Eliana Willis

Occasional flashes light up Venus’ shroud of clouds. Previous analyses have hinted that the bursts of light could be lightning in the hellish world’s atmosphere. But a new study suggests most of the flashes may be nothing more than the brief yet brilliant blazes of meteors.

With upcoming missions planned for Venus, scientists are eager to figure out the light’s origin (SN: 6/2/21). If the flashes are lightning, the electrical phenomenon could pose risks to future probes dropping through the Venusian atmosphere or carried by balloons for extended periods in the planet’s clouds, says Claire Blaske, a planetary scientist now at Stanford University. Small meteors that burn up in the atmosphere, however, wouldn’t pose much of a danger.

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Previous landers on Venus have often detected electromagnetic static similar to the type picked up on AM radio and caused by lightning during thunderstorms on Earth, Blaske says. And orbiters and Earth-based telescopes have discerned brief, bright flashes in the atmosphere.

But the static and optical flashes have never been detected simultaneously, Blaske says. And, notes Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the study, “it’s not clear there is the potential for lightning on Venus” given how little is known about the dynamics of its atmosphere.

Blaske, then at Arizona State University in Tempe, and her colleagues wondered whether meteors could be masquerading as lightning on Venus. Two surveys counted the flashes of light: one by a telescope on Arizona’s Mount Bigelow and one by instruments aboard Japan’s Akatsuki orbiter (SN: 12/8/15).

Given that data, there are probably between 10,000 and 100,000 of these flashes each year, the researchers report in the September Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

That may seem like too many flashes to all be caused by meteors. After all, Venus is a slightly smaller cosmic target than Earth. But meteors there will be substantially brighter — and thus more noticeable — because they are traveling faster on average: The space rocks zip through Venus’ atmosphere at about 25 kilometers per second, compared with 20.3 kilometers per second for meteoroids entering Earth’s atmosphere. In part, that’s because Venus is traveling around the sun faster than Earth is.

Overall, these factors and others led Blaske and her colleagues to conclude that meteors could be numerous enough to account for most, if not all, of the flashes expected to occur in Venus’ atmosphere.

The team’s analysis “is convincing and does a nice job of establishing a plausible explanation for these flashes,” Byrne says. Future observations that simultaneously measure the flashes and electromagnetic static on Venus could help resolve the mystery. But other big questions remain. For example, it’s unknown whether Venus might experience a form of lightning, or other type of electrical discharge, in its carbon dioxide–rich atmosphere that isn’t accompanied by flashes of light but could still pose a risk to probes. More

When a probe smashed into a small asteroid last year, the collision did more than change the asteroid’s orbit — it blasted a few dozen hefty boulders into space too.

Last September, NASA steered the DART spacecraft into Dimorphos, a moonlet of the larger asteroid Didymos, to test a strategy for knocking any future Earth-bound asteroids off course (SN: 10/11/22). About three months after the impact, the Hubble Space Telescope spied a halo of 37 previously unseen objects accompanying the space rock duo in their orbit around the sun, researchers report in the July 21 Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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The boulders probably aren’t bits that were pulverized from larger rocks during the impact. Instead, simulations suggest they were likely intact when they were blasted off Dimorphos and could have been launched off the moonlet’s rubble-covered surface by the energy of either the collision or the seismic waves bouncing around inside it in the wake of the impact.

Still, “there’s a lot of uncertainty in such simulations,” planetary astronomer David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles.

The last complete image from NASA’s DART spacecraft shows Dimorphos’ rubble-strewn surface just two seconds before the probe smashed into the asteroid.NASA, APL

Based on the brightness of the new objects, some of the dimmest ever spied by Hubble in our solar system, Jewitt and colleagues estimate that these boulders may be as wide as 7 meters. At least 15 are larger than 4 meters across. Together, the researchers calculate, the boulders probably weigh just over 5 million kilograms — roughly the weight of 300 dump truck loads of gravel.

