their orbits. These objects all complete the closest part of their orbit to the Sun in the same sector and have similar tilts in their axises.
For some astronomers, this is enough evidence to conclude that their must be a large object in the Kuiper Belt, the so called Planet Nine, that is affecting the orbits of these objects. However, other astronomers believe that these observed similarities are only due to the difficulties that we experience while trying to locate these objects. They believe that a Planet Nine is just the product of wishful thinking.
As shown in the image above, Planet Nine would most likely have a mass about five times of Earth, and a radius slightly smaller than Neptune. The mass and density of the planet is not that interesting as it would most likely be similar to the other ice giants. Its orbit is where the confusion comes in. Current planetary models do not explain how that big of an object could have formed as far as 620 astronomical units from the Sun. This means that it most likely moved. One guess is that it is the core of a gas giant that was ripped from the rest of the planet by Jupiter. Another says that our solar system stole if from an ancient neighbor. A third speculates that a passing star may have pulled it to the edges of our solar system.
Whatever the case, the possible existence of a ninth planet will continue to intrigue astronomers until irrefutable evidence either confirms or denies its existence.
One a side note, if Planet Nine is ever discovered I think that it should be named Vulcan, after the Roman God who was exiled from Mount Olympus.
The Curiosity Rover is located on Mars. This car-sized explorer, which is owned by NASA, is designed to investigate Mars climate and geology. It was launched on November 26, 2011 and landed on August 6, 2012. It has traveled over 16 miles exploring Mars and taking pictures for astronomers to study.
Its main goal is to discover if Mars could ever habitat life. It looks at the biology of the planet and the composition of it. It also examines the chemical building blocks of life such as phosphate, sulfur, carbon, oxygen, etc. All of this work must cost a lot. Curiosity Rover is estimated to cost 3.2 billion dollars.
How did this rover get its name? A NASA panel took over 9,000 submissions from all over the world and picked a girl named Clara Ma’s submission which was: Curiosity! She wrote in her submission and won a trip to NASA’s Jet propulsion laboratory in California. Fun fact: Clara was able to sign her name on Curiosity while it was being built.
Curiosity is still roaming around Mars today and has spent over 3442 sols on the red planet! There is a website that you can explore to see the new pictures that it takes everyday!
The most famous dwarf planet is Pluto but not many people know about Ceres. Ceres is located between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt. There are many interesting facts surrounding this dwarf planet such as: it was the first asteroid to be discovered in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi. Piazzi was an Italian astronomer and catholic priest.
Ceres was named after the Roman goddess of agriculture. It has an orbital period of 4.6 Earth years and a day on Ceres is 9 hours and 4 minutes. It makes up ⅓ of the total size of the asteroid belt just by itself. It has a heavily cratered surface however there are few large craters. This means that Ceres is very old, 4.573 billion years to be exact.
Finally, one of the most interesting aspects of Ceres is the potential for habitability. It is not actively being described as a potential new home but there is the most amount of water than any other planet in the solar system. There are areas on the surface called brine pockets that could be used to habitat life.
What do you find most interesting about the dwarf planet Ceres?
Here we see Ceres as compared to the size of the Moon and of Earth.
The Oort cloud is located in the most distant part of our solar system. It is so far away that it is thought to be multiples times farther from the Sun than the outermost parts of the Kuiper Belt. One thing that makes the Oort Cloud unique is that the objects within it do not fall more or less on the same plane that most other objects in our solar system orbit on. It is instead thought to be like a large spherical shell that encapsulates everything else in our solar system.
Because the Oort cloud is so far away, it is thought that comets with extremely long periods of orbit around the Sun originate from it. One example is the comet nicknamed Siding Spring. This comet passed Mars in 2014, and is not thought to return to the inner solar system for more than 740,000 years.
Although we are fairly certain of the existence of the Oort Cloud, it is so far away that no object has actually been observed in this area. However, as technological advances continue to occur at an exponential rate, hopefully we will possess sufficient technology to gather more information about the region of the distant solar system that we call the Oort Cloud.
