The Winter Solstice Conjunction of 2020

 

Tonight is the Great Conjunction with Jupiter and Saturn. It's visible just over the south-westsern horizon, and will be there for a little while longer if you want to catch it. This pic was taken by my friend Steven Glaspie. His phone camera is a bit better than mine :-)

 

 

 

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Newly-discovered planet has rings TWO HUNDRED TIMES BIGGER than those of Saturn

I won't apologize for the all-caps there.  I mean, we are talking about something of monstrous proportions here...

Four hundred-some light years away is the recently-discovered exoplanet J1407b.  Its parent star kept blinking in and out of view.  Astro-boffins went to work on the case, doing analysis of light patterns and spectroscopy and all kinds of stuff like that.

What they found is that J1407b, a young planet with about 40-50 Jupiter masses, boasts a massive, MASSIVE ring system.  One that is more than 200 times larger than the one Saturn has.

Here's what it might look like...

See that teeny dot?  That's meant to be J1407b.  Mind you, this is a planet already with 40 times more mass than Jupiter.  See those rings?  They're spread out over 120 million kilometers of diameter's worth of disk.

If J1407b was located where Saturn is in our solar system, not only would the ring system be very easily visible from the Earth, it would be significantly larger than the full Moon.

And yet, it's been calculated that this system of rings is made up of about the same amount of material as the Earth has.  Which is comparably small in the cosmic scheme of things.

Just when you think you can't imagine anything else, here is something confirming that, yes... there are things that we could not have imagined out there.

Mash here for more about J1407b, how it was discovered and all that jazz.

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Saturn's weird hexagon replicated in a lab

Here's something that's intrigued me for quite a few years. Saturn - the second biggest planet in the solar system - has an odd feature and it ain't them purty rings: there's a huuuuuge hexagon-shaped cloud formation, thousands of miles to a side, surrounding its north pole. It's a persistent phenomenon that has mystified astronomers ever since it was first discovered.

So if you've been baffled about Saturn's mystery hexagon, be bebaffled no further 'cuz Ana Claudia Barbosa Aguiar and Peter Read of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom have recreated the mechanism in their lab with little more than a bucket of water and some green dye, and set it a'spinning on a variable-speed turntable. And fun was had by all!

From the article at ScienceNow...

The faster the ring rotated, the less circular the green jet stream became. Small eddies formed along its edges, which slowly became larger and stronger and forced the fluid within the ring into the shape of a polygon. By altering the rate at which the ring spun, the scientists could generate various shapes. "We could create ovals, triangles, squares, almost anything you like," says Read. The bigger the difference in the rotation between the planet and the jet steam—that is the cylinder and the ring—the fewer sides the polygon had, the team reports in this month's issue of Icarus. Barbosa Aguiar and Read suggest that Saturn’s north polar jet stream spins at a rate relative to the rest of the atmosphere that favors a six-sided figure, hence the hexagon.

I bet some entrepreneur could make a tidy sum selling this thing as a science project to middle-school students :-)

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