NASA has announced that after nearly a half-century of studying the outer reaches of the Solar System—and beyond—the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes will be shut down over the course of the next few years. Although both probes are still functioning perfectly, their nuclear fuel is expected toread more
To say the environment on the surface of Venus is extreme might be viewed as an understatement by some: the hottest planet in the Solar System’s air cooks at a scorching 462ºC (864ºF), under crushing atmospheric pressure that is 92 times greater than Earth’s — and that’s not counting the corrosive effects of the sulphuric acid lacing the clouds. The result is an environment that severely limits the lifespan of manmade probes sent there, that are typically measured in timescales of mere hours, as opposed to the years-long missions enjoyed by Mars rovers.
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The more we study it, the universe continues to become curiouser and curiouser, and the last few weeks have been no exception: X marks the center of the galaxy; one of Saturn’s rings was broken; and NASA plans to destroy Juno space probe — to protect aliens?
Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute and the University of Toronto have verified the existence of an extremely large X-shaped arrangement of stars at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a structure that was hinted at by previous observations of other galaxies and computer models. From Earth’s point of view, the galaxy’s central bulge of millions of stars looks like a peanut shape, with the X-structure being an integral part of this.
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