In January, 2000, an asteroid, harboring some of the oldest fluids in the solar system, burst into Earth’s atmosphere, landing on the frozen surface of Tagish Lake in British Columbia, Canada. The now-iconic Tagish Lake meteorite appears to have originated in the middle of the asteroid belt as part of a meteoroid that, in its pre-atmospheric state, had a mass of about 200,000 kilograms, belonging to a rare class known as carbonaceous chondrites.
Imagine living on a planet with constant storms with thunderheads reaching 40 miles from base to top — five times taller than those on Earth, and powerful lightning flashes up to three times more powerful than Earth’s largest “superbolts.” Welcome to gas giant Jupiter.
“There must be hundreds of millions of black holes out there, but we know about only very few. Knowing what to look for should put us in a better position to find them,” says ESO astronomer Thomas Rivinius about the discovery of a black hole lying just 1000 light-years from Earth. Finding a black hole in a triple system so close by indicates that we are seeing just “the tip of an exciting iceberg.”
The outburst was equal to 1,038 nuclear bombs. “This is an extreme case…” said Michael Calzadilla, at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI) of a massive black hole explosion in galaxy cluster SPT-0528 so powerful that it punched two holes in the cosmos. Even though the outburst happened billions of years ago, before our solar system had even formed, it took around 6.7 billion years for light from the galaxy cluster to travel all the way to Chandra, NASA’s X-ray emissions observatory that orbits Earth.
“It’s a shame we don’t have it naturally here on earth, but on Jupiter, there are oceans of metallic hydrogen. We want to find out how these oceans give rise to Jupiter’s enormous magnetic field,” observed Mohamed Zaghoo with the University of Rochester’s Laboratory of Laser Energetics (LLE) and colleague Gilbert ‘Rip’ Collins, director of the high-energy-density physics program. Astrophysicists have long thought that planets with magnetic fields are better able to sustain gaseous atmospheres and are more likely to harbor life.
Some 65 million years ago the greatest asteroid impact in a billion years may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth. Blasted debris escaped Earth’s gravitational force forming irregular orbits around the sun, eventually finding its way to the planets and moons of the solar system. Mars was eventually dusted with the debris and according to a 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology, the 14-kilometer-wide object ejected tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble that may have landed on Saturn’s moon, Titan and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter – all satellites that scientists believe harbor promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this debris still carried living microbes.
