Gas Giant With Violet-colored Clouds And Rings.

Picture of the Day - December 30, 2018

Globular cluster. Almost 10,000 stars packed into a sphere just 100 light years across.

Hot Jupiter

Planets in our own solar system have a wide range of properties. They are distinguished by two basic properties, their size and their orbit. The size determines if the planet can have a life-sustaining atmosphere. The orbit affects the surface temperature and whether there could be liquid water on the planet’s surface.

Hot Jupiters are a class of gas giant exoplanets that are inferred to be physically similar to Jupiter but that have very short orbital period (P<10 days). The close proximity to their stars and high surface-atmosphere temperatures resulted in the moniker “hot Jupiters”.

Hot Jupiters are the easiest extrasolar planets to detect via the radial-velocity method, because the oscillations they induce in their parent stars’ motion are relatively large and rapid compared to those of other known types of planets.

One of the best-known hot Jupiters is 51 Pegasi b. Discovered in 1995, it was the first extrasolar planet found orbiting a Sun-like star. 51 Pegasi b has an orbital period of about 4 days.

There are two general schools of thought regarding the origin of hot Jupiters: formation at a distance followed by inward migration and in-situ formation at the distances at which they’re currently observed. The prevalent view is migration.

Migration 

In the migration hypothesis, a hot Jupiter forms beyond the frost line, from rock, ice, and gases via the core accretion method of planetary formation. The planet then migrates inwards to the star where it eventually forms a stable orbit. The planet may have migrated inwar.

In situ

Instead of being gas giants that migrated inward, in an alternate hypothesis the cores of the hot Jupiters began as more common super-Earths which accreted their gas envelopes at their current locations, becoming gas giants in situ. The super-Earths providing the cores in this hypothesis could have formed either in situ or at greater distances and have undergone migration before acquiring their gas envelopes.

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Pluto-Like Double World

Picture of the Day - October 25, 2018

Two frozen worlds very almost identical in their size ratio to one another as the Pluto-Charon double dwarf planet system.

Pictures of the day - December 19, 2018

Insight A System - Fourth Planet (Insight A-IV)

Insight A-IV is the fourth and largest planet orbiting Insight A. It is a large ice giant planet with a mass 41.38 times that of Earth and a diameter of 4.41 Earths. The planet has a hot atmosphere with a temperature of 297 F, which is dominated by hydrogen and helium. Additionally, a single large moon orbits the planet alongside 13 smaller asteroid-like satellites.

The planet orbits it’s sun at an average distance of 0.36 AU, completing an orbit once every 72.17 Earth Days. The planet is not tidally locked, but has a slow rotational rate of 288.70 Earth days, resulting in solar days that last 96.23 Earth days.

High Resolution Pictures

Insight A-IV

Stormy North Pole

Setting Sun

Crescents

View from the moon

Pictures of the day - December 8, 2018

Insight B System - Sixth Planet’s (Insight B-VI) Major Moons

Three large terrestrial-sized moons orbit Insight B-VI, all of them being roughly halfway between the size of Mars and Venus. Lunar Stats Below.

Insight B-VI-M2 (Second Moon) Radius = 4,567.71 km (0.72 x Earth) Mass = 0.24 Earth Masses Atmosphere = 0.13 Atmospheres/ Ammonia, Sulfur Dioxide, Methane, and Carbon Dioxide

Insight B-VI-M3 (Third Moon) Radius = 5,672.06 km (0.89 x Earth) Mass = 0.31 Earth Masses Atmosphere = 0.23 Atmospheres/ Carbon Dioxide, Methane and Acetylene

Insight B-VI-M4 (Fourth moon) Radius = 5,786.11 km (0.91 x Earth) Mass = 0.40 Earth Masses Atmosphere = 0.01 Atmospheres/ Methane, Carbon Dioxide and Nitrogen

High Resolution Pictures

All Three Major Moons

Insight B-VI-M2 (Second Moon)

insight B-VI-M3 (Third Moon)

Insight B-VI-M4 (Fourth Moon)

Orange Gem

Picture of the Day - October 28, 2018

Here we have another Titan-Like world with rings. Seas of liquid methane cover the surface, and a thick hazy nitrogen-methane atmosphere obscures most of the surface.

What’s the biggest misconception people have about space or astronomy in general?

I’m not sure which is the biggest mistake, but I believe that one of them is the colors that are imposed on the images of planets, nebulae and other bodies of space. Many images are not real colors, many of them are fake colors. False colors are used to differentiate, some particular type of material, temperature, wavelength, chemical or mineral variations, and other factors.

Mercury with colors in visible light

Color-enhanced, this image represents chemical and mineral variations across the planet: tan areas are lava-formed plains, and blue regions show material that reflects little light.

This image shows two different views of the Horsehead Nebula. On the right is a view of the nebula in visible light, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile . The new image on the left shows the nebula in the infrared, using observations from Hubble’s high-resolution Wide Field Camera 3.

Some illustrations of space can also deceive or confuse, like images of exoplanets, where in fact we do not know for sure what it would be, since we can not have such clear images to the point where we can see them closely, and other things like representation of the curvature of space time, which shows a curvature in 2D, would actually be in 3D, but this is a little harder to visualize.

Curvature of the space-time fabric in 2D

Curvature of the space-time fabric in 3D

An annotated view of the Beta Pictoris system.

Artist’s impression of Beta Pictoris b. The debris disk around the parent star can be seen.

You can learn more about it by clicking here!

Northern Lights

Picture of the Day - October 23, 2018

Auroras shine brilliantly over a polar cyclonic vortex.

Crowded Worlds

Picture of the Day - October 15, 2018

Alien moon and its parent gas giant, looking towards the sun. This system is located within one of the densely packed globular clusters orbiting Triangulum’s center.