Category Archives: Astronomy

7:30 to 9:30 p.m. May 16. Free. The North Door, 502 Brushy St. ndvenue.com.

With a pint of beer in hand, travel out of this world to outer space with another in the casual cosmic talks from local scientists. This months Astronomy on Tap brings you three insightful discussions about ice on Mars, merging galaxies and the Hubble deep field from Cassie Stuurman, Chao-Ling Hung and Mark Dickinson. Plus, the 31st edition of the series will feature trivia, giveaways and even telescopes that will be on hand for anyone to look for exciting orbs in the night sky, weather permitting.

2. Joyce Howell at Wally Workman Gallery

10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays through May 27. 1202 W. Sixth St. 512-472-7428, wallyworkmangallery.com.

Wally Workman is opening their fifth show with Texas abstract painter Howell, who lives and works in Kingsland on the Colorado River. The setting provides ample opportunity to observe color changes relating to atmosphere, temperature, wind, time of day and season. Howell believes that even the most pastoral scene, when observed carefully, is riotous in color, texture and pattern. Those elements come to life in her current body of work displayed at the gallery.

3. Julia Mickenberg at BookWoman

6 p.m. May 16. Free. 5501 N. Lamar Blvd. ebookwoman.com.

The University of Texas professor will give a reading of her forthcoming book, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, while you enjoy appetizers provided by Russian House of Austin. The book chronicles a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation (those who came of age during and just after World War I): that Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, journalists and artists, as well as curious travelers.

4. Georgetown Art Centers Made for You and Me

10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday through June 4. Free. 816 S. Main St., Georgetown. 512-930-2583, georgetownartcentertx.org.

Austin-based artist James Tisdales newest body of work, a series of Southern Gothic sculptures on display at the center, takes a look at the social and political issues scattered across the American landscape. These issues, created from our past, follow us to this day and stretch from coast to coast. While Tisdale is influenced by all that he sees and hears, his historical art influences range widely, from the figurative works of the Renaissance to the personally powerful folk art of the south.

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Astronomy on Tap just one of the fun Tuesday things to do - Austin American-Statesman

The astronomy club at Klamath Community College recently welcomed Citizens For Safe Schools for an evening of excitement, inspiration and education at its Astronomy for Everyone: Size & Scale of the Universe fundraiser.

The club matched all mentor tickets for the agencys youth, providing an opportunity to foster curiosity and literacy in science for mentees in the program.

Former NASA Consultant Kevin Manning delivered a virtual journey through the cosmos, exploring the science of the universe and creation. His presentation was followed by hands-on observation of the moon, Jupiter, Saturn and the constellations in the night sky with a powerful self-engineered telescope.

The newest mentee was invited to select the winning tickets in a raffle drawing for several sextants and a telescope.

Funding generated during the event will be used to secure celestial navigation instruments and facilitate observational field trips throughout the summer.

Renee Haney, the clubs president, extended an offer to to include mentor/mentee matches on the clubs field trips to encourage ongoing education and enthusiasm for the science of astronomy. Many pairs have already expressed interest and are looking forward to partnering with the club.

Anyone interested in contributing to the clubs summer field trip project is asked to contact Renee Haney at 541-292-9237 or kcc.astronomy@yahoo.com.

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Astronomy club hosts Safe Schools members and mentees at fundraiser - Herald and News

Youd think a black hole with a mass of 160 million times that our Sun would be difficult to move and youd be right. Nonetheless, astronomers have spotted a potentially renegade black hole offset from the center of an elliptical galaxy about 3.9 billion light-years away.

In a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, first author Dongchan Kim of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, and his colleagues outline their discovery of a supermassive black hole whose X-ray emission a sign of growth due to the influx of new material onto the black hole is offset from the center of its host galaxy by roughly 3,000 light-years.

