Planets

2014 UZ224 orbit (Image JPL Horizons / Sky and Telescope)

1

David Gerdes, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Michigan, and a number of colleagues associated with the DES (Dark Energy Survey) survey have discovered a new dwarf planet that currently has a distance of about 14 billion kilometers (about 8.5 billion miles) from the Sun. Called for now just 2014 UZ224, it’s among the most distant celestial bodies discovered in the solar system after the dwarf planet Eris and the possible dwarf planet known as V774104 whose discovery was announced in December 2015.

Wharton Ridge (ImageNASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.)

0

After extending the mission of the venerable Mars Rover Opportunity another time, NASA announced that it will drive down a gully dug by a fluid a long time ago, maybe by water. The goal is to understand whether this is the remains of an ancient Martian river. It’s the beginning of yet another mission for Opportunity, which suffers wear and might be at risk because of a storm that will hit Mars.

A part of Sputnik Planum seen by the New Horizons space probe (Photo NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)

0

An article published in the journal “Nature” offers an explanation for the existence of Sputnik Planum, the heart-shaped basin on Pluto. Tanguy Bertrand and François Forget, two researchers at the Laboratoire de dynamique météorologie (CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique/ UPMC/ENS Paris) used computer simulations to show that the peculiar Pluto’s atmosphere and insolation favors condensation near the equator in the lower altitude areas. The result is nitrogen ice accumulation in that basin.

Sloping buttes and layered outcrops within the Murray Buttes (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

0

NASA published a series of photographs taken by the Mars Rover Curiosity that show the landscape of the Martian area called “Murray Buttes”. Those are very high quality images captured on September 8, 2016 using the Mast Camera (MastCam) instrument, consisting of two cameras able to get among other things photographs in natural colors. The result is a breathtaking view which at the same time is very interesting from the scientific point of view because the photographed stratified rocks show traces of Mars’ geological history.

Pluto seen at visible light and at X-rays (not in scale) (Image X-ray: NASA/CXC/JHUAPL/R.McNutt et al; Optical: NASA/JHUAPL)

2

Two new research are connected in different ways to emissions coming from the dwarf planet Pluto. An article published in the journal “Icarus” describes a research which, through the use of the NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, detected X-rays emissions from Pluto. Another article published in the journal “Nature” offers an explanation for the reddish color to Charon’s poles, caused by methane ripped from Pluto’s atmosphere and turned into ice by the low temperatures.