Top solar image by Peter Lawrence. Bottom solar image by C. Miller and J. Stetson. [SpaceWeather]

[TrES]
[Space Weather]

Crowning a moon champion ain't as easy as it seems when Saturn alone has 59 of them. Fortunately the field got smaller when we considered five key points all moons should have on their resumes. It may be hard to stomach having Charon up there — it's questionable that it's even a moon — but someone had to be the goat.

And now, the winners in the individual categories:

BEST FEATURE NAME: Despite tons of creative feature names, Europa wins by a wide margin with Rathmore Chaos. It sounds like a level of Hell from Dante's Inferno, but like most of the outer system, the Chaos is a cold place. In fact it's a jumble of broken up ice that's evidence of the moon's active ice tectonics...and maybe a liquid water ocean below.

POTENTIAL FOR COLONIZATION: Phobos gave Earth's Luna a run for it's money; it's low gravity and proximity to the Red Planet make it worthy of it's full score. But in the end the deck's stacked against the Martian moon — the stated goal for NASA's next generation of manned spaceflight is to return to the moon...to stay.

ACTIVE GEOLOGY: This is a toughy. Uranus' moon Miranda doesn't have active geology, but scientists speculate that the whole moon may have been obliterated by impacts, then reassembled itself. You know, like T-1000 in Terminator 2. Charon, Triton, and Enceladus all look like they've got actively erupting cryovolcanoes of frigid ammonia, water, or liquid nitrogen which is cool, but it knocks Titan down a notch in uniqueness. Jupiter's Io wins for it's self sacrifice though; riddled with volcanoes, the firey moon is literally gutting itself, spewing 1 ton of sulfur dioxide into space every second.

MOVIE/BOOK: The hands-down winner is Earth's Moon, which has been in books and movies since the art forms were invented. It's hardly a fair fight, so the prize goes to Jupiter's Ganymede. The largest moon in the solar system (that's right, bigger than Titan!), it haunts tons of Philip K. Dick's books.

POTENTIAL FOR LIFE: Cryovolcanoes are going off all over the solar system's icy moons, and where there are volcanoes, there's liquid. Most of the liquid is in the form of methane, ammonia, nitrogen, or some other substance that Earth-life wouldn't want to swim in, but who knows what sort of strange aliens could be out there?

That said, Europa's icy shell is made of old-fashioned H2O, and features like Rathmore Chaos look a lot like shifting pack ice here on Earth, which floats on a big ocean of salty water, which in turn contains tons of critters. There's a good chance the same is true on Europa, meaning....

the prize for THE OVERALL AWESOMEST MOON IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM goes to EUROPA!!! Honorable mention to TItan for a strong showing, but it just goes to show...don't mess with the moon with the water oceans under the ice!

Sources: Lunar and Planetary Institute

The Cascadia Astrobiology Institute

Science Direct

WIkipedia

The Nine Planets Solar System Tour

According to a release from NASA:

"We found a clock that ticks slower and slower, and when it slows down too much, boom! The bomb explodes," says lead author Diego Altamirano of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

The bursts occur on a neutron star, which is the collapsed remnant of a massive star that exploded in a supernova. The neutron star belongs to a binary system that can be described as a ticking time bomb. Hydrogen and helium gas from a companion star spirals onto the neutron star, slowly accumulating on its surface until it heats up to a critical temperature. Suddenly, the hydrogen and helium begin to fuse uncontrollably into heavier elements, igniting a thermonuclear flame that quickly spreads around the entire star. The resulting explosion appears as a bright flash of X-rays.

These bursts, which can occur several times per day from the same neutron star, release more energy in just 10 to 100 seconds than our Sun radiates in an entire week. Put another way, the energy is equivalent to 100 fifteen-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding simultaneously over each postage-stamp-size patch of the neutron star's surface.

NASA satellite pins down time of explosions [Eurekalert]

In the Godzilla mythos, King Ghidora was an alien creature that came to Earth from Venus, where it had wiped out all civilization. This was only the latest of many civilizations destroyed by the space dragon, who would go on to become Godzilla's arch-nemesis and Annalee's avatar. But even if the PLANET C orbiter fails to find any kaiju, it will still be a landmark mission that will teach us a great deal about Venus' weather and surface.

By using several cameras and measuring the temperature in the atmosphere, the orbiter will be able to differentiate clouds from surface features, resulting in accurate photos of the planet below. If you speak Japanese and happen to have a planetary probe gathering dust in your garage, you can even apply to send a microprobe piggy-backed onto the PLANET C mission. Image by: JAXA.

