The giant gas planets of our solar system — Saturn and Jupiter — have deep atmospheres without a solid or liquid base like Earth. Jupiter is our solar system’s largest planet, an immense spinning colorful sphere of methane and ammonia so large it could easily swallow all the other planets. Jupiter harbors a dense extreme atmosphere with constant storms and thunderheads reaching 40 miles from base to top, five times taller than those on Earth, with powerful lightning flashes up to three times more powerful than Earth’s largest “superbolts”.
Another amazing week on the Blue Dot from escaped coronavirus has grave implications for the world to the microscopic creature that survived for 24,000 years in the Siberian permafrost to NASA joins the search for UFOs to does a relic of the Big Bang exist in our Solar System?
Astronomers may soon be able to confirm the existence of a primordial black hole –gravity wells formed just moments after the Big Bang–in our Solar System with gravitational-wave experiments that will look back to a time before the formation of the first stars. “Ancient black holes would give us access to physics we would never otherwise be able to do,” wrote Dan Hooper, head of the theoretical astrophysics group at FermiLab, in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “If primordial black holes are real,’ he wrote, “they’d have potential to solve a whole host of the biggest problems in cosmology, not the least being the mystery of dark matter, considered to be the backbone to the structure of the universe.”
Was Venus the first habitable planet in the Solar System? NASA intends to find out. “It is astounding how little we know about Venus, but the combined results of these missions will tell us about the planet from the clouds in its sky through the volcanoes on its surface all the way down to its very core,” said Tom Wagner, NASA’s Discovery Program scientist about NASA’s JPL designing two missions to survive the planet’s extreme temperatures and atmospheric pressure. “It will be as if we have rediscovered the planet.”
Scientists have long speculated that Juptiter’s moon Europa has an icy crust covering a vast, global ocean –what Caltech’s Mike Brown describes as a “miniature Earth” ocean. The rocky layer underneath may be hot enough to melt, leading to undersea volcanoes.
“You’ve heard of electric cars and e-books, but now we are talking about electric dark matter,” said Julian Munoz of Harvard University. “However, this electric charge is on the very smallest of scales.”
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