The black hole, labeled CXO J101527.2+625911, wasnt easy to find. First, the authors had to examine data from thousands of X-ray images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory to find a galaxy showing signs of an accreting supermassive black hole. They examined those candidates with the Hubble Space Telescope to look for two peaks of brightness in the optical images, which would indicate one of two scenarios: either a pair of accreting supermassive black holes, or a single renegade black hole ousted from the center of its galaxy.

Finally, the authors looked at Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectra of any galaxies that matched the previous two criteria. Spectra are observations that break light into its constituent parts, allowing astronomers to easily identify certain types of processes such as accretion and clearly identify motion.

Supermassive black holes preferentially lie in the center of their host galaxy, where they dont move much. When one is clearly offset from the center, then, it likely means something interesting is going on. Astronomers are searching for cases such as these because they can shed further light on the formation and behavior of supermassive black holes and the galaxies in which they reside.

CXO J101527.2+625911 does indeed show both an offset and distinct motion. Its velocity doesnt match the overall motion of its host galaxy, leading researchers to believe that it is experiencing the recoil of a previous black hole merger. When two black holes merge, they must first spiral in toward each other, each losing angular momentum before they finally collide. Because the black holes are so massive, this process generates gravitational waves. Differences in mass, spin, and orientation of the two merging black holes cause asymmetry in the gravitational waves produced, which at the final moment of merging can give the object that results a massive kick in one preferred direction. This is called recoil, and it results in a single supermassive black hole moving in a distinct direction away from the center of its galaxy.

If this scenario sounds familiar, its because another such case of a potentially recoiling black hole was recently reported, based on images taken with the Hubble.

Kims group does acknowledge that the alternate scenario is still possible: The galaxy may have two supermassive black holes, one of which (in the center) is either not growing as quickly or whose emission is shrouded. But they still favor the recoiling black hole scenario, as the host galaxy also shows signs of disruption in its outer regions and rapid new star formation, both hallmarks of a recent merger with another galaxy that increases the likelihood of a recoiling black hole.

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Chandra spots a recoiling black hole - Astronomy Magazine

Around 440 light years away, theres a planet a little bigger than Neptune thats more than meets the eye.

HAT-P-26b seems, by all standards at first, an ordinary hot Neptune. It should theoretically have a composition much like Uranus and Neptune, the latter of which is more dense and compact than the other giant planets in the outer solar system. But despite its size being closer to the ice giants, the actual planet is only a little more dense than Saturn (which is the least dense planet in the solar system.)

So something is amiss. And that something is water. Or, more accurately, water vapor. At 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit (700 Celsius) the planet is not exactly conducive to somehow being an ocean world. (Nor would it necessarily be at that mass. Despite an abundance of water in Uranus and Neptune, theyre called ice giants because atmospheric pressure pushes water vapor into a state known as hot ice, where its roughly solid but also fairly hot.)

Hannah Wakeford, a postdoc at NASA Goddard who is an author on the study published today in Science, says that the planet is primarily made of a rocky core and a dense envelope of water, with a hydrogen helium atmosphere of about 15-30 percent the mass of the planet. Hubble observations suggest its relatively free of other contaminating heavy metals, which is anything above hydrogen and helium on the periodic table.

What we find is that unlike Neptune and Uranus in our solar system, which have over 100 times the amount of heavy elements as the sun, HAT-P-26b has a low metallicity more like that of Jupiter despite its low Neptune-mass, Wakeford says. This bucks the trend seen in the solar system where decreasing mass results in increasing metallicity.

You might then consider the world, which orbits its K-type star in four days, a hot mini-Jupiter or Saturn instead of an ice giant type world. It also probably formed differently from the ice giants. The abundance of water vapor (nearly 90 percent of the composition of the planet) and the lack of heavy elements suggest a snug formation close in to the star.

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A new hot Neptune may be a massive water world - Astronomy Magazine

GLENS FALLS Crandall Public Library announced it will present Eyes to the Skies, a series of astronomy programs leading up to a coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in the United States, which will take place on Aug. 21.

Programs will be held in the community room in the library basement and are open to the public free of charge.

