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NASA Probe Makes Tantalizing Find – Live Science

Asteroid Bennu

It looks like NASA chose the right space rock for its asteroid-sampling mission. The agency’s OSIRIS-REx probe, which just arrived at Bennu last week, has already found hydrated minerals on the 1,640-foot-wide (500 meters) near-Earth asteroid, mission team members announced yesterday (Dec. 10). The discovery suggests that liquid water was once plentiful in the interior of Bennu’s parent body, which scientists think was a roughly 62-mile-wide (100 kilometers) rock in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (Bennu is likely a pile of rubble that coalesced after a massive impact shattered that larger object hundreds of millions of years … Read more

SPACE: Scientists Propose Tunnelbot to Explore Europa

tunnelbot

A group of scientists wants to send a nuclear-powered “tunnelbot” to Europa to blaze a path through the Jovian moon’s thick shell of ice and search for life. Europa, the fourth largest of Jupiter’s 53 moons, is one of the best candidates in our solar system for hosting alien life. Researchers believe that its icy crust hides a liquid water ocean and that vents through that crust might deliver the necessary heat and chemical ingredients for life into that ocean.To peek beneath that thick veil of ice, researchers on the NASA Glenn Research COMPASS team (a group of scientists and … Read more

Is Mars Hiding Life Under the Surface? – Live Science

Insight - NASA

To find life on Mars, scientists may need to give up surface exploration and “go deep.” Typically, Mars missions searching for signs of life target the planet’s surface, at sites where there are signs of ancient water (a reliable indicator of where life is found on Earth). But while no life has turned up yet on Mars’ surface, there may be an abundance of microbial Martians congregating underground, according to research presented Dec. 11 here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). In recent decades, explorations underground on Earth have revealed the so-called deep biosphere — a … Read more

First There Was Dark Matter. Now We Have Dark Fluid – Live Science

dark fluid - pixabay

d It’s embarrassing, but astrophysicists are the first to admit it. Our best theoretical model can only explain 5 percent of the universe. The remaining 95 percent is famously made up almost entirely of invisible, unknown material dubbed dark energy and dark matter. So even though there are a billion trillion stars in the observable universe, they are actually extremely rare. The two mysterious dark substances can only be inferred from gravitational effects. Dark matter may be an invisible material, but it exerts a gravitational force on surrounding matter that we can measure. Dark energy is a repulsive force that … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Dust

Sometimes the most insane acts of destruction render a beautiful rebirth in its place. Not often, but every once in a while. In the great whirling dance of the cosmos, we find that beauty the most. R Aquarii just showed us a magnificent one. This binary system has been documented as far back as 1073 CE by Korean astronomers, when the pair lit up with a massive solar jet arced out into its surrounding hourglass nebula. This duo has an extremely complex relationship, the white dwarf stealing mass from the red giant, a greedy cannibalism accompanied by a spectacular light … Read more

Have Aliens Already Visited Earth? – Live Science

ufo - pixabay

Fox News published a startling article Monday (Dec. 3) with the headline “NASA scientist says Earth may have been visited by aliens.” Unsurprisingly, that news rocketed around the web, with similar articles soon turning up in the New York Post, Russia Today and The Daily Wire. (Fox appears to have been the first major U.S. news source to run with the story.) These articles are based on a document on NASA’s website by Silvano Colombano, a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. It really does argue that scientists should at least take seriously the notion that … Read more

SPACE: NASA’s Stunning Moon Photo Will Make You Swoon

Moon - NASA

The moon is pretty enough here from Earth, but it’s even more stunning up close, as this new photograph from NASA reminds us. The image was captured on Nov. 3 by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the moon since 2009. While the crater itself is not quite so young, it’s still pretty fresh — it formed less than 100 million years ago, the spacecraft’s camera team said. “Look closely at this crater. Some might say they see a hole in the ground,” representatives of Arizona State University, which runs the three cameras on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, … Read more

SCIENCE: What Is Dark Matter?

dark matter - pixabay

In the 1930s, a Swiss astronomer named Fritz Zwicky noticed that galaxies in a distant cluster were orbiting one another much faster than they should have been given the amount of visible mass they had. He proposed than an unseen substance, which he called dark matter, might be tugging gravitationally on these galaxies. Since then, researchers have confirmed that this mysterious material can be found throughout the cosmos, and that it is six times more abundant than the normal matter that makes up ordinary things like stars and people. Yet despite seeing dark matter throughout the universe, scientists are mostly … Read more

SPACE: When the Sun Blows, There Will Be Sand Everywhere

sand - pixabay

Until now, scientists didn’t know for sure where most of the stuff around us came from. Now, they do. Silica, or silicon dioxide (SiO2), is just about the most abundant thing here on the outer shell of Earth. It makes up most of the planet’s crust by mass — about 60 percent, according to NASA. It’s the main thing in sand at the beach. It’s common in dirt and clay. It makes up most of the stuff in sandstone and quartz, and it’s a critical ingredient in feldspar (a super common sort of rock). Granite has a lot of it. … Read more

SPACE: Dark Matter Hurricane’s a Comin’

dark matter hurricane

Scientists think there’s a “dark matter hurricane” heading toward Earth. In fact, it might even be blowing through us already. But don’t worry — it’s definitely not going to kill you. Mostly, it’s just a bunch of normal dark matter with especially good branding. And it really is headed (more or less) this way. Here’s what’s going on: Back in 2017, astronomers spotted a stretched-out line of stars passing through our solar system’s general region of the Milky Way. The scientists named this group the “S1 stream,” identifying it as the nearest of several stellar streams moving through the galaxy. … Read more