The ongoing deep dive into data from NASA’s Cassini mission has found smaller and soluble organic building blocks on Saturn’s ocean-moon Enceladus – potential precursors for amino acids and other ingredients required for life on Earth. The findings shows that Enceladus’ ocean has reactive building blocks in abundance, and it’s another green light in the investigation of the habitability of Enceladus, said co-author Frank Postberg, about new kinds of organic compounds, the ingredients of amino acids, that have been detected in the Enceladus’ towering plumes.
NASA chief scientist Jim Green, says we’re just years away from finding life on Mars, but the world is not ready for the “revolutionary” implications of the discovery as two Mars-bound rovers –from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA)– are scheduled to launch next year and will land on the red planet by March 2021 and one or both could find evidence of life within months. The discovery will start a whole new line of thinking, says Green. “I don’t think we’re prepared for the results. I’ve been worried about that because I think we’re close to finding it and making some announcements,” he told Great Britain’s The Telegraph.
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“We were only looking for pairs of black holes at the time, and yet, through our selection technique, we stumbled upon this amazing system,” said Ryan Pfeifle of George Mason University about an ancient event that occurred a billion miles away in the depths of space. “This is the strongest evidence yet found for such a triple system of actively feeding supermassive black holes.”
What is fascinating, says NASA’s principal investigator of the mystery, is the reason why scientists have spent so much time trying to find the black hole seeds –“because it sheds light on processes that happened in the early universe. What were the masses of relic black holes, or new formation mechanisms for black holes that we haven’t thought of yet,” said Fiona Harrison, professor of physics at Caltech and principal investigator for NASA’s NuSTAR mission, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