The schedule is as follows:

7 p.m. June 28 Kevin Manning, who previously worked with NASA and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, will speak. Weather permitting, the program will move outdoors to view the skies through a telescope.

6:30 p.m. July 11 Storyteller Diane Edgecomb will perform a program of ancient myths about the stars.

6:30 p.m. July 19 Staff from Dudley Observatory at the Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady will speak about the upcoming eclipse.

Noon to 4 p.m. Aug. 21 Livestreaming of the eclipse.

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With eclipse coming, library sets up astronomy series - Glens Falls Post-Star

This image of the Crab Nebula combines data from five different telescopes. Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Dubner (IAFE, CONICET-University of Buenos Aires) et al.; A. Loll et al.; T. Temim et al.; F. Seward et al.; VLA/NRAO/AUI/NSF; Chandra/CXC; Spitzer/JPL-Caltech; XMM-Newton/ESA; and Hubble/STScI

Astronomers have produced a highly detailed image of the Crab Nebula, by combining data from telescopes spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves seen by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to the powerful X-ray glow as seen by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory. And, in between that range of wavelengths, the Hubble Space Telescopes crisp visible-light view, and the infrared perspective of the Spitzer Space Telescope.

The Crab Nebula, the result of a bright supernova explosion seen by Chinese and other astronomers in the year 1054, is 6,500 light-years from Earth. At its center is a super-dense neutron star, rotating once every 33 milliseconds, shooting out rotating lighthouse-like beams of radio waves and light a pulsar (the bright dot at image center). The nebulas intricate shape is caused by a complex interplay of the pulsar, a fast-moving wind of particles coming from the pulsar, and material originally ejected by the supernova explosion and by the star itself before the explosion.

This image combines data from five different telescopes: the VLA (radio) in red; Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared) in yellow; Hubble Space Telescope (visible) in green; XMM-Newton (ultraviolet) in blue; and Chandra X-ray Observatory (X-ray) in purple.

The new VLA, Hubble, and Chandra observations all were made at nearly the same time in November of 2012. A team of scientists led by Gloria Dubner of the Institute of Astronomy and Physics (IAFE), the National Council of Scientific Research (CONICET), and the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina then made a thorough analysis of the newly revealed details in a quest to gain new insights into the complex physics of the object. They are reporting their findings in the Astrophysical Journal.

Comparing these new images, made at different wavelengths, is providing us with a wealth of new detail about the Crab Nebula. Though the Crab has been studied extensively for years, we still have much to learn about it, Dubner said.

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Observatories combine to crack open the Crab Nebula - Astronomy Now Online

Eds: Photos are available for web and print. Please refer to this story at religionnews.com for the photos.

Categories: c,i

By JOSEPHINE MCKENNA

c. 2017 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Francis told a group of astronomers that scientific questions about the universe and its origins sometimes clash with theology and spiritual beliefs, but he encouraged them to continue their quest for knowledge and ``never to fear truth.''

The pope sent a personal greeting on Friday (May 12) to astronomers, cosmologists and other researchers discussing black holes, gravitational waves and assorted scientific questions at the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo outside Rome.

Francis said issues such as the beginning of the universe and its development, as well as the ``profound structure'' of space and time ``concern us deeply.''

``It is clear that these questions have a particular relevance for science, philosophy, theology and for spiritual life,'' the pope said.

``They represent an arena in which these different disciplines meet and sometimes clash.''

The 35 conference participants included Gerald `t Hooft, the 1999 Nobel laureate in physics from the Netherlands, British mathematician Sir Roger Penrose, who won the 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics and Renata Kallosh, a theoretical physicist and professor at Stanford University.

``I encourage you to persevere in your search for truth,'' the pope said. ``For we ought never to fear truth, nor become trapped in our own preconceived ideas, but welcome new scientific discoveries with an attitude of humility.''

Brother Guy Consolmagno, the MIT-educated, Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, said on Monday that faith and science are not opposed to each other.

