3 science articles science project

Tara Jevrosimovic

1/18/2016

Science 9A

Patrick Youell

Most Important Astronomy News of 2015

Besides the tragic terrorist attacks, the celebrity gossips and scandals, other current events took place in the year of 2015, such as scientific ones. The following three current events are for me, the most important current events of 2015.There is finally evidence of water on Mars, a clear picture of Pluto, and a planet with two suns.

Pluto

More than 80 years after Pluto’s discovery, it became much more than a undistinguished point of light. It’s a unique, complex, and dynamic world that is different from any other orbiting the sun. The new discoveries of Pluto are the highly detailed images (more detailed than ever before) taken by the New Horizons spacecraft on July 11th 2015. These images show signs of glaciers, ice volcanoes, and mountains of water ice tower thousands of meters over fields of frozen methane and nitrogen.

Figure 1: Two ice mountains jut out of a textured plain (top), a close-up example of the varied terrain that stretches to Pluto’s horizon (bottom, taken 15 minutes after closest approach).

“It’s amazing to look at this world and realize I’ve been staring at it for years through a telescope and all that detail was there.” says Cathy Olkin, a deputy and planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado., and working on the New Horizons mission. As manifested by figure 2, the picture drastically changed from June 15 to July 11 2015. From July 1994 till July 2015, there were only blurry images from which only shadows could be seen. After the New Horizons project, some patterns and predictions could be made from the new images.

Figure 2: shows how we could see Pluto on June 1994, and how it turned clearer as the New Horizons project improved.

As soon as the spacecraft sent back its first comprehensive pictures, it could be seen that Pluto had changed a lot during its lifetime of over 4.6 billion years. Pluto was geologically alive, which meant that it has land-forms like volcanoes and tectonic plates that are constantly moving and rearranging the surface. Scientists could say this by their observations of the tiny planet, it supposedly has ice flows, mountains, glaciers and many other.

Mars

2015 was a very important year for the planet Mars, the year in which there was evidence found of water on Mars. When NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) announced that their Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft spotted hydrated salt, minerals it was almost sure that life could exist on Mars. Although water on Mars has already been announced many times in the past, this new finding is more detailed than ever before, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: “Seasonal water flows might have created dark streaks on Mars’ slopes, as seen in this computer-generated view of Hale Crater.”

The Curiosity rover (which is a robotic rover exploring Gale Crater on Mars) has been on Mars from the year 2012, and from then discovered chemical evidence of life on Mars. The rover recognized a form of Nitrogen in Martian rocks that is used in Earth to construct biological molecules, meaning that those molecules are present in living organisms, and Mars is inhabited by them. Six meteorites which were blasted into space by asteroid impact, show they contain methane which is used as a food source to microbes that are on Earth. To know if there is life on Mars, or ever was, will have to wait until at least 2020 when NASA is planning to launch a rover to collect rocks and store them which would in the end be flown back to Earth for tests and examination.

Two-sunned planets

After researching and collecting data, scientists believe that there could be more planets with two suns, compared to ones with only one (like Earth). After the space telescope Kepler was launched in 2009, finally astronomers had the implements to search for these multi-star systems which host planets among extra-solar planets (are planets that orbit a star other than the sun). Those are worlds which are outside of Earth’s solar system. Kepler-453b, shown in figure 4, the new-found extra-solar planet, is 1,400 light years away from Earth. It orbits a circumbinary (planets which orbit two suns) system because it circumnavigating both stars.

Figure 4: this in an illustration of what Kepler-453b might look like. The red and orange are the suns, and the blue is the actual planet.

“We realized there must be many other systems that we’re missing.” said Nader Haghighipour, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The fact that they found this planet at all is very lucky, if his team didn’t watch the stars at just the right time, they scientists would have definitely missed the telltale dip in light that gestured the existence of this planet.

After analyzing and recording this information, planets are truly the most interesting to me out of all scientific events. In the year of 2015, machines and technology improved well enough to determine & find out all of these things about our neighboring and far away planets. After doing this research, I asked myself a question, why spend so much money for discovering all these things about space, when there is a big possibility that Mars is the farthest we'll go? Well, by doing additional research, I found out that humans are driven to explore and discover the world, and space is something that they will never quite fully understand, so they spend lots of money to understand it, and with every new discovery they are getting closer and closer in finding out the secrets of the universe.It is amazing that we have come so far in finding new worlds and planets, and we are closer and closer each day to uncovering new mysteries of the universe.

Bibliography:

"Like Tatooine in Star Wars, This Planet Has Two Suns." Student Science. Student Science, n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2016.

"Year in Review: Best Evidence Yet for Water on Mars." Science News. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2016.

"Year in Review: Pluto Unveiled as a World like No Other." Science News. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2016.