Tagged: universe

Pluto’s newly discovered moons receive names (1 picture + video)

Pluto’s newly discovered moons now have names. Known previously as P4 and P5, the International Astronomical Union has now given the fourth and fifth discovered moons of Pluto the namesKerberos and Styx. The small moons were discovered in 2011 and 2012 by the Hubble Space Telescope in preparation for the close passing of the New Horizons spacecraft by Pluto in 2015. Keberos is named for the many headed dog in Greek mythology that guards the entrance to the underworld, while Styx is named for the goddess who overlooks the mythological river that runs between the Earth and the underworld.

South up Moon phase & libration 2013

This visualization shows the Moon’s phase and libration at hourly intervals throughout 2013, as viewed from the southern hemisphere. Each frame represents one hour. In addition, this visualization shows the Moon’s orbit position, sub-Earth and subsolar points, and distance from the Earth at true scale.

Is there a center of the universe?

It’s been a long road to the discovery that Earth is not the center of the Solar System, the Milky Way, or the universe; great thinkers from Aristotle to Bruno have grappled with it for millennia. But if we aren’t at the center of the universe, what is? Marjee Chmiel and Trevor Owens discuss where we stand in the (very) big scheme of things.

Saturn’s Hyperion: a Moon with odd craters

What lies at the bottom of Hyperion’s strange craters? Nobody’s sure. To help find out, the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn swooped past the sponge-textured moon in 2005 and2010 and took images of unprecedented detail. An image from the 2005 pass, shown above in false color, shows a remarkable world strewn with strange craters and a generally odd surface.