``God is not a scientific explanation,'' Consolmagno told RNS. ``If you are using God instead of science to explain what happens in the world you are talking about the gods of the Romans and Greeks.

``We believe in a God that creates outside space and time and shows us everything he did. We experience God as a person, as a god of love.''

The Vatican Observatory was established by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 to show that the church supported science. The weeklong conference was held in honor of the Belgian Catholic priest and cosmologist, Monsignor Georges Lemaitre, who is credited with the big-bang theory about the creation of the universe.

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BC-RNS-VATICAN-ASTRONOMY - Colorado Springs Gazette

Australias CSIRO faces fresh cuts in new spending plan.

By Cheryl JonesMay. 10, 2017 , 1:00 PM

In terms of the impact on science, the Australian budget, released 9 May, is very bland, says Les Field, science policy secretary at the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra, the nations leading scientific association. There are no big spending initiatives but no major cuts, he adds.

Its a business-as-usual budget for science and technology, agrees Kylie Walker, CEO of Science and Technology Australia in Canberra, which represents scientists.

Overall spending on science for the fiscal year beginning 1 July and in later years, called the forward estimates, is not yet clear becausesupport is spread across several ministries. But the plan does reveal some winners and losers.

Field notes that there will be small decreases in years to come for the publicly funded science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), which in recent years has been hit with massive cuts that resulted in extensive job losses. Im profoundly disappointed at the missed opportunities to restore support, says Kim Carr, the opposition Australian Labor Partys shadow minister for innovation, industry, science, and research.

And the government is making it difficult for the private sector to pick up the slack. The budget cuts an R&D tax incentive by $810 million over the next 3 years, Carr notes. The incentive is one of the governments biggest programs to stimulate business investment in research and development. But the budget also includes an outlay of $74 million to promote innovation in Australias manufacturing sector, something Field welcomes.

Higher education is also suffering, says Belinda Robinson, chief executive of Universities Australia, an advocacy group based in Canberra. She was referring to $2 billion in cuts to higher education announced separately from the federal budget last Monday. Large numbers of overseas students make higher education the nations third-largest export sector. Universities contribute more than they receive, she says. And although the government plans to invest heavily in air, road, and rail transport infrastructure, it has cut a program designed to support big national research facilities at universities.

Astronomy, meanwhile, was a real policy win, Field says. The budget includes $19 million to support an Australian partnership with the European Southern Observatory, meaning Australian astronomers will be involved in the major astronomy initiatives around the world. The commitment also includes ongoing funding of $9 million a year over the next decade.

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Australian astronomy one of few winners in new budget | Science ... - Science Magazine

The Planet that Acts Like a Comet

Planets typically orbit their host stars in rounded ellipses, while comets follow long, narrow orbits that carry them far out into the cold reaches of the solar system before falling inward again. HD 20782bs orbit looks more like that of a comet than a giant planet twice as massive as Jupiter. The gas giant slingshots around a G-type main sequence star 117 light years away in the constellation Fornax, swooping in just 5.5 million miles from the star (seven times closer than Mercurys orbit of our Sun) before making a long swing 232 million miles out into its solar system (about the distance from the Sun to the Asteroid Belt). That gives HD 20782b an orbital eccentricity of 0.96: its path through space is a long, narrow ellipse, not the round, nearly circular kind that most well-behaved planets follow.

That wild orbit is probably thanks to a series of gravitational pushes from another gas giant orbiting the same star (which astronomers havent spotted yet), or possibly from the other star in its binary system, HD 20781. In fact, this is the first binary system astronomers have found where both stars have their own planets.

HD 20782b swoops past its star too fast for the stellar wind to blast away much of the gas giants atmosphere, so despite its daringly close perihelion, the planet still has clouds of icy particles, like the ones in Jupiters upper cloud layers. Starlight reflecting off those icy clouds allowed astronomers to learn more about the planet in 2016, ten years after changes in the stars radial velocity first revealed the planets existence.

