Quarks, the smallest building-blocks of matter, never appear alone in nature. They are always tightly bound inside the protons and neutrons. However, neutron stars, weighing as much as the Sun, but being just the size of a city like Frankfurt, possess a core so dense that a transition from neutron matter to quark matter may occur. Physicists refer to this process as a phase transition, a fancy term to describe a holistic change in the overall arrangement of a system’s structure, and in turn, its function.
“The Hubble Constant is one of the most important numbers in cosmology because it is essential for estimating the curvature of space and the age of the universe, as well as exploring its fate,” said Hiranya Peiris, at University College London. Peiris, a British astrophysicist best known for her work on the cosmic microwave background radiation, was one of 27 scientists who received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018 for their “detailed maps of the early universe.”
“Our calculations indicate that, coinciding with the so-called ‘Heavy Bombardment’ produced by the gravitational destabilization of the main asteroid belt, billions of tons of carbonaceous chondrites reached Earth about 3.8 billion years ago. And they did it transporting in their fine matrices water and other volatile elements in form of hydrated minerals”, says Josep M. Trigo-Rodríguez at the Institute of Space Sciences.
NASA has selected a new space mission, SPHEREx, that will deliver an unprecedented map of the Milky Way containing ‘fingerprints’ from the first moments in the universe’s history, said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “And we’ll have new clues to one of the greatest mysteries in science: What made the universe expand so quickly less than a nanosecond after the big bang?”
On August 31, 2018 John Callas, Opportunity project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
reported: “If we do not hear back after 45 days, the team will be forced to conclude that the Sun-blocking dust and the Martian cold have conspired to cause some type of fault from which the rover will more than likely not recover,” said John Callas, Opportunity project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Decades of research have led scientists to look deeply into the nature of life itself — what it is, how it began on Earth, and what other worlds might also support it. A shift in focus is now emerging as NASA scientists recognize that with a strategic push the possibility of detecting life beyond Earth could be on the horizon with the creation of new teams: Center for Life Detection Science, Network for Life Detection, Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures, and Oceans Across Space and Time.
