Exploration of the gas giants

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New evidence found for Planet 9
https://phys.org/news/2024-04-evidence-planet.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A small team of planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Université Côte d'Azur and Southwest Research Institute reports possible new evidence of Planet 9. They have published their paper on the arXiv preprint server, and it has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

In 2015, a pair of astronomers at Caltech found several objects bunched together beyond Neptune's orbit, near the edge of the solar system. The bunching, they theorized, was due to the pull of gravity from an unknown planet—one that later came to be called Planet 9.

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NASA's Juno Probe Reveals Glass-Like Surface of Io's Giant Lava Lake
Loki Patera is a prominent feature of Io, but you've never seen it like this.
By Ryan Whitwam April 24, 2024

NASA's Juno spacecraft was dispatched on a mission in 2011 to study the planet Jupiter. It has beamed back some truly stunning images and valuable data on the solar system's largest planet. While in the neighborhood, Juno also took a closer look at some of the larger Jovian moons. The mission's most recent triumph is a close-up view of the volcanic moon Io, depicting lakes of lava as smooth as glass.

Technically, the images you've seen around the internet are not real photos of the surface, but they're based on data from the probe's recent flybys of Io. These artist impressions of the moon's lava lakes came from data Juno acquired on its recent low-altitude passes in December 2023 and February 2024. The probe passed within 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the surface during those flybys.

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