Dive into Titan’s thick atmosphere and find out what a strange place it is, adapted from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. With its clouds, rain cycle, and giant lakes, Saturn’s large moon Titan is a surprisingly Earthlike place. But unlike on Earth, Titan’s surface is far too cold for liquid water – instead, Titan’s clouds, rain, and lakes consist of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane (which exist as gases here on Earth). When these hydrocarbons evaporate and encounter ultraviolet radiation in Titan’s upper atmosphere, some of the molecules are broken apart and reassembled into longer hydrocarbons like ethylene and propane.

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft first revealed the presence of several species of atmospheric hydrocarbons when it flew by Titan in 1980, but one molecule was curiously missing – propylene, the main ingredient in plastic number 5. Now, thanks to NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, scientists have detected propylene on Titan for the first time, solving a long-standing mystery about the solar system’s most Earthlike moon.

This edition of COSMIC JOURNEYS explores the still unfolding story of Earth’s past and the light it sheds on the science of climate change today. While that story can tell us about the mechanisms that can shape our climate. it’s still the unique conditions of our time that will determine sea levels, ice coverage, and temperatures.

Ice, in its varied forms, covers as much as 16% of Earth’s surface, including 33% of land areas at the height of the northern winter. Glaciers, sea ice, permafrost, ice sheets and snow play an important role in Earth’s climate. They reflect energy back to space, shape ocean currents, and spawn weather patterns.

But there are signs that Earth’s great stores of ice are beginning to melt. To find out where Earth might be headed, scientists are drilling down into the ice, and scouring ancient sea beds, for evidence of past climate change. What are they learning about the fate of our planet… a thousand years into the future and even beyond?

30,000 years ago, Earth began a relentless descent into winter. Glaciers pushed into what were temperate zones. Ice spread beyond polar seas. New layers of ice accumulated on the vast frozen Continue reading Cosmic Journeys – Earth in 1000 Years →

Thirty-six years ago this month, on Sept. 5, 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

On September 12, 2013, NASA officially confirmed that Voyager 1 had reached the interstellar medium in August 2012. This makes Voyager 1 the first spacecraft to exit our solar system, a mark in history to be remembered forever.

Hear what today’s leading Astro-celebs have to say about Voyager’s incredible landmark accomplishment!

In the far reaches of the Galapagos archipelago there is a remote island – Darwin Island. Here, a mysterious parade of giant whale sharks passes by. All of them are pregnant females, about to give birth. What has drawn them here? Where are they going?

Galapagos: Realm of Giant Sharks follows a group of researchers who have travelled out to Darwin Island to begin following these dinosaurs of the sea wherever they travel across the globe. But placing satellite tracking devices on giant sharks is not always easy. Steel spear tips bounce off, dangerous currents intervene, and the sharks can deliver bone-crushing swipes with their tails.

In an exciting blend of science and natural history filmmaking, Galapagos: Realm of Giant Sharks uses action-packed, high-resolution photography to draw audiences into the world of one of the ocean’s largest and least understood creatures.

A fascinating new simulation from NASA shows how astronomers might use black holes to look for signs of a theoretical dark matter particle called a WIMP. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. When they get whipped up by a black hole, annihilation rates would soar, and we’d be able to see them.

“The sun & the stars dear, they’ll shine on our highway. They’ll shine on our home here, by my highway of light.”

Images:
European Southern Observatory

Music:
“Moonlight Hall” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Revel in this spectacular commemorative image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, courtesy of HubbleCast.

Hubble was launched in orbit on 24 April 1990 as the first space telescope of its kind. For two and a half decades, it has beamed back data and images that have changed our understanding of the Universe and how it came to be.

This amazing image of the star cluster Westerlund 2 is a giant cluster of about 3000 stars. The cluster resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina.

The stellar nursery is enshrouded by dust, but Hubble’s Camera peered through the dusty veil in near-infrared light, giving us a clear view of its inner workings. The image resolves the dense concentration of stars in the center, about 10 light-years across.

The cluster is only about two million years old, but contains some of the brightest, hottest and most massive stars ever discovered. Some of the heftiest stars are carving deep cavities in the surrounding material by unleashing torrents of ultraviolet light and high speed streams of charged particles, known as stellar winds. These are etching away the enveloping hydrogen gas cloud in which Continue reading Hubble Space Telescope Celebrates 25 Years in Space →

Watch the full 50-minute program early on… http://www.vessel.com/SpaceRip… and get a FREE one-year subscription if you visit by tomorrow. The completed program “Age of Hubble” will appear in segments on Vessel over the next few days.

In landmark observations, the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile has given astronomers the best ever three-dimensional view of the deep Universe. After staring at the Hubble Deep Field South region for a total of 27 hours the new observations reveal the distances, motions and other properties of far more galaxies than ever before in this tiny piece of the sky. The new observations are allowing astronomers to go beyond the Hubble Deep Field and reveal a host of previously unseen objects.

A gem from NASA Astrophysics. Eta Carinae is a binary system containing the most luminous and massive star within 10,000 light-years. A long-term study combined data from NASA satellites, ground-based observing campaigns and theoretical modeling to produce the most comprehensive picture of Eta Carinae to date. New findings include Hubble Space Telescope images that show decade-old shells of ionized gas racing away from the largest star at a million miles an hour, and new 3-D models that reveal never-before-seen features of the stars’ interactions.

Located about 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina, Eta Carinae is actually two massive stars whose eccentric orbits bring them close every 5.5 years. Both produce powerful stellar winds, which enshroud the stars and stymy efforts to directly measure their properties. Astronomers have established that the brighter, cooler primary star has about 90 times the mass of the sun and outshines it by 5 million times. Its smaller, hotter companion weighs in at about 30 solar masses and emits a million times the sun’s light.

At closest approach, or periastron, the stars are 225 million kilometers apart, or about the average distance between Mars and the sun. Astronomers observe dramatic changes in the system during Continue reading Superstar Duet in Eta Carinae →