Repeated observations by Hubble reveal that, on average, the boulders are drifting away from Dimorphos and Didymos at about 1 kilometer per hour — a little faster than the escape velocity for the double asteroid system. So, Jewitt says, the boulders, as well as a presumed multitude of rocks too small and dim for Hubble to see, will eventually break away from the asteroid system’s orbit and circle the sun on their own. More

Watch out Yosemite — the moon has its own impressive rock display.

An enormous chunk of granite, measuring roughly 50 kilometers wide, may be buried beneath the lunar surface, researchers reported July 5 in Nature. Finding such a behemoth, by far the largest granite structure spotted beyond Earth, is a surprise given that forming this type of rock typically requires plate tectonics or abundant water.

When Apollo astronauts landed on the moon in the 1960s and 1970s, they encountered vistas dominated by basalt. The igneous rock is run-of-the-mill stuff on both the moon and our planet, says Matthew Siegler, a planetary scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson. “Everything starts as basalt.”

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But over time, with enough heat and pressure, basalt can melt and morph into more durable granite. Plate tectonics and water, both mainstays on Earth, often help facilitate that transformation: Tectonic forces can help drag rocks down deep, where it’s hotter, and water, acting like a salt, helps rocks melt at lower temperatures (SN: 1/13/21).

Because the moon has no plate tectonics and very little water, finding copious amounts of granite there would be unexpected, Siegler says. Indeed, out of the roughly 380 kilograms of moon rocks (about the heft of a large bear) brought back to Earth by Apollo astronauts, just a handful of millimeter-sized pieces are granite (SN: 7/15/19). “That’s our whole inventory,” Siegler says.

But Siegler and his colleagues now have strong evidence that a massive piece of granite might be lurking under the moon’s surface. The team analyzed microwave data collected from the farside of the moon by China’s Chang’e-1 and Chang’e-2 lunar orbiters and discovered a geothermal hotspot roughly 9 degrees Celsius warmer than expected. Elevated temperatures are often an indicator of granite, Siegler says, because uranium and thorium — radioactive elements that decay over time and release heat — tend to aggregate within the rock.  

To estimate how large a piece of granite could be lying beneath the region, known as the Compton-Belkovich Volcanic Complex, the researchers ran computer simulations of different sizes of granite buried at different depths. The team concluded that an ellipsoidal hunk of granite roughly 50 kilometers wide and 25 kilometers tall capped by a smaller ellipsoid of granite, all buried four kilometers below the lunar surface, best explained the Chang’e-1 and Chang’e-2 observations.

The big question is how such an edifice formed. One idea that Siegler and his colleagues propose is that a mantle plume — a column of molten rock — once persisted under the Compton-Belkovich Volcanic Complex. That plume would have turned some of the region’s basalt into granite.

On Earth, mantle plumes famously combine with tectonic plate movement to create island chains like Hawaii, Siegler says (SN: 9/19/11). But on the moon, where there is no plate tectonics, a mantle plume would just continuously heat one region, he says. “You get a single spot of the crust that keeps getting roasted.”

This is an intriguing discovery that should be followed up with a lunar mission, says Brad Jolliff, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved with the new study. “It’s ripe for a robotic mission that has a small rover that can test some of these properties up close.”

In the next few years, scientists plan to do just that. NASA’s Lunar Vulkan Imaging and Spectroscopy Explorer mission, or Lunar-VISE, which is slated to launch by 2027, will land on the summit of one of the Gruithuisen domes. Located on the moon’s nearside, these volcanic features are believed to also contain granite. Lunar-VISE will be able to take a closeup look at the region’s chemical composition, says the mission’s principal investigator Kerri Donaldson Hanna, a planetary geologist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

That’s important because it’s often difficult to capture small details from orbit. Landers like Lunar-VISE can shed light on the moon’s geology, says Donaldson Hanna. “We need new observations.” More

Mercury’s auroras are perfectly in character. While temperate Earth gets heavenly light shows over its poles, hellish Mercury gets invisible ribbons of X-ray radiation that cling to its sun-blasted surface.

But as alien as they may appear, Mercury’s X-ray auroras have a lot in common with Earth’s polar lights, and with auroras throughout the solar system.

