It spans the whole spectrum.
A slow-burning politically charged science fiction dark comedy-thriller
Saturn reclaims 'moon king' title with 62 newfound satellites, bringing total to 145
May 11, 2023
Astronomers have discovered 62 new moons orbiting the ringed planet Saturn.
The satellite haul brings the planet's total number of moons to over 100 and also means the gas giant takes back the crown as the solar system's "moon king" from Jupiter.
Prior to this discovery, Saturn had 83 moons recognized by the International Astronomical Union(opens in new tab), so the new batch brings the total number to an incredible 145. The discovery marks another milestone for Saturn, with the planet becoming the first world in the cosmos known to be orbited by more than 100 moons.
The new moons were discovered by a team led by Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, who used a technique called "shift and stack" to find these smaller and fainter moons around Saturn.
The technique uses a set of images shifting at the same speed at which a moon moves through the sky to enhance the signal from that moon. Moons that are too faint to be seen in single images can reveal themselves in the resultant "stacked image."
Astronomers have used this method to search for moons around the ice giants Neptune and Uranus, but this is the first time it has been applied to the solar system's second-largest planet, Saturn.
The data used by the team was collected between 2019 and 2021 in three-hour spans by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on top of Maunakea in Hawaii. It allowed the astronomers to detect moons around Saturn as small as 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) in diameter. That's about two-thirds the length of Hollywood's Walk of Fame.
Though some of the moons had been spotted as early as 2019, it takes more than sighting an object close to a planet to confirm it is a moon and not an asteroid making a brief close passage to that planet. To change these objects from "suspected moons" to "confirmed moons" of Saturn, the astronomers had to track them for several years to ensure each is actually orbiting the gas giant.
Performing a painstaking process of matching objects detected on different nights over the course of 24 months, the team tracked 63 objects that they ended up confirming as moons. One of these satellites was revealed back in 2021, with the remaining 62 moons gradually announced over the past few weeks.
"Tracking these moons makes me recall playing the kid's game Dot-to-Dot, because we have to connect the various appearances of these moons in our data with a viable orbit," Ashton said in a statement(opens in new tab). "But with about 100 different games on the same page, and you don't know which dot belongs to which puzzle."
Saturn's irregular moons may have a violent history
The newly discovered moons of Saturn are classified as "irregular moons." This term refers to objects that are believed to have been captured by a planet's gravitational influence and end up orbiting it on large, flattened or "elliptical" paths that are more inclined in comparison to the orbits of regular moons.
Saturn now has 121 known irregular moons along with its 24 regular moons. Irregular moons like these new ones tend to bunch up in groupings depending on the tilt of their orbits. Saturn's system currently hosts three of these groupings — the Inuit group, the Gallic group and the densely populated Norse group, all of which take their names from different mythologies.
All of the newfound moons of Saturn fall into one of these three currently existing groupings. Three of the new moons belong to the Inuit group, but the majority fit in the Norse group.
The moons in these three groups are believed to have been created when larger moons around Saturn originally captured by the gas giant slammed together and fragmented. Investigating the orbits of Saturn's irregular moons could help astronomers better understand the history of such collisions in the gas giant system.
The team behind the new discovery thinks that the large number of tiny moons in a retrograde orbit around Saturn (that is, opposite in direction to the planet's orbit) is evidence of a collision between irregular moons around the gas giant as recently as 100 million years ago. This collision is believed to have created the moons in the Norse group.
"As one pushes to the limit of modern telescopes, we are finding increasing evidence that a moderate-sized moon orbiting backward around Saturn was blown apart something like 100 million years ago," team member and University of British Columbia astronomer Brett Gladman said in the same statement.
Jupiter leap-frogged Saturn for the moon crown in February 2023 when 12 new moons were found around the solar system's largest planet, bringing the total number of known Jovian moons to 92.
https://www.space.com/saturn-moon-king-62-newfound-satellites
https://phas.ubc.ca/saturn-re-takes-moon-crown
FBI Searches NASA Scientist's Home in Missing Student Case
May 12, 2023
A NASA scientist's home has been searched by the FBI in relation to a missing-person case from the 1990s, with nearly a dozen bags of evidence removed from the house.
The house in Redwood City, California, belongs to Thomas Pressburger, who is a computer scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center.
"Basically, we took a look back into the case and opened up the cold-case investigation and that's why we're out here today," Lt. Peter Lotti, a spokesperson for the Belmont Police Department, said in a video posted by local broadcaster KTVU. "And really our ultimate goal is to bring closure to the case."
The search was carried out on Wednesday at the house and in a nearby park, reopening the cold case of the disappearance of Ylva Hagner, who went missing in October 1996, then aged 42.
Hagner, a Swedish national, worked at a software company and attended the Stanford Continuing Studies program. She was last seen at work in Belmont—5 miles north of Redwood City—on October 14, 1996.
Her car was found in San Carlos four days later with the keys in the ignition, but she could not be located, and her disappearance was considered suspicious. San Carlos is situated between Belmont and Redwood City.
"We have nothing to show that she was kidnapped, we can't find any signs of a struggle or anything like that, so all we can say at this point is it's a disappearance under extremely suspicious circumstances," said Belmont Police Department Commander Larry Riche in 1996.
Now, however, Belmont police, the FBI, and the San Mateo County Sheriff's office have all been involved in the search of Pressburger's house.
According to a report in the Chronicle Peninsula Bureau at the time, Pressburger was Hagner's boyfriend during that period, and had been questioned by police during the initial investigation.
ABC7 reported that the police were specifically interested in a brick patio in the backyard of the home, initially removing bricks and scanning the ground. Police then brought in excavation equipment and dug up that section of the yard.
"Hopefully they find something and figure it out," Annie Norgaard, a neighbor, told ABC7. "The Nextdoor app was buzzing all day. It is usually quiet here but of course we saw all the police and helicopters here today."
Belmont police told ABC7 that the search of the property was now complete, and that they were planning to release new information in the coming days.
https://www.newsweek.com/nasa-scientist-cold-case-fbi-investigation-1799942
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/author/37295375900
Didn't realize we were this far down, will repost