Hellacious Lava Fountains on Jupiter’s Moon Io: Curtains of Fire

Within a two-week period Io, Jupiter’s moon, experienced two massive outbursts in August 2013. Astronomers speculated that these volcanic eruptions could be regular phenomenon that can spew materials in huge quantities above the surface. If we talk about ratio, it could be somewhere from one huge outburst per one or two years but Io suggested more than this. Io is the innermost moon out of the planet’s four large Galilean moons. It is more than 3,600 km across. It is the only space body that is known so far, by…

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Japan to create Space Force to Monitor Debris: The Fourth Battlefield

Space debris are affecting our vital services and if it continuous to do so then time is not far when we would no longer be able to communicate, the financial markets would be paralyzed, no TV, no internet, no phone calls, no satellites, life would come to a halt, literally! Satellite collisions would initiate the catastrophic snow balling effect amplifying the cascade of destruction. The movie Gravity did call for some serious thinking about the impacts that debris can cause. Although the movie had some serious flaws but that is…

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Earlier Asteroid Impacts led to the formation of Earth’s Crust: Geological Evolution

Last year we talked about how meteor impact led to pastoral revolution and now recent research on Earth’s surface revealed that the planet was in a constant reprocessing process due to the huge asteroid impacts. The new approach utilizing the terrestrial bombardment model based on lunar and terrestrial data disclosed that asteroid collisions where the game changer which caused evolution of the topmost layers of Earth during its initial stages, which happened around 4.5b years ago. Yvonne Pendleton, NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) Director added that repeated…

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Building 3D Products in Space: Printing the Metals of the Future

One of the major drawbacks of 3D printing is its lack of ability to use varied types of materials in printing a particular product. The same inability has been hindering 3D printing in space travel as well, where at times, situation demands fabrication of certain parts from several different materials. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) space scientists in collaboration with researchers from Caltech and Penn State University have been working closely to resolve this problem of bringing 3D printing closer to space travel. They developed a process that allowed for…

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Black Holes morph into White Holes: Space-Time Loops cause Big Bounce

As per a recent theory, supernova explosions could be the dying throes of black holes that were formed soon after the Big Bang. The phenomenon called black holes have been the most flabbergasting observable fact of the universe and until now, there has been no concrete evidence as to what is on its other side and what happens to the matter that it engulfs. However, two physicists have gone ahead and postulated that these black holes have an expiry date too and that they morph into ‘white holes’ explosively dispersing…

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US military to develop a Reusable Unmanned Spacecraft: The Experimental Spaceplane project

The US military is looking forward to create an affordable and efficient robotic space plane that has an ability of embarking payloads directly into the orbit. DARPA has already granted the design contract to three firms namely, Boeing, Masten Space Systems and Northrop Grumman. For the initial stage of the Experimental Spaceplane project, also called the XS-1, the firms have collaborated with similar other aerospace companies. For instance, Boeing is working with Blue Origin, Masten is teaming up with XCOR Aerospace and Northrop Grumman is collaborating with the Virgin Galactic.…

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Habitability is Dependent on Ocean: Water bodies Influence Climate Stability

There is a lot of research work going to find traces of life on other planets and to find elements that are essential requisites for sustaining life on other Earth-like planets. All the research done so far using computer simulations were more focused on the atmosphere of these alien planets with Earth-like habitable climates. 

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An Affordable method of growing Food in Space: Plants with Life Support Systems

With the advancement in science and technology, the day is not far when humans will settle on distant planets or may plan a luxurious holiday on the moon. But arranging enough food supplies for a longer stay is the most challenging part as it occupies considerable room on the spacecraft and sending another spaceship loaded with supplies would be not cost efficient. To tackle the issue, researchers around the world are trying to develop a cost efficient method to grow food in space. This would definitely make future space travel…

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Tidal Forces influence Planets in Eccentric Orbits: Possibility of creating Habitable Worlds

Fixation towards heat for survival is the key element across planet earth and the solar system. During the origination of human life, early man stumbled upon the discovery of fire by rubbing sticks and since then it has evolved gradually. In an interesting study, researchers at NASA have discovered a similar fixation towards heat for survival across constellation. The findings are primarily based on the Earth sized planets in other star systems. Excessive heat denotes destruction but right amount of same heat results in creating habitual climatic conditions. 

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Frozen Steller Twins Discovered: Orbits in Binary Star System

Lately a binary star system has attracted attention of many space scientists. This binary system consists of twin stars, mutually orbiting around a common center of mass. Situated around 3,000 light years away from Earth, astronomers’ expecting that it could shed some information regarding similar Earth like bodies floating in space. The planet weighs twice that of the Earth and orbits, in binary system, one star. Distance between the two corresponds to the distance between the Earth and the Sun. However, unlike the Sun, the planet’s host star is dimmer…

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Titan’s Ice Shell overlies Salty Ocean: As Salty as Earth’s Dead Sea

NASA’s Cassini mission has given strong confirmation regarding the saltiness of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. Space scientists have even compared the salt content with Earth’s Dead Sea. The result corresponds to 10 years observation, where Cassini was busy accumulating the gravitational and topographical data. Researchers organized this information and developed a model based on Titan’s structure. This resulted in gaining better insights of the moon’s exterior ice shell.

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Kepler-10c the mega-Earth Discovered: Godzilla of Earths

Space scientists have discovered a new planet to which they call as “Godzilla of Earths”, maybe because of its rocky exteriors. The exoplanet weighs more than 17 times that of Earth. Until now researchers believe that the planet is all solid and is much gigantic with respect to previous discoveries of super-Earth, hence it falls into the casket of mega-Earth. Sasselov, one of the astronomers believe that Kepler-10c, the newly found mega-Earth, is high on probability with respect to implications for life.

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Augmentation of Cosmic Magnetic Flux by Turbulence: Interstellar Dynamics

Stellar physicists believed that escalation of interstellar space magnetic field could be an offshoot of the cosmic turbulence. Magnetic field pervades unanimously throughout universe however, there was no such thing around the beginning of Big Bang, which means the force has arisen from somewhere. In order to look for the answer, researchers at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK simulated creation of supernova, a giant star with 60k billions times more powerful shafts, these rays were higher than the laser pointers. The study was based on identifying magnetic fields in the deposits…

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GU Psc b: Another Exoplanet Discovered Through Direct Imaging

Space scientists have discovered a new planet by collective observations from the Gemini Observatories, the Observatoire Mont-Mégantic (OMM), the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) and the W.M. Keck Observatory. The gas giant is situated around GU Psc, in the constellation Pisces and is believed to be 3 times less massive than the Sun. The distance between the planet GU Psc b and its star GU Psc is approximately 2,000 times Earth-Sun distance. With this distance, it would take the planet nearly 80,000 Earth years to complete just one orbit around its star.…

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Illustris is New Time Machine: Simulation of the Realistic Virtual Universe

We know how our universe look today and we have pretty good idea as to how it looked before the things started taking shape somewhere around the Big Bang.  But we have no idea how the galaxies evolve and what was before the Big Bang. In order to study this, researchers at the MIT have built a computer simulation, they have named it the Illustris. This simulation is so complex that calculating on single desktop might take 2k years alone and its volume comprises around 215m light years. Although there…

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