The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced that Chandrayaan-3 has transmitted its first data from the moon, which revealed unexpected temperatures on the lunar surface.
The Indian Space Research Organization has released a graph of temperature changes on the lunar surface with increasing depth, as measured by the ChaSTE payload aboard Chandrayaan-3 .
"We all thought it could be 20 to 30 degrees Celsius at the surface, but it's 70 degrees Celsius. This is surprisingly higher than we expected," said BH Darukisha, a scientist at ISRO.
"On Earth, there is hardly any difference like this, so the first results of Chandrayaan-3 are very interesting," he explained, noting that "when we go two to three centimeters inside the Earth, we hardly see a difference of two degrees." to three degrees Celsius, while on the moon, the difference is about 50 degrees Celsius. That's an interesting thing."
And the organization published via the X platform (formerly Twitter) a graph showing temperature changes on the surface of the moon, and said: “The following are the first observations from the ChaSTE payload on board the Vikram Lander. ChaSTE measures the surface soil temperature of the moon around the pole, to understand thermal behavior to the lunar surface."
ChaSTE contains a temperature probe equipped with a controllable penetrating mechanism capable of reaching a depth of 10 cm below the surface.
Neptune : A huge and mysterious "dark spot" , the cause of which scientists do not know
Astronomers have noticed a huge and mysterious dark spot on the surface of Neptune about 10,000 km (6,200 miles) in diameter from Earth for the first time, with an unexpectedly smaller bright spot next to it.
While scientists still don't understand the origin of this mysterious patch on the distant ice giant's blue surface, new observations made with the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) could help shed some light on this. baffling feature.
A dark spot on Neptune was first discovered by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989 when it passed by the eighth planet in the solar system on its way out.
The dark spots on the surface of the planets have been familiar to astronomers since the nineteenth century, and they have been studying the "great red spot" of Jupiter, a storm that has been hitting the gas giant planet for at least 200 years. However, the dark spot on Neptune was strange, because it disappeared after the Voyager 2 observations.
Then, in 2018, the Hubble Space Telescope discovered several new dark spots on Neptune in the planet's southern and northern hemispheres.
Experts say that this is the first time that a dark spot has been spotted on the blue planet using a ground-based telescope.
These occasional features in the blue background of the planet's atmosphere are a mystery to astronomers, but the new findings may provide more clues about their origin.
"This is an amazing increase in humanity's ability to observe the universe," said co-author Michael Wong, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in the US. "At first, we could only detect these patches by sending spacecraft there, such as Voyager. Then we acquired "The ability to observe it from a distance using Hubble. Finally, the technology has evolved to enable us to do so from Earth."
Large spots are common features in the atmospheres of giant planets, the most famous of which is Jupiter's Great Red Spot.
Patrick Irwin, professor at the University of Oxford and principal investigator on the study, added: "Since the first discovery of the dark spot, I have always wondered what these elusive, short-lived dark features are."
The scientists used data from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to rule out the possibility that the dark spots were caused by the disappearing clouds.
Instead, the observations indicate that the dark spots are likely the result of dark air particles in a layer below the main visible haze layer, where ice and haze mix in Neptune's atmosphere.
Since dark spots are not permanent features of Neptune's atmosphere, and astronomers had not previously been able to study them in sufficient detail, it was not easy for them to come to this conclusion.
But they were able to do so after NASA and the European Space Agency's Hubble Space Telescope detected several dark spots in the planet's atmosphere, including one in the planet's northern hemisphere that was first detected in 2018.
Using the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (Muse) instrument of the Very Large Telescope (VLT), scientists were able to divide the sunlight reflected from Neptune and its sun into its component colors, or wavelengths. This allowed them to study the place in greater detail than was possible before.
Professor Irwin said: "I am very happy to have not only been able to make the first detection of a dark spot from Earth, but also to record a reflection spectrum of such a feature for the first time."
The existence of the spectrum enabled the astronomers to better determine the altitude at which the dark spot is located in the planet's atmosphere, and it also provided information about the chemical composition of the different layers of the atmosphere, which gave the team clues about the cause of the dark spot's appearance.
The observations also provided a surprising result, a rare type of deep, bright cloud that had not been identified before, even from space.
This rare type of cloud appeared as a bright spot next to the larger main dark spot, according to observations published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The data showed that the new deep, bright cloud was at the same level in the atmosphere as the main dark spot. This means that they are a completely new type of feature compared to the high-altitude small clouds of methane ice previously observed.
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