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GG 05.05.05
GG 05.05.05
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Scientists have obtained new insight into the unique power source
for many of Jupiter's auroras, the most spectacular and active
auroras in the Solar System. Extended monitoring of the giant planet
with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory detected the presence of
highly charged particles crashing into the atmosphere above its
poles.
"Spacecraft have not explored the region above the poles of Jupiter,
so X-ray observations provide one of the few ways to probe that
environment," said Ron Elsner of the NASA Marshall Space Flight
Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and lead author on a recently
published paper describing these results in the Journal for
Geophysical Research. "These results will help scientists to
understand the mechanism for the power output from Jupiter's
auroras, which are a thousand times more powerful than those on
Earth."
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http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/pr0510.html
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The iron meteorite that blasted out Meteor Crater almost 50,000
years ago was traveling much slower than has been assumed,
University of Arizona Regents' Professor H. Jay Melosh and Gareth
Collins of the Imperial College London report in the cover article
of Nature (March 10).
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But it's too slow to have melted much of the white Coconino
formation in northern Arizona, solving a mystery that's stumped
researchers for years.
Scientists have tried to explain why there's not more melted rock
at the crater by theorizing that water in the target rocks
vaporized on impact, dispersing the melted rock into tiny droplets
in the process. Or they've theorized that carbonates in the target
rock exploded, vaporizing into carbon dioxide.
"Even though iron is very strong, the meteorite had probably been
cracked from collisions in space," Melosh said. "The weakened
pieces began to come apart and shower down from about
eight-and-a-half miles (14 km) high. And as they came apart,
atmospheric drag slowed them down, increasing the forces that
crushed them so that they crumbled and slowed more."
Melosh and Collins began analyzing the Meteor Crater impact after
running the numbers in their Web-based "impact effects" calculator,
an online program they developed for the general public. The
program tells users how an asteroid or comet collision will affect
a particular location on Earth by calculating several environmental
consequences of the impact. The program is online at
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects
On Friday 8 April, Dr. Isobel Hook of Oxford University told the RAS
National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham about the compelling
scientific case for Extremely Large Telescopes which has been
developed at a series of meetings over the past four years. The
results of this evaluation process, which involved more than 100
astronomers, have recently been published, coinciding with the start
of the European Extremely Large Telescope Design Study. (See Web
details at the end of this release).
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