A Planetary Family Feud

A long time ago in a solar system 1,200 light years away,, two gas giants collided and flung each other to the far ends of the solar system. CVSO 30b, detected in 2012, orbits the young M3 star CVSO 30 at just 1.2 million kilometers, a tiny fraction of the distance between Mercury and the Sun. Thats right on the edge of its Roche limit, the distance at which the stars gravity will start to rip the planet apart. In fact, CVSO 30b may already be close enough for its host star to start stripping away its mass. It takes just 11 hours for the gas giant to complete an orbit.

At the other end of the solar system, its sister planet CVSO 30c, detected in 2016, keeps its distance with a 99 billion kilometer orbital radius, taking 27,000 years to make a lap around the star. CVSO 30 is a fairly small star, less than half the mass of our Sun, so its unusual to find two super-sized gas giants caught in its gravitational pull. In fact, CVSO 30c is so large that its discoverers say its probably a type of brown dwarf, too large to be a proper planet and too small to become a star, hovering awkwardly on the threshold.

And given that the two planets are pretty close in mass (each is around 5 times as massive as Jupiter) their orbits shouldnt be so wildly different, according to most models of how solar systems form. In fact, this is the first solar system astronomers have ever seen in which two planets have such different orbits.

CVSO 30c probably didnt start its life so far from its parent star. In fact, it probably formed in a position more like the one Jupiter occupies in our own solar system, but at some point in the solar systems history, 30b and 30c interacted gravitationally and flung each other into their current extreme orbits, in what astronomers described in a 2016 paper as a mutual catastrophic event of planet-planet scattering. Its probably not stable in the long run but for purposes of astronomers here on Earth, its close enough. That gives astronomers a rare opportunity to study what happens when gas giants interact.

The system may not be what it appears, however. A 2015 paper suggested that CVSO 30b might not exist at all. If thats the case, CVSO 30c is so far out from CVSO 30 that it may not actually be orbiting the star at all. It could be a free-floating object in space, which isnt uncommon for objects of its mass and type. So far, astronomical observations havent been able to confirm that the giant planet and the nearby star are actually moving regularly in relation to one another, so its possible that theyre simply not. On the other hand, astronomers say thats highly unlikely, with odds on the order of .00002.

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The wild wild worlds: a guide to the weirdest planets in the Milky Way - Astronomy Magazine

On March 8, 2015, Jupiters moon Europa passed in front of Io, allowing detailed mapping of the bright volcanic crater called Loki Patera (upper left). Credit: Katherine de Kleer

Taking advantage of a rare orbital alignment between two of Jupiters moons, Io and Europa, researchers have obtained an exceptionally detailed map of the largest lava lake on Io, the most volcanically active body in the solar system.

On March 8, 2015, Europa passed in front of Io, gradually blocking out light from the volcanic moon. Because Europas surface is coated in water ice, it reflects very little sunlight at infrared wavelengths, allowing researchers to accurately isolate the heat emanating from volcanoes on Ios surface.

The infrared data showed that the surface temperature of Ios massive molten lake steadily increased from one end to the other, suggesting that the lava had overturned in two waves that each swept from west to east at about a kilometer (3,300 feet) per day.

Overturning lava is a popular explanation for the periodic brightening and dimming of the hot spot, called Loki Patera after the Norse god. (A patera is a bowl-shaped volcanic crater.) The most active volcanic site on Io, which itself is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, Loki Patera is about 200 kilometers (127 miles) across. The hot region of the patera has a surface area of 21,500 square kilometers, larger than Lake Ontario.

Earthbound astronomers first noticed Ios changing brightness in the 1970s, but only when the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft flew by in 1979 did it become clear that this was because of volcanic eruptions on the surface. Despite highly detailed images from NASAs Galileo mission in the late 1990s and early 2000s, astronomers continue to debate whether the brightenings at Loki Patera which occur every 400 to 600 days are due to overturning lava in a massive lava lake, or periodic eruptions that spread lava flows over a large area.

