Jezero crater, where NASA plans to land a new Mars rover next year, is home to the remains of an ancient river delta. Researchers have now found deposits of hydrated silica, a mineral that’s especially good at preserving microfossils and other signs of past life, near the delta.
“Seeing this star is really amazing as we know it must have formed in the galactic center, a place very different to our local environment. It is a visitor from a strange land,” said NASA Hubble Fellow Ting Li with the Carnegie Observatories and Princeton University about an ultrafast star, S5-HVS1, traveling at a blistering 6 million km/h, that was ejected by the supermassive black hole at the heart at the Milky Way five million years ago. (more…)
The discovery of the language of life, an ancient, long molecule called DNA with eight nucleotide letters suitable for storing and transmitting information, was a breakthrough in our knowledge of the range of possibilities necessary for life on Earth and beyond. Now, new studies suggest that alternatives to DNA-based life, as we know it on Earth, may be possible on other worlds.
“This could be a unique way of probing the physics around these supermassive black holes in a way that could not be probed in any other way,” said theoretical gravitational wave astrophysicist, Rochester Institute of Technology’s Assistant Professor Richard O’Shaughnessy, about simulations that could explain the origins of back hole mergers. “It offers unique insight into how the centers of galaxies grow, which is of course essential to understanding how galaxies as a whole grow, which explains most of the structure in the universe.”
“Just because we happen to live in a region that is overwhelmingly dominated by matter doesn’t preclude the existence of other regions of space that are instead dominated by antimatter,” observes Dan Hooper, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“Analysis of TESS data focuses on individual stars and planets one at a time, but I wanted to step back and highlight everything at once, really emphasizing the spectacular view TESS gives us of the entire sky,” said Ethan Kruse, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center of a new mosaic of the southern sky produced from a year of observations that includes supernova, red giant Betelgeuse, Orion Nebula, satellite galaxies, and the flare from a star ripped apart by a supermassive black hole.