Scientists have now directly shown that fluctuations in Mercury’s magnetic field can fling electrons toward the planet, where they eventually rain down and cause auroras of X-ray light. This process, called electron precipitation, now appears to be practically universal in the solar system: It causes auroras on every planet with a global magnetic field except Neptune, researchers report July 18 in Nature Communications. Even Mars, which has only localized magnetic fields, has auroras caused by raining electrons (SN: 3/19/15).

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For Mercury, “this is really the first time to detect these electrons directly,” says space plasma physicist Sae Aizawa of the University of Pisa in Italy.

Electron precipitation usually happens because of interactions between planets’ magnetic fields and the solar wind — a stream of charged particles spewed from the sun’s upper atmosphere.

Buffeted by the solar wind, the sun-facing side of a planet’s magnetic field gets squished while the night side is swept out into a long “magnetotail” that extends behind the planet. Eventually, the magnetotail stretches so much that its formerly mostly-parallel magnetic field lines snap and reconnect, sending some field lines flying off behind the planet and others back toward it.

Part of Mercury’s northern hemisphere comes into view in this picture taken by the BepiColombo probe (parts of which are visible in the foreground) during its first flyby of Mercury in 2021.BepiColombo/MTM/ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

“The magnetic field lines sort of break and form new ones,” says space physicist Ryan Dewey of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was not involved in the study. “And in that process, a lot of energy is released.”

All that energy sends packets of electrons flying planetward, spiraling in corkscrew-like trajectories along magnetic field lines. When these electrons hit the planet or its atmosphere, they release energy as light.

The light’s wavelength depends on what the electrons encounter as they rain down. Earth’s auroras shine in visible wavelengths because incoming electrons excite molecules of uncharged gases in the atmosphere like oxygen and nitrogen, which release visible light when they relax back to their normal states. Mercury’s auroras shine in X-ray wavelengths because electrons decelerate as they smack the planet’s rocky surface. The lost energy is released as X-rays.

Researchers first spotted Mercurian X-ray auroras in data beamed back from the MESSENGER probe, which orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015 (SN: 4/30/15). But while scientists reasoned that electrons must rain down on Mercury to cause its X-ray glow, MESSENGER didn’t have the right instruments to measure the precipitating particles.

The European Space Agency’s BepiColombo spacecraft does. Analyzing data from the probe’s first flyby of Mercury in 2021, Aizawa and her colleagues spotted telltale signs of the process.

One clue was that as BepiColombo flew through Mercury’s magnetosphere, it observed surges of fast-moving, high-speed electrons followed by several subsequent waves of progressively slower, lower-energy electrons. “This is exactly what we’d describe as a precipitating signature,” says Aizawa, who did the work while at the Institute of Research in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France.

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To Dewey, the new discovery is a tantalizing sneak peek at the discoveries waiting to be made at Mercury once BepiColombo enters orbit in 2025. By then, it will have been a decade since scientists last had a probe continuously orbiting Mercury.

“To me, it’s very exciting to see just how much we can learn from even just a short pass through the magnetosphere,” he says. “It’s a glimpse.” More

On Jupiter, lightning jerks and jolts a lot like it does on Earth.

Jovian lightning emits radio wave pulses that are typically separated by about one millisecond, researchers report May 23 in Nature Communications. The energetic prestissimo, the scientists say, is a sign that the gas giant’s lightning propagates in pulses, at a pace comparable to that of the bolts that cavort through our own planet’s thunderclouds. The similarities between the two world’s electrical phenomena could have implications for the search for alien life.

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Arcs of lightning on both worlds appear to move somewhat like a winded hiker going up a mountain, pausing after each step to catch their breath, says Ivana Kolmašová, an atmospheric physicist at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. “One step, another step, then another step … and so on.”

Here on Earth, lightning forms as turbulent winds within thunderclouds cause many ice crystals and water droplets to rub together, become charged and then move to opposite sides of the clouds, progressively generating static electrical charges. When the charges grow big enough to overcome the air’s ability to insulate them, electrons are released — the lightning takes its first step. From there, the surging electrons will repeatedly ionize the air and rush into it, lurching the bolt forward at an average of hundreds of thousands of meters per second.

