Against all odds, Comet Lovejoy has survived its encounter with the Sun last Friday even though astronomers expected that as it approached 140,000 kilometers from the solar surface, this "dirty snowball" would almost evaporate. righ now. Not surprisingly, temperatures in the corona can reach 2 million degrees Celsius.
Comet Lovejoy, discovered on December 2, is heading towards the Sun and is expected to meet its destination on December 15. Its orbit will bring it closer to only 140,000 kilometers above the solar surface. At that distance, the icy comet will not survive the heat of the star. What's more, comets are such loosely cohesive masses of ice and rock that Lovejoy could disintegrate at any moment.
In the crust of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, there is water in a liquid state with a volume similar to that of the Great Lakes of North America, according to a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin (United States). The finding has been published in Nature and would be a "significant" step in the search for life outside Earth, according to experts.
The asteroid 2005 YU55, which was once classified as a threat to Earth, will pass 324,600 kilometers from the planet on November 8. According to experts, there is no danger of collision, however, being a distance shorter than the orbit of the Moon, NASA will follow the trajectory of the body until it moves away.
A team of astronomers has detected for the first time around a nascent solar system an extensive cloud of water vapor cool enough to form comets that could deposit oceans on dry planets. It lies within the planet-forming disk surrounding the star TW Hydrae, 176 light-years away in the constellation Hydra, and contains volumes of water equivalent to thousands of Earth's oceans.
Scientists from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have announced that the ROSAT satellite, which weighs 2.4 tons, will fall to Earth over the next week without the possibility of directing its re-entry into the atmosphere.
NASA has recorded an unprecedented decrease in Earth's protective ozone layer over the Arctic this past winter and spring, caused by an unusually long period of extremely low temperatures in the stratosphere.
Scientists from NASA and ESA traveled to a desert near Flagstaff, in Arizona, United States, to simulate what it would be like to explore an asteroid. Since 1999, scientists, astronauts and engineers from different universities and NASA centers have come together once a year in this place to simulate manned missions to the Moon and Mars.
Danni Büchner is invited to Sam Dylan's Halloween party. But the "Goodbye Germany" emigrant has no desire for many other party guests. And find clear words.
