On Monday morning, SpaceX launched one of its reusable rockets from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying 60 satellites into space at once. It was the second payload of Starlink, its planned constellation of tens of thousands of orbiting transmitters to beam internet service across the globe.
It’s time to add one more tiny moon to Neptune’s icy family tree. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spied a previously undetected satellite around the solar system’s eighth planet, bringing its total number to 14.
They were intentionally saved for a time when more advanced technology would allow planetary scientists on Earth to delve deeper into the moon’s mysteries.
The discovery, formally reported Wednesday in Nature<em>,</em>is a reminder that there is much more to be found in our own backyard, with implications for our understanding of worlds around other stars in our galaxy.
In the mid-19th century, the north magnetic pole floated much farther south, roaming around Canada. For the past 150 years, however, the pole has been sprinting away from Canada and toward Siberia.
The change in distance occurs because our planet’s orbit is stretched into an ellipse — so Earth snuggles up to the Sun every January and dips farther out into the outer solar system every July, at a point known as aphelion.
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