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NASA's Lucy probe is set to fly on April 20, 2025

NASA's Lucy probe is scheduled to make a significant flyby of the asteroid Donaldjohanson on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025. Here are some detailed aspects of this mission: Mission Objectives: The Lucy mission aims to study the Trojan asteroids, which are believed to be remnants from the early solar system. By examining these asteroids, scientists hope to gain insights into the formation and evolution of the solar system. Asteroid Donaldjohanson: Named after paleontologist Donald Johanson, who discovered the famous Australopithecus fossil "Lucy," this asteroid orbits the Sun in a region known as the L4 Trojan camp, situated ahead of Jupiter in its orbit. It is one of the many Trojan asteroids that are thought to contain primitive materials. Flyby Details: During the flyby, Lucy will use its suite of scientific instruments to gather data about Donaldjohanson's surface composition, geology, and morphology. The close encounter will allow for high-resolution im...

The stellar nurseries of distant galaxies

Star clusters are formed by the condensation of molecular clouds, masses of cold, dense gas that are found in every galaxy. The physical properties of these clouds in our own galaxy and nearby galaxies have been known for a long time. But are they identical in distant galaxies that are more than 8 billion light-years away? For the first time, an international team led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has been able to detect molecular clouds in a Milky Way progenitor, thanks to the unprecedented spatial resolution achieved in such a distant galaxy. These observations, published in Nature Astronomy, show that the distant clouds have a higher mass, density and internal turbulence than the clouds hosted in nearby galaxies and that they produce far more stars. The astronomers attribute these differences to the ambient interstellar conditions in distant galaxies, which are too extreme for the molecular clouds typical of nearby galaxies to survive.

from Astronomy News - Space News, Exploration News, Earth Science News, Earth Science https://ift.tt/2Lx7qKe

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