Developing a high-performance detector for seeing through the real surface of Venus. [JAXA]

Images from the Hubble Space Telescope. [Bad Astronomy]

Here's a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope, which reveals that a black hole 40,000 times the mass of our own sun may be at the center of Omega Centauri. (That's intermediate size for a black hole, and these findings are important proof that black holes come in all sizes.) You can see the increased brightness from stars bunching up around the center of the cluster, drawn by the gravitational pull of the black hole. This ancient star cluster, one of 200 in or near our galaxy, is 17,000 light years from Earth.

Images by Spitzer Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope.

1. Titan is the only moon with a thick, stable atmosphere. It's mostly made of nitrogen, with a decent helping of methane and other hydrocarbons. It's not exactly a breathable atmosphere, but it's still pretty cool. Even better, Titan has Earth-like weather. Wind and rain sweep the surface of Titan, shaping its geography and producing seasonal effects. Some scientists say Titan is a lot like a young Earth, only much colder.

2. Titan has dune seas. As much as 40 percent of the equatorial region might be covered by "sand" dunes hundreds of meters high. They probably aren't made of silicate particles the way Earth sand is. Rather, Titan's sand could be precipitated from the atmosphere. The dunes are sort of like semi-permanent snow drifts.

3. Titan has cryovolcanoes. There are mountains on Titan, along with evidence of volcanic activity. The interior of Titan probably doesn't support the same kind of heat and pressure that we find within the Earth. Instead, Titan's volcanoes might be the result of highly pressurized ice fracturing and spewing liquid water and ammonia into the atmosphere.

4. Titan has liquid features on the surface, like the hydrocarbon lakes pictured in the computer rendering above. Earlier Cassini data found proof of methane lakes in Titan's polar regions. Even more interesting, there might be an entire ocean lying beneath Titan's surface. This leads us to the best reason that Titan is awesome...

5. Titan might be our best bet for finding extraterrestrial life within our solar system. If the subsurface ocean exists, it would be made of liquid water and ammonia and would be warmer than the surface. The chemical makeup of the atmosphere and the active weather and geology have lead some scientists to propose that the conditions on Titan are right for the formation of primitive life. That's exciting. Image by Steven Hobbs via NASA.

These composite images, including data from the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array, give new insight into how stars can appear in a galaxy's backwoods. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer is an ultraviolet survey telescope. Its observations, shown here in blue and green, highlight the galaxy's farthest-flung clusters of young stars up to 140,000 light-years from its center. The Very Large Array observations show the radio emission in red. Images by NASA. [Galex]

Because of the immense atmospheric pressure on Venus (more than 90 times higher than sea level Earth air pressure), it's unlikely that a volcano there would erupt explosively. However, it could emit sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere as liquid lava flows down the volcano's flank. The Venus Express looks at the sun through Venus' atmosphere, then uses spectroscopy to identify the chemicals there. It observed a more than 60 percent drop in sulfur dioxide levels over just a few days, strong evidence of an intermittent source of that gas. ESA scientists want to use more spectroscopy to spot a tell-tale gas plume, or infrared sensors to find volcanic hot spots. Photo by NASA.

Search For Active Volcanoes On Venus In High Gear. [Science Daily]

Using the Extreme-Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph mounted on the Hinode spacecraft, astronomers pinpointed the pressure fluctuations in the immense magnetic fields that send the gases spewing out into the sun's corona. In a press release, Dr. Michelle Murray of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London had this to say:

When a new section of magnetic field pushes through the solar surface it generates a continual cycle of fountains, but new magnetic fields are constantly emerging across the whole of the solar surface and so our results can explain a whole multitude of fountains that have been observed with Hinode.

New Views On The Sun's Startling Magnetic Fountains. [Science Daily]

Earlier this week I pondered whether dark energy is just a new version of an outdated theory, but a team of astronomers in Antarctica is doing the hard work of trying to find out. The South Pole Telescope (SPT) uses 1,000 advanced optical sensors to peer at distant galaxy clusters looking for subtle variations in the cosmic background radiation. Those variations will give scientists a better idea of the structure of the universe, and whether or not dark energy is part of it.

The SPT is the largest Antarctic telescope. Despite the frigid cold of the region, the optics are further shielded from background heat by being chilled to a temperature not far from absolute zero. Photo by: The University of Chicago.

Cosmologists Probe Mystery Of Dark Energy With South Pole Telescope. [Science Daily]

Minton, who already created vector maps of the islands in this sea, writes:

I went ahead and digitized the shoreline of the unnamed methane sea . . . It is one of the largest bodies of liquid known to exist on this moon of Saturn. This body of liquid methane, ethane and nitrogen is about the size of Lake Superior.

The orange opacity of Titan's atmosphere makes the moon appear bigger than it actually is - astronomers have since distinguished between permanent cloud cover and surface, and downgraded it from the first- to the second-largest moon in our system, after Jupiter's satellite Ganymede.

