Galaxies: Types And Morphology

Orange Gem

Picture of the Day - October 28, 2018

Here we have another Titan-Like world with rings. Seas of liquid methane cover the surface, and a thick hazy nitrogen-methane atmosphere obscures most of the surface.

Starlight

Pictures of the Day - January 18, 2019

2nd set of pictures of this Titan-Like world.

Pictures of the day - December 2, 2018

Insight System - Third Planet orbiting Insight B (Insight B-III)

Insight B-III is the giant of the Insight System, being the most massive planet of both of the system’s stars. It is a massive gas giant the nears the boundary with a brown dwarf at 11.75 Jupiter masses. The planet has an active atmosphere from both solar heating and internally released heat and has an average atmospheric temperature of 147 F.

The planet orbits the sun at an average distance of 0.21 AU, and completes an orbit once every 41.33 days. The planet is not quite tidally locked with a rotational rate of 41.67 days vs its orbital period of 41.33 days. As a result, a solar day on the planet lasts 14.00 Earth years.

No major satellites orbit the planet; however, 30 asteroid-like irregular satellites orbit the planet.

Note the star visible in the last picture is the Insight System’s primary star Insight A. Viewed from the gas giant, the star shines with an average magnitude of -17.29, bright enough that it illuminates the dark side of objects to approximately the same level of lighting as the average living room.

High Resolution Pictures

Insight B-III

Polar View

Crescent View

Equatorial Cloud Bands

Nearby asteroid moon

Distant asteroid moon

Evaporating Planets

Picture of the Day - October 27, 2018

These three planets (not comets) close to a white giant star losing their atmospheres. The giant star has expanded so fast that all of the inner planets are superheated to nearly 2,000 F.

Dust Storms on Titan Spotted for the First Time

Data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has revealed what appear to be giant dust storms in equatorial regions of Saturn’s moon Titan. The discovery, described in a paper published on Sept. 24 in Nature Geoscience, makes Titan the third Solar System body, in addition to Earth and Mars, where dust storms have been observed.

The observation is helping scientists to better understand the fascinating and dynamic environment of Saturn’s largest moon.

“Titan is a very active moon,” said Sebastien Rodriguez, an astronomer at the Université Paris Diderot, France, and the paper’s lead author. “We already know that about its geology and exotic hydrocarbon cycle. Now we can add another analogy with Earth and Mars: the active dust cycle, in which organic dust can be raised from large dune fields around Titan’s equator.”

Titan is an intriguing world – in ways quite similar to Earth. In fact, it is the only moon in the Solar System with a substantial atmosphere and the only celestial body other than our planet where stable bodies of surface liquid are known to still exist.

There is one big difference, though: On Earth such rivers, lakes and seas are filled with water, while on Titan it is primarily methane and ethane that flows through these liquid reservoirs. In this unique cycle, the hydrocarbon molecules evaporate, condense into clouds and rain back onto the ground.

The weather on Titan varies from season to season as well, just as it does on Earth. In particular, around the equinox – the time when the Sun crosses Titan’s equator – massive clouds can form in tropical regions and cause powerful methane storms. Cassini observed such storms during several of its Titan flybys.

When Rodriguez and his team first spotted three unusual equatorial brightenings in infrared images taken by Cassini around the moon’s 2009 northern equinox, they thought they might be the same kind of methane clouds; however, an investigation revealed they were something completely different.

“From what we know about cloud formation on Titan, we can say that such methane clouds in this area and in this time of the year are not physically possible,” said Rodriguez. “The convective methane clouds that can develop in this area and during this period of time would contain huge droplets and must be at a very high altitude – much higher than the 6 miles (10 kilometers) that modeling tells us the new features are located.”

The researchers were also able to rule out that the features were actually on the surface of Titan in the form of frozen methane rain or icy lavas. Such surface spots would have a different chemical signature and would remain visible for much longer than the bright features in this study, which were visible for only 11 hours to five weeks.

In addition, modeling showed that the features must be atmospheric but still close to the surface – most likely forming a very thin layer of tiny solid organic particles. Since they were located right over the dune fields around Titan’s equator, the only remaining explanation was that the spots were actually clouds of dust raised from the dunes.

Organic dust is formed when organic molecules, formed from the interaction of sunlight with methane, grow large enough to fall to the surface. Rodriguez said that while this is the first-ever observation of a dust storm on Titan, the finding is not surprising.

“We believe that the Huygens Probe, which landed on the surface of Titan in January 2005, raised a small amount of organic dust upon arrival due to its powerful aerodynamic wake,” said Rodriguez. “But what we spotted here with Cassini is at a much larger scale. The near-surface wind speeds required to raise such an amount of dust as we see in these dust storms would have to be very strong – about five times as strong as the average wind speeds estimated by the Huygens measurements near the surface and with climate models.”

The existence of such strong winds generating massive dust storms implies that the underlying sand can be set in motion, too, and that the giant dunes covering Titan’s equatorial regions are still active and continually changing.

The winds could be transporting the dust raised from the dunes across large distances, contributing to the global cycle of organic dust on Titan and causing similar effects to those that can be observed on Earth and Mars. source

Picture of the day 2 - November 20, 2018

Messier 59. - The next galaxy I have selected to explore in space engine. M59 is an elliptical galaxy location about 54 million light years from the Milky Way.

Lunar Shadow

Picture of the Day - October 14, 2018

Small satellite casting its shadow across a gas giant.