Stories & Discoveries

Until recently, before NASA’s Juno space probe entered its orbit around the planet Jupiter, no one knew that powerful cyclones, approximately the size of Australia, rage across its polar regions. Jupiter's storms, as opposed to their earthly variety, do not disperse, hardly change, and are clearly not associated with flying rooftops and damp weather reporters.

It’s not just how hot the fires burn – it’s also where they burn that matters. During the recent extreme fire season in Australia, which began in 2019 and burned into 2020, millions of tons of smoke particles were released into the atmosphere. Most of those particles followed a typical pattern, settling to the ground after a day or week; yet the ones created in fires burning in one corner of the country managed to blanket the entire Southern hemisphere for months.

As the plastic in our oceans breaks up into smaller and smaller bits without breaking down chemically, the resulting microplastics are becoming a serious ecological problem. A new study at the Weizmann Institute of Science reveals a troubling aspect of microplastics – defined as particles smaller than 5 mm across. They are swept up into the atmosphere and carried on the wind to far-flung parts of the ocean, including those that appear to be clear.

Clouds: We see them as objects with clear-cut shapes and outlines. The satellites that collect cloud data and the climate models built on this data work on this supposition as well. But the line between “cloudy” and “clear” is much hazier than we think.

If humans are to establish any sort of settlement on the Moon, they might do so near one of its poles, where its meager supply of water is stored in the form of ice. That ice has been detected in difficult-to-reach spots: at the bottoms of large, deep craters, down where sunshine cannot reach and temperatures remain below -160^o Centigrade.

The history of our planet has been written, among other things, in the periodic reversal of its magnetic poles. Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science propose a new means of reading this historic record: in ice.

If life does exist outside of Earth in our Solar System, it could be hiding in subterranean oceans flowing under the surface of icy moons. One of the most promising candidates for such an underground liquid body is Triton – aptly named for the son of the sea god Neptune – the planet around which it orbits.

Geoscientists studying the conditions prevailing in Earth’s earliest oceans have been in disagreement for the past half century. Some, working backwards, think the first ocean was extremely hot – at least 70˚ Celsius – while others believe it was closer to the 15˚C we enjoy today.

The 2019 Israel Prize for Earth Sciences will go to Prof. Dan Yakir of the Weizmann Institute of Science. The Prize committee chose Prof.

The main scientific instrument on board the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft, the SpaceIL Magnetometer (SILMAG), has now been successfully turned on in space and data returned to Earth. After its successful launch, Beresheet is circling Earth on its journey to the Moon. Prof.

Antifreeze is life’s means of surviving in cold winters: Natural antifreeze proteins help fish, insects, plants and even bacteria live through low temperatures that should turn their liquid parts to deadly shards of ice. Strangely enough, in very cold conditions, the same proteins can also promote the growth of ice crystals. This was the finding of experiments carried out in Israel and Germany using proteins taken from fish and beetles.

Cassini was one of the more successful planetary missions, orbiting and returning information on Saturn and its moons for the last 20 years. But as the mission was approaching its end, it was decided to end its life with a non-circular orbit swinging in very close to the planet, followed by a final plunge into the gaseous mass. Kaspi and Galanti joined the Cassini team following their work as part of NASA’s Juno science team, which had employed a similar orbit to produce the most reliable measurements yet of Jupiter’s atmospheric depth.