If Loki Patera is a sea of lava, it encompasses an area more than a million times that of a typical lava lake on Earth, said Katherine de Kleer, a UC Berkeley graduate student and the studys lead author. In this scenario, portions of cool crust sink, exposing the incandescent magma underneath and causing a brightening in the infrared.

This is the first useful map of the entire patera, said co-author Ashley Davies, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, who has studied Ios volcanoes for many years. It shows not one but two resurfacing waves sweeping around the patera. This is much more complex than what was previously thought.

This is a step forward in trying to understand volcanism on Io, which we have been observing for more than 15 years, and in particular the volcanic activity at Loki Patera, said Imke de Pater, a UC Berkeley professor of astronomy.

De Kleer is lead author of a paper reporting the new findings that will be published May 11 in the journal Nature.

Binocular telescope turns two eyes on Io

The images were obtained by the twin 8.4-meter (27.6-foot) mirrors of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory in the mountains of southeast Arizona, linked together as an interferometer using advanced adaptive optics to remove atmospheric blurring. The facility is operated by an international consortium headquartered at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Two years earlier, the LBTO had provided the first ground-based images of two separate hot spots within Loki Patera, thanks to the unique resolution offered by the interferometric use of LBT, which is equivalent to what a 23-meter (75-foot) telescope would provide, noted co-author and LBTO director Christian Veillet. This time, however, the exquisite resolution was achieved thanks to the observation of Loki Patera at the time of an occultation by Europa.

Europa took about 10 seconds to completely cover Loki Patera. There was so much infrared light available that we could slice the observations into one-eighth-second intervals during which the edge of Europa advanced only a few kilometers across Ios surface, said co-author Michael Skrutskie, of the University of Virginia, who led the development of the infrared camera used for this study. Loki was covered from one direction but revealed from another, just the arrangement needed to make a real map of the distribution of warm surface within the patera.

These observations gave the astronomers a two-dimensional thermal map of Loki Patera with a resolution better than 10 kilometers (6.25 miles), 10 times better than normally possible with the LBT Interferometer at this wavelength (4.5 microns). The temperature map revealed a smooth temperature variation across the surface of the lake, from about 270 Kelvin at the western end, where the overturning appeared to have started, to 330 Kelvin at the southeastern end, where the overturned lava was freshest and hottest.

Using information on the temperature and cooling rate of magma derived from studies of volcanoes on Earth, de Kleer was able to calculate how recently new magma had been exposed at the surface. The results between 180 and 230 days before the observations at the western end and 75 days before at the eastern agree with earlier data on the speed and timing of the overturn.

Interestingly, the overturning started at different times on two sides of a cool island in the center of the lake that has been there ever since Voyager photographed it in 1979.

The velocity of overturn is also different on the two sides of the island, which may have something to do with the composition of the magma or the amount of dissolved gas in bubbles in the magma, de Kleer said. There must be differences in the magma supply to the two halves of the patera, and whatever is triggering the start of overturn manages to trigger both halves at nearly the same time but not exactly. These results give us a glimpse into the complex plumbing system under Loki Patera.

Lava lakes like Loki Patera overturn because the cooling surface crust slowly thickens until it becomes denser than the underlying magma and sinks, pulling nearby crust with it in a wave that propagates across the surface. According to de Pater, as the crust breaks apart, magma may spurt up as fire fountains, akin to what has been seen in lava lakes on Earth, but on a smaller scale.

De Kleer and de Pater are eager to observe other Io occultations to verify their findings, but theyll have to wait until the next alignment in 2021. For now, de Kleer is happy that the interferometer linking the two telescopes, the adaptive optics on each and the unique occultation came together as planned that night two years ago.

We werent sure that such a complex observation was even going to work, she said, but we were all surprised and pleased that it did.

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[ 10 May 2017 ] Waves of lava seen in Io's largest volcanic crater News - Astronomy Now Online