A 0.4-millimeter diameter iron-rich spherule. Credit: Avi Loeb/The Galileo Project Our solar system does not exist in isolation. It formed within a stellar nursery along with hundreds of sibling stars, and even today has the occasional interaction with interstellar objects such as ‘Oumuamua and Borisov. So it’s reasonable to presume …
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Artist rendering showing an interior cross-section of the crust of Enceladus, which shows how hydrothermal activity may be causing the plumes of water at the moon’s surface. Credits: NASA-GSFC/SVS, NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI In the next decade, space agencies will expand the search for extraterrestrial life beyond Mars, where all of our astrobiology …
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The lifting body aircraft on Rogers Dry Lake, near what is now NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, include, from left, the X-24A, the M2-F3, and the HL-10. Credit: NASA NASA researchers are looking at the possibility of using a wingless, unpowered aircraft design from the 1960s to …
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Evan Anzalone, at lower left, principal investigator for the Lunar Node-1 demonstrator payload, monitors the LN-1 mission from the Lunar Utilization Control Area in the Huntsville Operations Support Center at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. LN-1 successfully tested an autonomous navigation and geo-positioning system that will make …
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A map of dark matter from 2021 using weak gravitational lensing data set. Credit: Dark Energy Survey. darkenergysurvey.org/des-year-3-cosmology-results-papers/. New research in Physical Review Letters (PRL) has proposed a novel method to detect light dark matter candidates using laser interferometry to measure the oscillatory electric fields generated by these candidates. Dark …
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Angular diameter distance as a function of redshift in CCC+TL and ΛCDM models. Credit: The Astrophysical Journal (2024). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ad1bc6 The current theoretical model for the composition of the universe is that it’s made of normal matter, dark energy and dark matter. A new University of Ottawa study challenges this. …
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The Large Magellanic cloud. Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/SMASH/D. Nidever (Montana State University) Image processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin. A fresh look at red giant stars offers key insights into cosmic distance measurements and a way to measure the universe’s expansion with the highest accuracy. …
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Credit: BFA / Warner Bros Frank Herbert’s Dune is epic sci-fi storytelling with an environmental message at its heart. The novels and movies are set on the desert planet of Arrakis, which various characters dream of transforming into a greener world—much like some envision for Mars today. We investigated Arrakis …
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Discs giving birth to new planets, seen by the Very Large Telescope. Credit: ESO/C. Ginski, A. Garufi, P.-G. Valegård et al. When we look out to the stars, it is typically not a yearning for the distant depths of outer space that drives us. When we are looking out there, …
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Protein fragments identified new types of extremophiles, which survive harsh environments on Earth, and could someday help astrobiologists identify alien life. Credit: Journal of Proteome Research (2024). DOI: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.3c00538 Perfectly adapted microorganisms live in extreme environments, from deep-sea trenches to mountaintops. Learning more about how these extremophiles survive in hostile …
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