Astro Wonders

2021-05-16 10:31:00 The New Horizons mission is helping us understand worlds at the edge of our solar system by making the first reconnaissance of the dwarf planet Pluto and by venturing deeper into the distant, mysterious Kuiper Belt – a relic of solar system formation.

The Journey

New Horizons launched on Jan. 19, 2006; it swung past Jupiter for a gravity boost and scientific studies in February 2007, and will conduct a five-month-long reconnaissance flyby study of Pluto and its moons in summer 2015. Pluto closest approach is scheduled for July 14, 2015. As part of an extended mission, the spacecraft is expected to head farther into the Kuiper Belt to examine one or two of the ancient, icy mini-worlds in that vast region, at least a billion miles beyond Neptune’s orbit.

Sending a spacecraft on this long journey will help us answer basic questions about the surface properties, geology, interior makeup and atmospheres on these bodies. Open / Comment

2021-05-16 10:30:01 Open / Comment

2021-05-16 05:45:23 Earth was originally born as a twin to the planet Theia, which was about half as wide as Earth and roughly the size of Mars. The two planets shared an orbit for several million years until they collided. Earth absorbed Theia, and the remaining debris eventually coagulated into Earth’s moon. The mass donated by Theia gave Earth the gravity necessary to sustain a substantial atmosphere.

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2021-05-15 20:34:58 China becomes only second nation in history to land a rover on Mars.

After several months orbiting Mars, a Chinese rover successfully touched down on the Martian surface Friday, making China the second nation, after the United States, to achieve a soft landing on the red planet.

The rover, named Zhurong after the Chinese god of fire, is part of China's Tianwen-1 mission, which launched in July 2020. The landing is a major milestone for China's space agency, which has advanced rapidly in just a few decades.

The video is the simulation of the whole mission of Tianwen 1 rover!!

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2021-05-15 15:30:01 The Higgs Boson(God Particle)

The Higgs boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, a field that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks.

In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, no electric charge, and no colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately.

The Higgs is the particle which gives other particles their mass, making it both centrally important and seemingly . Physicists believe that, without the Higgs Field, mass wouldn't exist.

Scientists confirmed its existence in 2012 through the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland. This discovery led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to Peter Higgs and François Englert.

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2021-05-15 10:30:00 Happy International Astronomy Day

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2021-05-15 09:24:21 Open / Comment