Pluto is one of the six dwarf planets that we have currently identified in our solar system, and it was the first object discovered in the Kuiper belt. It was discovered in 1930 and was initially declared to be the ninth planet. However, when other objects were discovered in the Kuiper belt (like the dwarf planet Eris), people began to doubt whether Pluto was actually worthy of the title of a planet. Eventually, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of its title and classified it as a dwarf planet. However, Pluto still has several claims to fame. It is currently the ninth largest object that is directly orbiting the Sun and the tenth most massive object orbiting the Sun. It is the largest trans-Neptunian object (by volume) and has five moons. Its moons are Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. Because Charon is so similar to Pluto in mass, they are considered to be a binary system, as the center of mass of the system does not exist within Pluto. Currently, we do not know a ton of information about Pluto, as only one flyby in 2015 has been conducted. Hopefully we can launch new missions to learn more about the former planet and its uniqueness.
Figure 1. Artist depiction of the build-up of space debris over time.
Now that humanity has reached a stage where we can send equipment and spacecraft to space quite frequently, there is a concern about the build-up of debris around the Earth. The Department of Defense keeps surveillance of more than 27,000 pieces of rogue debris that are orbiting within the near-Earth environment. These pieces of “space junk” are traveling at speeds of the magnitude of tens of thousands of miles per hour-fast enough to cause structural damage to nearby spacecraft.
Knowing this, one might ask: “How is the International Space Station orbiting Earth without taking such dangerous impacts?” NASA has created a decision-making hierarchy to which the space station can determine if evasive maneuvers are required to avoid potentially severe impacts. For example, an imaginary pizza box (dimensions of 2.5 x 30 x 30 miles) surrounds the space station. Should predictions show that a piece of debris (4 in or larger in diameter/length) should strike the station, they are capable of activating thrusters for a short while to get out of the way. One thing to note is that there are thousands more of debris that exist that aren’t tracked due to their small sizes; however, the shielding around the station is capable of withstanding hits from them. Regardless, constant monitoring is required to protect the spacecraft and humans residing in this field of debris.
So, what happens if we continue to add space junk without methods to clean some of it up? The Kessler Syndrome offers one perspective for this thought. It essentially says that there is a point at which the trash orbiting Earth sets off a chain reaction where more debris is continuously created. For instance, say that a satellite is obliterated by either floating debris or asteroids, resulting in numerous pieces of material flying in all directions. If we reach the point identified by the Kessler Syndrome, the satellite pieces could strike other pieces of space junk, causing more splitting of trash. We must look into ways to remove and prevent space junk from continuing to accrue as future launches may face unnecessary damage and casualties.
Figure 1. Pictures of Saturn’s moon Pan by the Cassini spacecraft on March 7th, 2017.
Perhaps the moon in Figure 1 looks like a miniature version of Saturn. Maybe even an empanada. Saturn’s innermost moon Pan was first identified in 1990 in a photograph captured by the Voyager 2 spacecraft (which flew in 1981). Pan has an average diameter of 17.6 miles and orbits about 83,000 miles apart from Saturn. As for the bulge that exists around Pan, computer models show that as Pan formed, materials/particles from the rings of Saturn fell and attached along the moon’s equator. Over time, these materials built up and formed a “disk”.
So, why is this moon named “Pan”? According to Greek mythology, Pan is the Greek god of nature and has the appearance of a man with hooves and hind legs as that of a goat (known as a satyr). This name is ideal as Pan is a shepherd moon that maintains the Encke gap in Saturn’s A-ring (as shown in Figure 2). Essentially, Pan serves as a natural satellite that maintains the 200-mile wide Encke gap clear of particles as it orbits Saturn every 13.8 hours.
Additionally, Pan creates “wakes” in the rings of materials on both sides of it. Particles that pass close to Pan receive a gravitational boost of sorts. This produces waves throughout the rings, and these waves can interact downstream to form wakes (or areas of bunched-up materials). Although it is not clearly depicted below, the edges of the Eckne Gap have wavy edges. By obtaining occupation profiles from instruments on the Voyager, scientists were able to see light-dark variations that Pan is creating wakes in the rings. All-in-all, it is impressive how such a small moon can create such noticeable effects around Saturn.
Figure 2. Depiction of Pan residing in the Encke gap inside of Saturn’s A-ring.
Rocky asteroids contain metals that are commonly used on Earth. What if there was a way to mine those metals from asteroids and bring them back to Earth? The potential gains seem promising, as even a small asteroid can contain enough industrial metals to be worth trillions of dollars. A large asteroid could contain enough […]
