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"I want to know why the universe exist, why there is something greater than nothing."
Steven Hawking
Scientist, Space Lover
What has happened to Comet Lemmon's tail? The answer is blowing in the wind — the wind from the Sun in this case. This continuous outflow of charged particles from the Sun has been quite variable of late, as the Sun emits bursts of energy, CMEs, that push out and deflect charged particles emitted by the comet itself. The result is a blue hued ion tail for Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) that is not only impressively intricate but takes some unusual turns. This long-duration composite image taken from Alfacar, Spain last month captured this inner Solar System ionic tumult. Comet Lemmon is now fading as it heads out away from the Earth and Sun and back into the outer Solar System.
What caused the pits, ridges, and gullies on otherwise smooth Martian terrain? One hypothesis is water. The lack of craters at this mid-latitude location indicates that the terrain is quite young by geological standards, perhaps only 100,000 years old. Were the terrain since saturated by water ice, that ice would soon evaporate into the thin Martian air. Left over, however, might be fragile cake-like sand that can be broken up by wind into pits and ridges. Consequences of this hypothesis include that even the Martian equator undergoes epochs of relative wet and dry, and that future spacefarers might be able to find water (ice) in a relatively mild climate near the Martian equator. Pictured above is young-ridged terrain that also shows evidence of a downhill flow.
An analemma is that figure-8 curve that you get when you mark the position of the Sun at the same time each day throughout planet Earth's year. Above, 26 separate exposures were recorded to illustrate the regular solar motion -- a difficult project performed mostly during the calendar year 2006. The images were taken at 8 am in the morning in northern New Jersey, USA, and digitally combined with a single foreground image later. The individual images have since been combined into a movie. Solstices correspond to the top and bottom of the figure-8, indicating the northern and southernmost excursions of the Sun in the sky. The tilt of planet Earth's axis and the variation in speed as it moves around its orbit combine to produce the graceful analemma curve.
Expanse