Added 1 new A* page:A mini space news roundup!
- China's colossal radio telescope begins testing (BBC) - There's an impressive photo of the completed giant dish in this article—the thing is 500 meters across! : o It will "take three years to calibrate." (The next largest dish, in Puerto Rico, is a "mere" 305m.)
- Europa moon 'spewing water jets' (BBC) - Scientists used Hubble to spot spectroscopic readings of excess hydrogen and oxygen, suggestive of water spewing into space from Jupiter's moon Europa, back in 2013; Europa is thought to have a massive ocean beneath a maybe tens of kilometers thick ice crust. Now, scientists have used Hubble to look for water coming from Europa again, but this time observing the rim of the moon in ultraviolet light as it passed in front of Jupiter, and in ultraviolet they seemed to see "dark fingers" extending from the edge of the moon, in about the same area as the 2013 spectroscopic readings. These "fingers," then, are likely to be plumes of water ice, "several hundred kilometres in height," and quite possibly similar to ice plumes clearly photographed on Saturn's moon Enceladus. Europa's plumes appear to be sporadic, and the reason for that is as yet unexplained.
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