Not until the flyby, in 2004, of the Cassini-Huygens mission could scientists confirm the speculation, first ignited by both Voyager missions and then heightened by Hubble observations, that Titan is the only heavenly body (save Earth) to contain large liquid surfaces - or seas, as non-astronomers would call them. For they seem a bit too small to be labelled oceans.

These seas, or lakes, most probably consisting of methane or another hydrocarbon, can be seen on this page of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

EVS-Islands [via Strange Maps]

Scientists began to suspect a global ocean when they saw some landmarks on Titan had shifted up to 19 miles between October 2004 and May 2007. The best explanation is a vast ocean, separating the planet's icy crust from its rocky center. The Cassini Space probe will fly within 620 miles of Titan, sample the atmosphere, and take pictures of the site where the Huygens probe landed.

At least we can console ourselves with this artist's rendering of what it would look like to be zooming through Enceladus' plumes if they were visible to the naked eye.

Cassini probe failed to 'taste' moon's geysers in flyby [New Scientist]

Images by NASA/JPL. [Science Daily]

The Large Binocular Telescope, in Arizona, combines the light from two 28-foot primary mirrors to create the resolution of a single 75-foot telescope. [Large Binocular Telescope]

[Hyakutake 1957]

The whole picture occupies a space of 100 million light years and this computer simulation "paints" the densest areas red. The yellow lines show the intensity of the galaxies' velocities as they fall into the highest-density area. The speed of the galaxies' rush towards the center of the structure depends on the the balance between dark matter, dark energy and the overall expansion of the universe. Astronomers are learning how to measure this "infall pattern" by using a large survey of galaxies at different epochs. [European Southern Observatory]

NASA administrator Doug Cooke says, "We now know the south pole has peaks as high as Mt. McKinley and crater floors four times deeper than the Grand Canyon." So your Moon condos could have beautiful mountain top views, or lie snuggled at the base of a sweeping canyon. Plus, there are more advantages, according to NASA:

The location has many advantages; for one thing, there is evidence of water frozen in deep dark south polar craters. Water can be split into oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to burn as rocket fuel—or astronauts could simply drink it. Planners are also looking for "peaks of eternal light." Tall polar mountains where the sun never sets might be a good place for a solar power station.

New Radar Maps of the Moon [NASA]

[Hubblesite]

Above, you can see Titan's dunes. Below, there are dunes from an Earth desert. The sand formations are remarkably similar. Images via NASA.

This is the "fan" filled with stair-like formations: The scientists figured out that it was caused by gushing liquid by setting up an experiment on Earth where they recreated the "gushing water" conditions in a sand bed and observed the structures the water carved out. Here's the Earth experiment: Images via ESA, NY Times, and Reuters.

Research Explains Origin of Martian Fans [NY Times]

I love this picture because I'm just finishing up John Varley's new novel Rolling Thunder (due out in March), which is partly set on Europa. The main character has a view of Jupiter from her window in the habitat where she lives on Europa. Image via NASA.

And finally, here's a nice image for getting some perspective on where the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud are relative to the rest of the solar system. Image via NASA.

Top image via Calvin J. Hamilton.

What makes these photos art is the fact that humans have altered them, argues the Museum's Gary Vikan in a Baltimore Sun op-ed:

These photos of outer space, like all photographs in art museum exhibitions, earn their public display precisely because of the creative interventions of a talented human being. In the case of the Hubble, our visitors soon come to realize that the data from which these images are created are not visual but numerical, and that you and I could never "see" the Cat's Eye Nebula the way its photo shows it, even if a rocket could somehow propel us to its near neighborhood some 3,000 light-years away. Why? Because the radiation emitted by the nebula and given visual expression in the photographic print is substantially outside the boundaries of human sight.

The gravity from this cluster of galaxies forms a natural "zoom lens" that lets astronomers view a galaxy that formed just 700 million years after the Big Bang. You can just about glimpse the galaxy A1689-zD1 on the right side of the picture, inside the box. It's one of the youngest and brightest galaxies we've ever seen, formed during the cosmic "dark ages." Researchers believe the dark ages, when stars and galaxies started to form, lasted from 400,000 years to a billion years after the Big Bang — and this new discovery may have been one of the galaxies that helped end that era. [Spitzer Space Telescope]

Images from NASA/ISS. [SpaceWeather]

This one comes from photographer John Nassr in Baguio, Philippines.

[Special note to Moff and Blakeley: Just try making dick jokes about this picture! It can't be done!] Image courtesy of NASA/JHUAPL/CIW NASA Spots Mystery Spider Scar [Space.com]