There have been a few really cool astronomy stories over the past few days.
First we have Japan landing rovers onto an asteroid. I know some people might say “oh, big deal, didn’t we already do that?” Well…no. Armageddon was not a documentary. The European Space Agency landed on a comet a few years ago (more on that in a second). This is exciting for a variety of reasons: I mean, first of all, it has to be incredibly difficult to land anything on an asteroid or comet (small target, moving, etc) and secondly, this is an old asteroid, which can give us some insight about the beginning of the solar system.
Speaking of Comet 67P, the ESA released a photo the other day of what it looks like standing on the comet. The image is created from a combination of a few images snapped by Rosetta’s cameras.
I was a bit surprised by the contours and actual terrain found on a comet. I envisioned something more rounded, I have no clue why, but that is just what I pictured. I believe the ESA said that the landscape does change as the comet approaches the sun (I guess a cliff collapsed).
What excites me about these two stories is that space interest seems to be increasing every year. We have ESA, JAXA (Japanese space agency), IRSO (India’s space program), and a few private groups making the news just about every week. I feel like it is an exciting time to be a space enthusiast.
The coolest story was the possible discovery of the first exomoon. What was crazy about the discovery is that the planet is a huge gas giant, but the moon would also be pretty big. For scale, imagine Jupiter with a moon the size of Neptune. There have to be crazy effects happening with this system. Astronomers have already observed that the planet transits faster than it should, which they theorized has to be from a gravitational tug.
All of this stuff is so damn cool!
