I thought there was already a topic for this kind of stuff, but I can't seem to find it. Oh well. General news about astronomy topic go!

Mainly to post that New Horizons first pics of Pluto are in! They're still small (it's still getting closer) but already show more detail than we ever had, including something that looks like a polar cap.

The comet lander Philae has woken up from hibernation!

I saw this... Good news indeed

Whoo! Awesome! Maybe they'll get to do more useful sciencey stuff with it.

Actually, that reminds me: has anyone else been following the Mystery of the Bright Spots on Ceres?

The Dawn spacecraft, as it approached Ceres (after orbiting Vesta, another large asteroid), started capturing a weirdly bright small spot from its navigation camera. As it got closer, the image resolved into two bizarrely bright spots inside an impact crater. Even when Ceres would rotate away from the Sun, the bright patches stayed bright for a long time.

Dawn has now spiraled in to about 2,700 miles up, and this is what it sees now:
What the heck are those things?

JPL is posting the latest images to the Dawn Twitter account, and even they say they don't know. They've pretty much ruled out self-generated light and concluded that it's probably reflected light... but reflected from what? Ice? Salt? No one knows.

Which is cool. We're getting to watch real science as it happens.

Dawn still has two more orbital distances to go from the 2,700 mile orbit it reached on June 6: a closer orbit after June 30, and its final orbit distance of just 900 miles up in December. We should get some excellent images of these anomalies then.

In the meantime: speculation!

That's fascinating!

I had heard of it, but I hadn't really followed it. Fascinating stuff, thanks for the write-up!

Dinosawer wrote:The comet lander Philae has woken up from hibernation!

Every single one of those astronomers was probably like;

Flatfingers wrote:In the meantime: speculation!

Someone painted our second sun to look like something else and now the paint is starting to chip?

Flatfingers wrote: In the meantime: speculation!

The dead star that was 'too expensive' to build was actually build much earlier and made to look like a piece of rock and dust but they forgot to paint a piece and thus the reflecting bit is actually a piece of the dead star's hull?

It's where America stashes it's candy wrappers

How big are the white spots?

Jetison333 wrote:How big are the white spots?

That depends on which white spots you mean.

JPL says the crater is about 55 miles across. (To our European friends: feel free to convert these units to candy wrappers or something else. )

So just eyeballing it, one of the littlest circular spots looks to be a bit under a mile in diameter. Meanwhile, I'd guesstimate the big bright glob in the middle of the crater to be around 8 miles across.

One other note: at 2,700 miles up, each pixel in this image spans 1,400 feet. (That's the number provided by JPL. Presumably that implies the CCD navigation camera that's collecting these images uses square pixels. I also don't know if they're doing binning or some other funky process with the CCD camera data; that could affect the actual ground distance spanned by a raw pixel. So for now I'm assuming JPL's statement means each pixel covers a 1400x1400 square foot patch on Ceres.)

Pluto pics Woooooooo!!!

NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa- ... n-to-earth
http://www.nasa.gov/keplerbriefing0723

Cha0zz wrote:NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa- ... n-to-earth
http://www.nasa.gov/keplerbriefing0723

This neighborhood sucks, I'm moving away from Earth.