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There Are Blueberries on Mars. Sort Of. – Live Science

https://www.livescience.com/64265-mars-blueberries-mystery.html

It was just a few months after NASA’s Opportunity rover touched down on Mars in 2004 that it spotted a geological curiosity: tiny, iron-rich spheres scattered across the rock surface near the robot’s landing site. Snack-loving scientists working with the mission dubbed these objects “blueberries,” but the features were easier to name than to understand. Their recipe remains something of a puzzle. Trying to sort out the origins of these blueberries has always involved studying similar-looking spherical formations here on Earth. New research takes its inspiration from these terrestrial analogs to offer a new idea of the chemistry that may have gone … Read more

Ten Bizarre Things We Launched Into Space This Year – Live Science

Humanity Star

This past year, engineers launched many oddities into space, including a Tesla Roadster, a gold-plated canopic jar and a cosmic disco ball. The total list of launched objects is lengthy, so here are the top 10 coolest objects (in our opinion) that blasted spaceward in 2018: Cosmic disco ball Got an urge to dance some disco? This past year, you had the opportunity to do it under the cosmic disco ball, which was launched into orbit on Jan. 21 by the U.S. company Rocket Lab.  The 3-foot-long (1 m) reflective ball’s official name is the Humanity Star, and it was … Read more

SPACE: Star Births Its Own Twin – Live Science

a star is born

A close-up look at the birth of a star has revealed a surprise: Not one new stellar body, but two. In 2017, scientists using a new array of radio telescopes in the Chilean desert were observing a massive young star named MM 1a in an active star-forming region of the galaxy more than 10,000 light-years away. As they analyzed the data, they realized that MM 1a was accompanied by a second, fainter object, which they dubbed MM 1b. This, they found, was the first star’s smaller sibling, formed from the spray of dust and gases it holds in its gravitational … Read more

Are Black Holes Portals to the Future? – Live Science

black hole - pixabay

Black holes are among the most mysterious places in the universe; locations where the very fabric of space and time are warped so badly that not even light can escape from them. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, at their center lies a singularity, a place where the mass of many stars is crushed into a volume with exactly zero size. However, two recent physics papers, published on Dec.10 in the journals Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D, respectively, may make scientists reconsider what we think we know about black holes. Black holes might not last forever, and … Read more

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

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