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Jupiter’s Pull Makes the Sun Wobble: The Sun–Jupiter Barycentre Lies Just Beyond the Sun’s Surface
science14 days ago

Jupiter’s Pull Makes the Sun Wobble: The Sun–Jupiter Barycentre Lies Just Beyond the Sun’s Surface

Jupiter and the Sun orbit a common centre of mass called the barycentre; at Jupiter’s average distance this barycentre sits about 742,000 km from the Sun’s centre, roughly 46,000 km beyond the Sun’s visible surface, meaning Jupiter does not orbit a fixed Sun but both bodies move around a shifting balance point. This concept helps explain planetary motion and underpins the radial-velocity method used to detect exoplanets by observing stellar wobbles.

via Space Daily|
#barycentre#exoplanet-detection#radial-velocity
Voyager 1: In interstellar space yet still bound to the Solar System
science17 days ago

Voyager 1: In interstellar space yet still bound to the Solar System

Voyager 1 crossed the Sun’s heliopause into interstellar space in 2012, becoming the first human-made object in interstellar space, but it remains gravitationally bound to the Sun. Estimates place the Oort Cloud’s inner edge at about 2,000–5,000 AU and its outer edge at 10,000–100,000 AU, meaning the probe will take roughly 300 years to reach the Oort Cloud and up to 30,000 years to pass beyond it. The boundary it has crossed is about the solar wind boundary rather than the solar system’s final edge, and its power is fading as it continues the journey.

via Space Daily|
#heliopause#interstellar-space#oort-cloud
Neptune’s Supersonic Winds Break Solar System Speed Records
science18 days ago

Neptune’s Supersonic Winds Break Solar System Speed Records

Neptune hosts the solar system’s fastest winds—about 2,000 km/h (roughly 1,200 mph)—well above Earth’s Category 1 hurricane speeds (minimum 119 km/h). These speeds were first inferred from Voyager 2’s 1989 cloud-tracking flyby and later confirmed by ALMA measurements at known pressure levels. Scientists think the winds are powered more by internal heat and planetary rotation than by sunlight, with a shallow atmospheric layer (roughly 1,000 km deep) driving the stormy weather. Neptune’s extreme distance means little solar input, and with one Neptune year equal to 165 Earth years, our data come from a small, early snapshot—awaiting future probes to reveal more of its atmospheric mysteries.

via Space Daily|
#atmospheric-dynamics#neptune#science
Beyond Neptune: the Sun's dominance reveals a vast, mostly empty solar system
science20 days ago

Beyond Neptune: the Sun's dominance reveals a vast, mostly empty solar system

The Sun accounts for about 99.86% of the solar system’s mass, so gravity is dominated by a single star while the rest is mostly empty space; the solar boundary extends far beyond Neptune to the heliopause (~120 AU), where Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012 and Voyager 2 followed in 2018. Beyond lies the distant, inferred Oort Cloud that may reach up to a couple of light-years, while Planet Nine remains a hypothesis not yet confirmed.

via Space Daily|
#heliopause#oort-cloud#planet-nine
Uranus Rolls on Its Side, Trading 42-Year Daylight for Darkness
space28 days ago

Uranus Rolls on Its Side, Trading 42-Year Daylight for Darkness

Uranus sits on its side with a 97.8-degree tilt, rolling around the Sun so each pole endures about 42 years of daylight followed by 42 years of darkness, creating extreme seasons and unusual atmospheric responses that lag behind the sunlight. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to have visited, and while a giant early collision is the leading explanation for the tilt, some theories involve a spin-orbit resonance with a hypothetical Planet Nine; the full story is still debated.

via Space Daily|
#astronomy#seasons#solar-system
Venus Is Warmer Than Mercury: Heat Trapped by a Runaway Greenhouse
science1 month ago

Venus Is Warmer Than Mercury: Heat Trapped by a Runaway Greenhouse

Venus is hotter than Mercury not because of proximity alone, but because its thick CO₂ atmosphere traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect, keeping the surface at about 867°F (464°C) year-round. Mercury, while closer to the Sun, has almost no atmosphere, so its day-side heat is extreme but it cools drastically at night. The Sun’s long-term brightening and Venus’s early water loss likely propelled this runaway warming, and Earth’s climate also warms via greenhouse gases, though Venus represents an extreme cautionary case in planetary climate.

via The Conversation|
#greenhouse-effect#mercury#runaway-greenhouse
Prospector’s Rock Turns Out to Be a 17‑kg Meteorite From the Solar System’s Dawn
science-and-technology1 month ago