Scientists have suggested that superbolts observed in Jovian clouds might also form by collisions between ice crystals and water droplets (SN: 8/5/20). But no one knew whether the alien bolts extended and branched in increments, as they do on Earth, or if they took some other form.

For the new study, Kolmašová and her colleagues used five years of radio wave data collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft (SN: 12/15/22). Analyzing hundreds of thousands of radio wave snapshots, the team found radio wave emissions from Jovian lightning appeared to pulse at a rate comparable to that of Earth’s intracloud lightning — arcs of electricity that never strike ground. 

If bolts extend through Jupiter’s water clouds at a similar velocity as they do in Earth’s clouds, then Jovian lightning might branch and extend in steps that are hundreds to thousands of meters long. That’s comparable in length to the jolted strides of Earth’s intracloud lightning, the researchers say.

“That’s a perfectly reasonable explanation,” says atmospheric physicist Richard Sonnenfeld of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, who wasn’t involved in the study. Alternatively, he says, the signals could be produced as pulses of electrical current propagate back and forth along tendrils of lightning that have already formed, rather than from the stop-and-go advancements of a new bolt. On Earth, such currents cause some bolts to appear to flicker.

But stop and go seems like a sound interpretation, says atmospheric physicist Yoav Yair of Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel. Kolmašová and her colleagues “show that if you’re discharging a cloud … the physics remains basically the same [on Jupiter as on Earth], and the current will behave the same.”

If that universality is real, it could have implications for the search for life elsewhere. Experiments have shown that lightning strikes on Earth could have smelted some of the chemical ingredients needed to form the building blocks of life (SN: 3/16/21). If lightning is discharging in a similar way on alien worlds, Yair says, then it could be producing similar ingredients in those places too. More

Saturn’s rings might have formed while trilobites scuttled about on Earth. Space dust has been accumulating on the icy halos for no more than 400 million years, researchers report in the May 12 Science Advances.

The 4.5-billion-year-old planet appears to have acquired its iconic ornamentation relatively recently, says physicist Sascha Kempf of the University of Colorado Boulder. “We’re quite lucky to see a ring in the first place.”

The rings of Saturn are made of countless icy particles, which become covered with dust as tiny meteoroids strike them. These dustings darken the rings’ complexion, like mud sullies snow on roads in winter.

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This cosmic staining was key to the new analysis, as was the now-defunct Cassini spacecraft’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer. From 2004 to 2017, the instrument caught dust-sized micrometeoroids moving around Saturn, measuring their velocity, mass, charge and composition.

Kempf and colleagues identified about 160 particles — out of millions — that could have hailed from beyond the Saturn system. The researchers estimated the rate at which the incoming dust accumulates on Saturn’s rings, and calculated how long it would have taken to darken the rings to their observed color. The planet’s hoops might have materialized more than 100 million years after trilobites — mysterious, extinct invertebrates — appeared on Earth, the team found (SN: 8/30/19).

The age of the rings has been debated for decades (SN: 10/20/16). Even after the new study, there’s still disagreement.

If the rings are somehow losing dust over time, they could be ancient, says planetary scientist Aurélien Crida of Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, who was not involved in the study. “Possibly as old as Saturn.”

It seems clear that the rings have been exposed to micrometeoroid impacts for at least a hundred million years, Crida says. But simulations of the rings’ formation from the gravitational shredding of an early moon suggest their size is consistent with an age of billions of years, he says. And researchers have reported silicate grains falling from the rings into Saturn’s atmosphere (SN: 10/4/18). Some unidentified process might be cleaning the rings of the micrometeoroid dust, making them appear younger than they are, Crida says.

Alternatively, the previously reported falling dust might come from meteoroid impacts that shatter ring ice, Kempf says.

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Experiments that smash micrometeoroids into ice particles could help resolve the discrepancy, Crida says. For now, the debate over the age of the rings lives on. More