Monday, July 29, 2013

Saturn, Titan, Rings, and Haze




Before It's News | Popular Space





Saturn, Titan, Rings, and Haze



This is not a solar eclipse. Pictured is a busy vista of moons and rings taken at Saturn. The large circular object in the center of the image is Titan, the largest moon of Saturn and one of the most intriguing objects in the entire Solar System. The dark spot in the center is the main solid part of the moon. The bright surrounding ring is atmospheric haze above Titan, gas that is scattering sunlight to a camera operating onboard the robotic Cassini spacecraft.









NASA's Chandra Sees Eclipsing Planet In X-rays For First Time



For the first time since exoplanets, or planets around stars other than the sun, were discovered almost 20 years ago, X-ray observations have detected an exoplanet passing in front of its parent star. An advantageous alignment of a planet and its parent star in the system HD 189733, which is 63 light-years from Earth, enabled NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM Newton Observatory to observe a dip in X-ray intensity as the planet transited the star. This graphic depicts HD 189733b, the first exoplanet caught passing in front of its parent star in X-rays. Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Poppenhaeger et al; Illustration: NASA "Thousands of planet candidates have been seen to transit in only optical light," said Katja Poppenhaeger of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., who led a new study to be published in the Aug.






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