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The latest discovery marks the first time an asteroid that appears to be a permanent member of our solar system has been revealed as having its origins in another star system. ‘Oumuamua, an asteroid spotted hurtling through our solar system earlier this year, was only on a fleeting visit.

Known as asteroid 2015 BZ509, the permanent visitor is about 3km across and was first spotted in late 2014 by the Pan-Starrs project at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii. Experts quickly realised the asteroid travelled around the sun in the opposite direction to the planets – a retrograde orbit.

Further work on the asteroid revealed it takes the same length of time to orbit the sun as the planet Jupiter at a similar average distance, although in the opposite direction and with a different shaped path, suggesting the two have gravitational interactions.

To the team’s surprise, the results reveal that the asteroid’s orbit appears most likely to have remained very similar and linked to Jupiter for 4.5bn years – in other words, since the end of planet formation. “That was completely unexpected,” said Namouni.

“That means you can get a lot of cross-contamination, for lack of a better word, of stellar planetary systems during their formation,” she said, adding that it might be that other asteroids came into our solar system and crashed into the sun, were ejected or even smashed into planets or moons – a tantalising possibility not least because the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are thought to have conditions favourable for alien life.

“It definitely could mean that you could get organic building blocks [of life] spread between different systems,” she said.

Astronomers are using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study auroras — stunning light shows in a planet’s atmosphere — on the poles of the largest planet in the Solar System, Jupiter. This observation programme is supported by measurements made by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, currently on its way to Jupiter.

Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, is best known for its colourful storms, the most famous being the Great Red Spot. Now astronomers have focused on another beautiful feature of the planet, using the ultraviolet capabilities of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

The extraordinary vivid glows shown in the new observations are known as auroras [1]. They are created when high energy particles enter a planet’s atmosphere near its magnetic poles and collide with atoms of gas. As well as producing beautiful images, this programme aims to determine how various components of Jupiter’s auroras respond to different conditions in the solar wind, a stream of charged particles ejected from the Sun.

There's a secret mission to this mysterious water-world that NASA is keeping under wraps

NASA announced that it was investing in a $2 billion mission to Europa, but there's a part of the mission they're not talking about.

www.businessinsider.com|Jessica Orwig

A lander for Europa

Culberson is the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee with oversight of NASA's budget. And he wants to know if there's life on Europa as badly as any NASA scientist working on the Europa Multi-Flyby Mission.

Adding a lander to the mission would absolutely improve NASA's chances of discovering the presence, or absence, of life, which is why Culberson is pushing for the necessary funding to get a lander added to the mission.

"Honestly, if you're going to go all that way to determine if there's life on another world, why wouldn't you double-check it?" Culberson told Berger.

Earlier this month, during one of Culberson's regular check-ins with the mission scientists, he learned the latest details on the lander, which he relayed to Berger. Here's the gist, according to Ars Technica:

• The addition of a lander will prolong the mission launch an additional year from 2022 to 2023.
• Similar to the 2014 comet landing, a landing site will be chosen until the spacecraft has extensively studied the moon's surface.
• The lander will weigh about 500 pounds and be delivered to the surface by sky crane, similar to how the Curiosity Mars rover was set on the surface.
• Included in the 500-pound-limit, there's room for up to 66 pounds of instruments for scientific analysis, which will include a device for identifying complex biological molecules that could signify signs of life.
• The lander will also come with a scooper and sampling arm equipped with counter-rotating saw blades for shallow drilling into the icy surface to collect ice samples.

Ultimately, the scientists want to get the lander near a crevasse that is venting water vapor from the underground ocean, Berger reported. That way, the instruments can sniff for any signs of life that might be swimming or floating underneath.

NASA has yet to officially announce that they're sending a lander to Europa.

Ganymede was already interesting before today's news. Not only is it the largest moon in the solar system — it's almost as big as Mars — but it is the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field. That field is generated by a molten iron core, much like what we see here on Earth. Its thin atmosphere is also rich in oxygen.

This news doesn't mean that Ganymede should move to the top of the list of places to explore, however. The ocean is likely around 100 miles below the surface, which would make it complicated to study with a robot. Even if a space agency found a way to reach that far down, it's thought that layers of ice separate the ocean from the surface. That means Ganymede is less than ideal for life, because it probably lacks a hydrothermal system like the one thought to exist on Enceladus.

"As far as we can tell, almost everywhere we look there's water," Heidi Hammel said during the conference, who is the executive vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. "Water, water, everywhere in our solar system."