“The first galaxies in the early universe may illuminate what type of dark matter we have today,” says Mark Vogelsberger, associate professor of physics in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “Either we see this filament pattern, and fuzzy dark matter is plausible, or we don’t, and we can rule that model out. We now have a blueprint for how to do this.”
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.
“The Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda in about four billion years. So knowing what kind of a monster our galaxy is up against is useful in finding out the Milky Way’s ultimate fate,” said Dougal Mackey from the Australia National University’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. “Andromeda has a much bigger and more complex stellar halo than the Milky Way, which indicates that it has cannibalized many more galaxies, possibly larger ones.”
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.
Supermassive black holes simply grow along with the stars independent of their host galaxy’s mass, the larger environment, or the cosmic epoch, says Harvard astrophysicist Angelo Ricarte.
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