Carnival of Space #466

It’s Baaack! The Carnival of Space #466 graces Everyday Spacer.com this week and, once again, we host some amazing articles from our member bloggers. If you are a space blogger and you’d like to participate, you are welcome to learn about that, and join. You can offer an article like the folks below and, for a limited time no doubt, you can host the weekly event just like this!

So, Without Further Magoo, On With The Show!

Welcome to Jupiter – NASA’S Juno Achieves Orbit Around ‘KING OF THE PLANETS’
Ken Kremer | Universe Today

After a nearly five year journey covering 1.7-billion-miles (2.8-billion-kilometers) across our solar system, NASA’s basketball court-sized Juno orbiter achieved orbit around Jupiter, the ‘King of the Planets’ late Monday night, July 4, in a gift to all Americans on our 240th Independence Day and a gift to science to elucidate…

Stars Are The Universe’s Neat Freaks
Matt Williams | Universe Today

Imagine, if you will, that the Universe was once a much dirtier place than it is today. Imagine also that what we see around us, a relatively clean and unobscured Universe, is the result of billions of years of stars behaving like giant celestial Roombas, cleaning up the space around them in preparation for our arrival. According to a set of recently published catalogues, which detail the latest findings from the ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory, this description is actually quite fitting.

NASA Approves New Horizons Extended KBO Mission, Keeps Dawn at Ceres
Ken Kremer | Universe Today

In an ‘Independence Day’ gift to a slew of US planetary research scientists, NASA has granted approval to nine ongoing missions to continue for another two years this holiday weekend.

The biggest news is that NASA green lighted a mission extension for the New Horizons probe to fly deeper into the Kuiper Belt and decided to keep the Dawn probe at…

Juno’s Cinematic View of Jupiter Orbit Insertiona
C.C. Peterson | The Space Writer

Juno arrives at Jupiter and the team creates a cinematic view that evokes ancient earth history. The Spacewriter explores that video and its meanings.

Does Pluto Have a Subsurface Ocean? New Research Says Probably
Paul Scott Anderson | Planetaria

So-called “waterworlds” have been found to be surprisingly common in the Solar System – small icy moons which have ice crusts but oceans of liquid water below the surface. These include Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede and Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Titan, and possibly others. These moons are cold and very far from the Sun, but heated inside by the gravitational pull of their giant host planets and/or radioactivity. Now there’s another Solar System body which, even more surprisingly, some scientists think has a subsurface ocean: Pluto.

There had been suggestions before that Pluto used to have an internal ocean a long time ago, although it was thought to have most likely frozen solid by now. But a new study adds to the evidence that not only was there an ocean, but that it is…

“We Got This.” A look at the United State of Women Summit from #womeninstem
Kimberly K. Arcand | The Huffington Post

The United State of Women Summit brought together leaders in all different professional fields – from politics to entertainment, from science to finance. The common thread among all of the participants, however, was easy to find: everyone there wanted to continue to foster and enhance the opportunities for girls and women in whatever endeavors they may choose to pursue.

The Summit offered me an opportunity to interact with and listen to women who have overcome a litany of obstacles to achieve their spectacular goals (or goals in progress). It provided a forum for incredibly accomplished and confident men who…

Asteroids and the Asteroid Belt: What They Are… and Aren’t
Carolyn Collins Peterson | About: Education

Asteroids are rocky chunks of solar system material that can be found orbiting the Sun throughout nearly the entire solar system. Most of them lie in the Asteroid Belt, which is an area of the solar system that stretches between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. They occupy a huge volume of space out there, and if you were to travel through the Asteroid Belt, it would seem quite empty to you.

That’s because the asteroids are spread out, not crowded together in swarms (like you often see…

Brown Dwarf 23 Light Years Away with Radio Emission
Brian Wang | Next Big Future

23 light years away is a brown dwarf (W0607+24) which is a source of radio emissions. According to a research paper published July 4, this substellar object showcases quiescent radio emission, making it one of the most radio-faint, ultra-cool dwarfs yet detected. The discovery of this process in this nearby object could be crucial for our understanding of this process in ultracool dwarfs in general.

The object is less than two billion years old, has a maximum mass of about 0.055 solar masses and a radius approximately of 0.1 solar radii.

Simulations Suggest Saturn’s Moon Titan Might Have Non-Water Based Life
Brian Wang | Next Big Future

A team of researchers at Cornell University has built and run a simulation that showed prebiotic reactions could possibly occur on the surface of one of Saturn’s moons, Titan, suggesting the possibility of life evolving in a place where it is too cold for water to be a factor. The team describes the simulation they created in response to the discovery (by the Huygens probe) that polymers such as polyimine might have already…

And there you have it! Another stimulating Carnival from Everyday Spacer.com. Watch for Carnival #467 next week hosted by Brian Wang at Next Big Future!