Prospector’s Rock Turns Out to Be a 17‑kg Meteorite From the Solar System’s Dawn

A metal-detecting prospector found a dense reddish rock in Maryborough Regional Park in 2015 that resisted cutting with a saw, acid, drill, and even a sledgehammer. Identified in 2018 by geologists at the Melbourne Museum as a 17‑kilogram ordinary H5 chondrite meteorite dating to about 4.6 billion years ago, it formed at the dawn of the Solar System and likely came from the asteroid belt. Diamond cutting revealed tiny chondrules inside, confirming its extraterrestrial origin and making it rarer than gold.

via CPG Click Oil and Gas|
#asteroid-belt#chondrite#maryborough
Earth Might Surf the Sun’s Red-Giant Wake, But Humanity Is Doomed
space-and-spaceflight1 month ago

Earth Might Surf the Sun’s Red-Giant Wake, But Humanity Is Doomed

New research suggests Earth could dodge engulfment by the Sun’s red-giant stage if the Sun loses mass quickly enough, causing Earth to drift to a wider orbit around a future white-dwarf Sun; however, life would still be impossible due to increased brightness and heat long before that final phase, with Mercury and Venus assuredly doomed and Mars potentially surviving in a wider orbit.

via Gizmodo|
#astronomy#earth#red-giant
Lucy Spots Water Clues on a Tumbling Peanut-Shaped Asteroid
space1 month ago

Lucy Spots Water Clues on a Tumbling Peanut-Shaped Asteroid

NASA’s Lucy mission found that the main-belt asteroid Donaldjohanson is a bilobed, peanut-shaped body with a complex tumbling rotation gradually altered by sunlight (the YORP effect). Close flyby data revealed iron-rich clays that formed in the presence of liquid water, suggesting water briefly existed on its parent body long ago. At about 155 million years old, Donaldjohanson is younger than Bennu and Ryugu and has stayed in the main belt, offering a contrast as Lucy heads toward studying Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, starting with Eurybates in 2027.

via SciTechDaily|
#asteroids#lucy-mission#nasa
Water in Your Glass Traces Back to Interstellar Ice
science2 months ago

Water in Your Glass Traces Back to Interstellar Ice

New models argue a substantial portion of solar-system water—roughly 30–50%—was inherited from pre-solar interstellar ice, not formed in the early solar disk; the deuterium enrichment seen in solar-system water is hard to explain with disk chemistry alone, suggesting some water in Earth’s oceans and comets predates the Sun by billions of years and carries ancient interstellar heritage.

via Space Daily|
#astronomy#deuterium#interstellar
Cosmic Flybys May Have Triggered Earth’s Mass Extinctions, New Theory Suggests
science2 months ago

Cosmic Flybys May Have Triggered Earth’s Mass Extinctions, New Theory Suggests

A new preprint by Daniele Fargion proposes that flybys of planetary-mass objects in the outer Solar System could generate strong tides, volcanism, and climate upheavals on Earth, contributing to past mass extinctions beyond the Chicxulub event. The idea emphasizes tidal effects from near-passages (not direct collisions) and links several geological anomalies to such events; the hypothesis is controversial and based on correlations in the geological record. The paper, presented in 2025 and available on arXiv, underscores the possibility that distant, massive objects occasionally influence Earth’s history.

via ScienceAlert|
#extinction#mass-extinction#planetary-mass-objects
Two Lost Ice Giants May Have Shaped the Early Solar System
space2 months ago

Two Lost Ice Giants May Have Shaped the Early Solar System

A new study based on 122 simulations suggests the early outer solar system may have hosted two additional ice-giant planets with masses between Earth and Neptune that were later ejected. Depending on whether the system started with five or six giants, Jupiter’s moons remained stable in the presence of two extra ice giants, while Uranus’s moons stayed stable with only one extra; Miranda’s ice content hints at past moon collisions. The findings imply a far bardziej crowded infancy for the solar system than previously thought, and the team notes further simulations are needed to pin down the exact number and masses of the missing planets. The work was published online in Icarus (2026).

via Live Science|
#giant-planets#ice-giants#jupiter
Rubin Observatory's LSST set to reveal millions of unseen solar-system objects
science2 months ago

Rubin Observatory's LSST set to reveal millions of unseen solar-system objects

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is gearing up to begin the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will repeatedly image the southern sky with a 3.2‑gigapixel camera to detect small, fast‑moving solar-system bodies. Simulations predict the survey could add roughly 5 million new main-belt asteroids, about 40,000 trans‑Neptunian objects, and over 10,000 comets, with near-Earth objects more than tripling, though these are model yields, not guaranteed discoveries. Data Preview 2 is planned for July–September 2026 ahead of the formal survey start, enabling early testing of the predicted yields. The project will boost planetary defense and solar-system science but will not replace targeted follow-up observations for composition and dynamics.

via Space Daily|
#lsst#near-earth-objects#rubin-observatory