Image: NASA

Saturn’s rings are such a spectacle that you can see them through even a modest telescope. Made mostly of water ice, the rings contain countless particles, large and small, that orbit the planet in a thin plane. For decades scientists have known that gravitational tugs from Saturn’s many moons imprint patterns on the rings. Now they have discovered a new ring sculptor: oscillations of the planet itself, which promise insight into the interior of the solar system’s second-largest planet.

The discovery came about because of a close inspection of Saturn’s rings. From outermost to innermost, the three main rings are named A, B and C. In 1980, when the Voyager 1 spacecraft flew past, it found grooves in each ring that resemble those on a vinyl record. The gravitational pulls of Saturn’s moons make waves, mostly in the A ring, because that’s the one closest to the moons.

In 1991, however, Paul Rosen, then at Stanford University, and his colleagues used Voyager data to discover waves in the C ring, the one nearest the planet. Although the moons accounted for some of these waves, no one knew what caused the others.

via Saturn Is Shaking Its Rings: Scientific American.

On May 12, 2013, the sun emitted a significant solar flare, peaking at 10 p.m. EDT. This flare is classified as an X1.7, making it the first X-class flare of 2013. The flare was also associated with another solar phenomenon, called a coronal mass ejection (CME) that can send solar material out into space. This CME was not Earth-directed.

Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however — when intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This disrupts the radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing – the radio blackout associated with this flare has since subsided.

via NASA – First X-Class Solar Flares of 2013.

Giant spiral galaxies such as Andromeda and the Milky Way outshine and outweigh most of their galactic peers. They grew so large both by swallowing lesser galaxies and by grabbing gas from the space around them. New observations of exotic “tadpole” galaxies are shedding light on how the Milky Way assembled its most luminous component: the starry disk that is home to the sun and Earth.

First spotted in the 1990s, tadpole galaxies sport bright heads, which spawn brilliant new stars, and long, faint tails. Most tadpoles are billions of light-years distant, meaning they were more common when the universe was young. From such great distances, though, studying the odd galaxies is difficult.

Thus, Jorge Sánchez Almeida of the Astrophysics Institute of the Canary Islands and his colleagues scrutinized seven rare tadpoles that happen to lie much closer, within 600 million light-years of Earth. Analyzing light from telescopes on the island of La Palma, the astronomers determined the speeds of different parts of each galaxy, demonstrating that most of the tadpoles rotate, just as the disks of spiral galaxies do.

via “Tadpole” Galaxies Offer Snapshots of the Milky Way’s Youth: Scientific American.