Black holes are not only gravitationally attractive: they also capture people’s attention. Just mention these two words in a course of elementary astronomy or in a public conference and you will find most eyes wide open. Even though they are common in observational astronomy, their singular physics and their fantastic dimensions makes them earn a […]
Our satellite is a magnificent spectacle in the sky. Considering its size, it is only surpassed by the biggest moons of Jupiter and Saturn, in spite of the fact that the giant planets are hundreds of times bigger than the Earth. Relative to its parent body, it is by large the largest satellite in the […]
Climate change due to global warming is usually presented as the Nemesis of our civilization. Day by day, evidences supporting temperature and sea level raise are presented. Numerical models point that CO2 concentration will lead to a new climate not very human friendly in what can be taken as the fastest ever climate change. Still […]
Galileo Galilei was the first person to see rings around a planet. He was unable to understand the image in the eyepiece of his simple, though revolutionary, telescope. Was it a triple planet? Were it handles? Much to his surprise, the unfathomable shape of Saturn changed as years went by. It took some decades to […]
Comets are one of the key components of our Solar System, at least for the Earth’s evolution and humankind point of view. While the inner region of our system was depleted in volatiles due to the high temperatures close to the Sun, the left overs in the outer borders retained water and other condensables in […]
Can you name a polygonal feature in any of the Solar System atmospheres? None? Up to our current knowledge there is only one: Saturn’s Hexagon. Not only it is the one and only of its kind but it is also the longest-lived planetary-scale atmospheric feature in any planet. A recent paper by Agustín Sánchez-Lavega and […]
Supernovae are one of the most fascinating events in stellar astrophysics. Most stars suffer explosions at some point of their last days but the most massive ones explode releasing incredible amounts of energy and rivaling in brightness with the rest of the galaxy they live in. What they leave behind is hydrogen enriched with materials […]
Curiosity has been studying the surface of Mars since its landing on August 6, 2012, at Gale Crater. One of its primary goals was to determine Mar’s habitability, present or past, as written in the geology of the red planet. For doing so, and after not a little debate, the landing site was selected to […]
Ceres was discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi in the very first day of the XIX century somewhere between Mars and Jupiter orbits. It was once considered the biggest asteroid in the Solar System but the 2006 Pluto demotion resulted in an upgrade of Ceres into the newly created dwarf-planet category, in which it became the smallest […]
As a child I was told that Earth’s atmosphere has a number of layers: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, ionosphere and exosphere (hope I have not forgotten anything in the list!). This looked much like an onion and, to be honest, the taxonomic subtleties did not make much sense to me at that point. Aside from […]