At https://phys.org/news/2023-05-webb-telescope-towering-plume-saturn.html … astronomers using the James Webb telescope have spotted a towering plume of water vapour estimated to be 6000 miles in length. It was spewing out of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. The Cassini spacecraft, during its 13 year reconnaissance of the Saturn system, estabished that Enceladus had a sub surface ocean of liquid water. It recorded plumes of ice grains and water vapour erupting into space from cracks in the moon’s icy surface. However, the sheer scale of the eruptions was not appreciated. The plume, as seen by the Webb telescope, is more than 20 times the diameter of Enceladus itself – and seems to supply water to the rest of the Saturn system.
At https://phys.org/news/2023-06-mysterious-dashes-revealed-milky-center.html … astrophysicists have been taking a peek at the centre of the Milky Way. They discovered giagantic one dimensional filaments dangling vertically near Sagittarius A, our galaxy’s super massive black hole. That was a couple of years ago, Now, the same team have discovered a new population of shorter filaments that lie horizontally, or radially, spreading out like the spokes of a wheel. Whilst the vertical filaments sweep through the galaxy, standing up to 150 light years high, the horizontal filaments are more like the dots and dashes of Morse code. That is one way of looking at it I suppose but morse code is more to do with sounds, long and short, rather than a visual thing – although when written down on paper it is transposed as dots and dashes. These structures seem to be pointed in the direction of the ‘theoretical‘ black hole at the heart of our galaxy. Neither are they random as they appear to be tied to an outflow from the black hole region. In other words – it might not be so much a black hole but something else.
At https://spaceweather.com June 3rd, 2023, we learn that the thermosphere is warming up. Geomagnetic storms in the first half of 2023 have pumped terrawatts of energy into Earth’s upper atmosphere. A NASA scientist, Martin Mlynczak, says increasing solar activity is heating the top of the atmosphere. He added, the extra heat has no effect on weather at the Earth’s surface. Funny, but we are experiencing a bout of hot summery weather here in the UK. Mlynczak is more interested in what solar activity might do to the satellites orbiting around the upper atmosphere.