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Second-Gen Planet, Mars Water Cycles & a 390M-Year Hidden Crater
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Astronomers have detected a gas giant that may have formed from a dead star's ashes — and Perseverance just rewrote the story of Martian water. Today's briefing covers five stories spanning white dwarf planets, Mars cycles, a military launch scrub, an amateur crater find, and Milky Way formation simulations.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Astronomers may have just found a planet that shouldn't exist. A gas giant candidate has been detected orbiting a white dwarf, a dead star, roughly two hundred seventy light-years away.
Shifting to Mars. Perseverance has been working the Margin Unit of Jezero Crater, and the results are reshaping how scientists read the planet's early history.
On the launch side, SpaceX had a difficult start to the week. A Falcon 9 carrying twenty-one Northrop Grumman military data-transport satellites auto-aborted on its first attempt, then again on a second.
A more grounded discovery. An amateur astronomer in Quebec named Joël Lapointe identified a previously unknown impact crater using satellite imagery.
Finally, new simulations called MEGATRON have produced the most detailed reconstruction yet of the Milky Way's early formation. The picture is turbulent.
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