Futurity.org » space

Will worms in space lead to life on Mars?

Lindsay Brooke-Nottingham — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:12:27 +0000

U. NOTTINGHAM (UK) — A microscopic worm may offer clues to how humans will cope with long-term space exploration.

New research shows that in space, C. elegans develop from egg to adulthood and produces progeny exactly how they do on earth, making the worms an ideal and cost-effective experimental system to investigate the effects of long-duration space travel.

Are alien probes hiding in vast space?

A'ndrea Elyse Messer-Penn State — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:12:11 +0000

PENN STATE (US) — Why have we never found evidence of extraterrestrial probes in our universe? A new study suggest that, from a mathematical point of view, we have not looked in enough places.

“The vastness of space, combined with our limited searches to date, implies that any remote unpiloted exploratory probes of extraterrestrial origin would likely remain unnoticed,” write Jacob Haqq-Misra and Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, two postdoctoral researchers at Penn State, in a paper posted online on ArXiv.

Gas ‘bullets’ shoot from giant black hole

Andrew Duff-Southampton — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:34:06 +0000

SOUTHAMPTON (UK) — Astronomers have uncovered some striking features in the gases emitted from the regions close to one of the brightest supermassive black holes known to exist.

The results are published in the latest issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics journal.

Mars rover finds early rock at crater’s rim

Tony Fitzpatrick-WUSTL — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:04:05 +0000

WASHINGTON U.-ST. LOUIS (US) — The Mars rover Opportunity is poised on the edge of the vast Endeavour Crater, sampling a rock unlike any other examined during its mission.

“Chester Lake” is the second rock the rover has sampled with a microscopic imager and a spectrometer since reaching its long-term destination, the rim of the Endeavour crater, in August. Unlike the first rock, which was a boulder tossed by excavation of a small crater on Endeavour’s rim, Chester Lake is an outcrop of bedrock.

Could briny drops harbor life on Mars?

Nicole Casal Moore-Michigan — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 20:00:31 +0000

U. MICHIGAN (US) — Beads of liquid brine may open the door to the possibility of microbial life on Mars, according to an international study.

The beads were photographed three years ago on one of the Phoenix lander’s legs.

Gargantuan, farthest water mass found

Deborah Williams-Hedges-Caltech — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 20:12:42 +0000

CALTECH/U. COLORADO (US) — A mass of water vapor in a quasar that is 30 billion trillion miles away is at least 140 trillion times that of all the water in the world’s oceans combined, and 100,000 times more massive than the sun.

The discovery, detailed in two studies in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, is the largest and farthest reservoir ever detected. The quasar’s light has taken 12 billion years to reach Earth, a time when the universe was only 1.6 billion years old.

‘Twisted’ solution to antimatter vs. matter

Peter Dunn-Warwick — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 15:06:38 +0000

U. WARWICK (UK) — Physicists may have neglected the significant effect of our galaxy’s rotation on the pattern of how subatomic particles breakdown, a new study suggests.

The work could help explain one of the outstanding puzzles of particle physics—and may shed new light on the related conundrum of why different amounts of matter and antimatter seem to have survived the birth of our universe.

Scientists would like a neat universe where the laws of physics are so universal that every particle and its antiparticle behave in the same way. However in recent years experimental observations of particles known as Kaons and B Mesons have revealed significant differences in how their matter and antimatter versions decay.

Universe born in a spin—and still whirling?

Nicole Casal Moore-Michigan — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:05:47 +0000

U. MICHIGAN (US) — New findings raise questions about the universe’s assumed mirror symmetry—and seem to suggest the early universe spun on an axis.

Physicists and astronomers have long believed that the universe has mirror symmetry, like a basketball. Physics professor Michael Longo and a team of five undergraduates at the University of Michigan cataloged the rotation direction of tens of thousands of spiral galaxies photographed in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Universe’s most distant quasar

Emma Thorne-Nottingham — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:28:13 +0000

U. NOTTINGHAM (UK) — Astronomers have discovered the most distant quasar to date—the brightest object yet found from a time when the Universe was less than 800 million years old.

This brilliant and rare beacon is powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun. The discovery—detailed recently in the journal Nature—could help further our understanding of a universe still in its infancy following the Big Bang.

Is Saturn moon hiding a salty ocean?

Jim Scott CU-Boulder — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:36:53 +0000

U. COLORADO-BOULDER (US) — Samples of icy spray ejected from a Saturn moon and collected by the Cassini spacecraft make a strong case for the existence of a subterranean saltwater ocean.

The spray shooting into space from Saturn’s moon Enceladus—one of 19 known moons of Saturn—originated from the so-called “tiger stripe” surface fractures at the moon’s south pole. The plumes apparently have created the material for the faint E Ring that traces the orbit of Enceladus around Saturn.