Space
It's no surprise that water was crucial to the formation of life on Earth. What may surprise you is that water on earth is older than the sun itself.
Identifying the original source of Earth's water is key to understanding how life-fostering environments came into being and how likely they are to be found elsewhere. A new paper in Science says that much of our Solar System's water likely originated as ices that formed in interstellar space. Water is found throughout the Solar System, not just on Earth; on icy comets and moons, and in the shadowed basins of Mercury and in mineral samples from…
Surprises in the dark. Credit: NASA GSFC, CC BY
By Rene Breton, University of Southampton
One of the many unanswered questions about the origin of life on Earth is: where did organic molecules – those containing carbon, from which life as we know it is derived – come from? Given the conditions needed to create complex organic compounds, it was assumed that they were made on Earth. But chemical analysis of meteorites suggested that such chemistry could happen beyond Earth, too.
Life-supporting material, it seems, can be manufactured in sterile interstellar space, rather than needing the more…
The nice thing about telescopes is that we can look back in time - light that is reaching us now may have originated a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which means astronomers can view the universe as it was when it was much younger.
But sometimes we can be fooled by entire galaxies. DDO 68, otherwise known as UGC 5340, a ragged collection of stars and gas clouds, at first was thought to be a recently-formed galaxy in our own cosmic neighborhood.
But it's not as young as it looks.
A cosmic oddity, dwarf galaxy DDO 68. Credit: NASA, ESA. Acknowledgement: A. Aloisi (…
Astronomers have discovered clear skies and steamy water vapor on a planet known as HAT-P-11b - outside our solar system.
HAT-P-11b
is about the size of Neptune, making it the smallest exoplanet ever on which water vapor has been detected.
HAT-P-11b is a so-called exo-Neptune, a Neptune-sized planet that orbits another star. It is located 120 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus (The Swan). Unlike Neptune, this planet orbits closer to its star, making one lap roughly every five days. It is a warm world thought to have a rocky core, a mantle of fluid and ice, and a thick…
When Curiosity's successor and ExoMars land on Mars around 2021, we will see two different approaches to the search for life on Mars side by side. NASA's mission is the first stage of a two decade sample return program, while the ESAs ExoMars rover is focused on an in situ search for biosignatures, with the capability to drill two meters below the surface. Which is the best approach?
NASA's decision was based on the last decadal review in 2012, for the decade 2013 to 2022.
NASA do one high cost "flagship mission" in each decade. For the next decade, they had a choice between a…
Planck telescope and the Cosmic microwave background. ESA and Planck, CC BY
By Robert Crittenden, University of Portsmouth
In March, scientists working on the BICEP2 experiment, a microwave telescope based at the South Pole, announced that they had seen gravity waves from the early universe, created just after the Big Bang. Ever since the announcement, the cosmological community has been excitedly debating the implications of their detection.
However, their claims have been called into question by other cosmologists. There is growing evidence that at least part of what BICEP2 saw might be…
It seems that foreground galactic dust could be responsible for all of the signal observed by the BICEP2 team. Two more shoes are waiting to drop. Results of cross correlation and comparison of Planck data and BICEP2 data in the region BICEP2 was able to observe, and Planck's own data on the B modes. For now there is reason to doubt BICEP2. This story is so full of twist that this could change.
This was the big story. Gravitational waves had been detected by their effects on the cosmic microwave background. The B modes had been observed with…
Miranda is a small, icy moon of Uranus and one of the most visually striking and enigmatic bodies in the solar system.
Despite its relatively small size, Miranda appears to have experienced an episode of intense resurfacing that resulted in the formation of at least three remarkable and unique surface features -- polygonal-shaped regions called coronae.
These coronae are visible in Miranda's southern hemisphere, and each one is at least 200 km across. Arden corona, the largest, has ridges and troughs with up to 2 km of relief. Elsinore corona has an outer belt that is approx. 80 km…
An ultracompact dwarf galaxy known as M60-UCD1 harbors a supermassive black hole – the smallest galaxy known to contain such a massive light-sucking object.
The astronomers used the Gemini North 8-meter optical-and-infrared telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea and photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to discover that M60-UCD1 has a black hole with a mass equal to 21 million suns. Their finding suggests plenty of other ultracompact dwarf galaxies likely also contain supermassive black holes – and those dwarfs may be the stripped remnants of larger galaxies that were torn apart during…
The farside of the moon may have had some extremely explosive volcanic eruptions hundreds of millions of years ago. The findings, reported in a paper submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research and posted September 3 on arXiv.org, appear to be the first evidence of vigorous, explosive silica volcanism on the moon. In 2011, scientists identified a curious “hot spot” on the far side of the Moon that appears to be a small volcanic province created by the upwelling of silicic magma. The unusual location of the province and the surprising composition of the lava that formed it offer…