Space Probes

Occator crater and the white spots on the dwarf planet Ceres (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS)

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NASA has released a new image of the now famous white spots of Ceres, one of the most mysterious geological features found on this dwarf planet. The Dawn space probe is currently mapping its surface from an altitude of 1,470 km (915 miles) and that allowed to take pictures much more detailed than the ones previously available. These new images have a resolution of 140 meters (450 feet) per pixel and are providing new information about the white spots waiting for in-depth analyzes.

On the left a picture of the Sun taken by the SDO space probe, at the center a close-up of a prominence and on the right a picture of the Earth in the same scale (Image NASA/JAXA/NAOJ)

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Two articles published in “The Astrophysical Journal” describe a study of what is known as the coronal heating problem. For decades, scientists have been trying to understand why the temperature on the surface of the Sun is about 6,000 Kelvin while the corona, the region between the surface and the area of ​​the outer atmosphere, can reach temperatures of several million degrees. Now a team of researchers led by Takenori Okamoto of the Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory at Nagoya University and ISAS/JAXA and Patrick Antolin of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Tokyo, offers an explanation, tied to resonant absorption.

Picture of the lonly mountain on Ceres taken by the Dawn space probe (Photo NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

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NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is carrying out a mapping of the dwarf planet Ceres and with its camera is capturing extraordinary images better than those available so far, with a resolution of 140 meters (450 feet) per pixel. Among the geological features photographed there’s a mountain about 6 kilometers (4 miles) high that had already intrigued scientists and public because it looks like a pyramid and its sides are covered with brilliant material.

Examples of the fractures detected on the surface of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (Image ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA)

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While the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko started moving away from the Sun, new studies have been published based on data collected over the past months. An article published in the journal “Geophysical Research Letters” describes the exam of the many fractures photographed after the arrival of ESA’s space probe Rosetta. Another article published in the journal “Annales Geophysicae” provides an explanation for the “song” of the comet discovered last year.