#planet

#planet

The Blue Eye of Jupiter(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill/Navaneeth Krishnan CC BY 3.0)While we've all become familiar with the Great Red Spot on the side of the Jupiter, the planet's North Pole is stormy, blue, and utterly fascinating, although we never got to see it until the Juno mission flew over it and began to sent back images in 2016. The picture above is titled Jupiter North Highly Enhanced. It took an entire team of engineers, photographers, and artists to render this new artwork of one of Jupiter's gigantic atmospheric storms from data sent back by the Juno mission. This is an example of collaborative work found at Junocam, where the missions's images are uploaded, processed, discussed, promoted, and displayed by volunteer amateur astronomers. Check out another picture of Jupiter's blue northern hemisphere processed from images at Junocam.

How Far Can You Throw a Ball on Other Planets? If you were to throw a ball in outer space, say, like when you were doing a extravehicular walk outside your spacecraft flying beyond earth's orbit, it would just continue going due to inertia. However, other planets have their own gravity, and their own drag force depending on the atmosphere. Planetary scientist James O'Donoghue made us a visualization of how far a ball thrown at a 45 degree angle would go in the conditions of different planets in our solar system, plus the moon.

Astronomers Found a Moon-Forming Disc Around an Exoplanet 400 Light-Year AwayYou've probably seen images of circumplanetary disc - or ring of matter that orbit a planet - on the cover of imaginative sci-fi novels before, but astronomers have finally captured the first image of such actual disc around a planet outside of our solar system.Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, astronomer Myriam Benisty and colleagues observed a disc surrounding the exoplanet PDS 70c, a giant Jupiter-like planet orbiting a star 400 light-years away."Our ALMA observations were obtained at such exquisite resolution that we could clearly identify that the disc is associated with the planet and we are able to constrain its size for the first time," Benisty said in a statement by the European Southern Observatory.Astronomers noted that the disc surrounding PDS 70c is huge: it's about 500 times larger than Saturn's rings.Circumplanetary discs are thought to play a significant role in the formation of moons and satellites, as its gas and dust come together into progressively larger bodies through multiple collisions, ultimately becoming moons.Images:ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Benisty et al.#circumplanetarydisc #ALMA #astronomy #astrophysics #EuropeanSouthernObservatory #PDS70c #planet #exoplanet #moonformingdisc