The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, Tech

Mars' 600-Million-Year Drought -- Did It Drive Life Underground?

 

         

Mars may have been arid for more than 600 million years, making it too hostile for any life to survive on the planet’s surface, according to researchers who have been carrying out the painstaking task of analysing individual particles of Martian soil. The team also estimated that the soil on Mars had been exposed to liquid water --critical for life--for at most 5,000 years since its formation billions of years ago. 

NewsFlash: Habitable Zone Earth-like Planet Discovered 22 Light Years Away

 

               

A team of scientists using data from the Kepler space telescope say they have identified a planet 22 light-years away that could possibly harbor life. Astronomers from the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of California, Santa Cruz say the planet resides in the habitable zone – placing it in a region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface of the planet. The star is a member of a triple star system and has a different makeup than our Sun, being relatively lacking in metallic elements. 

Black Holes --Do They Function as Engines of Star Birth?

 

          

The centers of most --if not all-- galaxies host a black hole, some with masses of thousands of millions of Suns and consequently strong gravitational pulls that disrupt material around them. They had been thought to hinder the birth of stars, but now an international team of astronomers studying the nearby galaxy Centaurus A has found quite the opposite: a black hole that seems to be helping stars to form. 

Image of the Day: Starbursts in Distant Galaxies

 

         

 

In galaxies that glow most brightly in the infrared, astronomers suspect that frantic star formation is in progress, in episodes called starbursts. The European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory (ISO)  has observed many galaxies which are half as old as the Universe by staring through a window in the dust of our own Milky Way Galaxy, called the Lockman Hole. In nearer galaxies, ISO's astronomers can relate strong infrared emissions to collisions and violent eruptions in galactic cores, which have punctuated the evolution of the galaxies.

Comment of the Day: On Fermi's Paradox

 

         


"I believe Fermi's paradox to be an arrogant assumption. Say "intelligent" life is rare enough that it only occurs once or twice per galaxy. Sure that makes the universe potentialy teeming with intelligent life.... But that also means that the nearest intelligent life would be millions of light years away... or if in our own galaxy, say the other side of the galaxy, 100,000 light years away.

"Humans May be One of the Early Advanced Species in Our Universe" -- Dimitar Sasselov of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

 

                

Intelligent life may be in it's "very young" stage in the observable Universe. Its 200 billion galaxies show a clear potential to continue on as we see them today for hundreds of billions of years, if not much longer. Because planets and life are so young in our Universe, says Harvard's Dimitar Sasselov, perhaps "the human species are not late comers to the party. We may be among the early ones."

Life Bearing Super-Earths --Will be Geologically Active with Volcanoes & Plate Tectonics (Today's Most Viewed)

 

          

"Super-Earths would be more geologically active than our planet, experiencing more vigorous plate tectonics due to thinner plates under more stress. Earth itself was found to be a borderline case, not surprisingly since the slightly smaller planet Venus is tectonically inactive."  

Harvard's Center for Astronomy

NewsFlash: Russia to Begin Search for Alien Planets

     

 

Russia plans to start their own search for planets outside our solar system following U.S. and French successes in finding such exoplanets. The U.S. Kepler space telescope and France's CoRoT space telescope have been successful in identifying exoplanets, while Russia's project will be Earth based. Ground-based telescopes can be used for the observation of a star's small drop in brightness occurring when the orbit of a planet passes in front of the star, known as a transit detection.

Comment of the Day: "Humans May be One of the Early Advanced Species in Our Universe"

 

         


"While I love bringing new ideas to the table, I have to say that I don't see a paradox as Fermi does, but an arrogant assumption by Fermi and those who endure his paradox. Even if you wish to dismiss the possible interpretations of some human artifacts as laying claim to previous encounters with extraterrestrial intelligence there is no paradox, for our inability to be aware of non-human intelligence (likely greater than our own) has far more possible causes than merely there is no ETI within our sight."

SiliconJon 

Original Post

SpaceX Successfully Tests SuperDraco Engine --Ability to Perform On-Target Propulsive Landings Anywhere in the Solar System

         

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has successfully test fired SuperDraco, a powerful new engine that will play a critical role in the company’s efforts to change the future of human spaceflight.

“SuperDraco engines represent the best of cutting edge technology,” said Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO and Chief Technology Officer. “These engines will power a revolutionary launch escape system that will make Dragon the safest spacecraft in history and enable it to land propulsively on Earth or another planet with pinpoint accuracy.”

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Will Exo Planet "Lights" Signal a Technological Civilization? (Today's Most Viewed)

 

     

If an alien civilization builds brightly-lit cities like those shown above of the Iberian Peninsula, future generations of telescopes might allow us to detect them. This would offer a new method of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence elsewhere in our Galaxy.

Predicting Alien Planets With Earth-Like, Rocky Compositions

 

              



In a new study, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists and collaborators came up with new methods similar to those used in weapons research for deriving and testing the equation of state (EOS) of matter in exoplanets and figured out the mass-radius and mass-pressure relations for materials relevant to planetary interiors.

"NASA Satellite Detects Alien Atoms" --Different from Chemical Composition of Our Solar System

 

                          


NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, the centerpiece of a $169 million mission mapping the frontier of the sun's influence, has detected atoms from interstellar space streaming by Earth, that are different from the chemical make-up of the solar system, scientists announced Tuesday. 

The IBEX satellite observed hydrogen, oxygen, neon and helium atoms that originated in interstellar space, the vacuous medium between stars in the Milky Way galaxy and found 74 oxygen atoms for every 20 neon atoms in the interstellar material, compared with 111 oxygen atoms for every 20 neon atoms inside the solar system. Most of the interstellar medium is made up of hydrogen and helium. Heavier elements, such as oxygen and neon, are spread by exploding supernovae at the end of a star's life cycle, according to NASA.

1st Video of Moon's Far Side! --NASA's GRAIL Mission

 

 

Image of the Day: A Gigantic Inter-Galaxy Shock Wave

 

           

This false-color composite image of the Stephan's Quintet galaxy cluster clearly shows one of the largest shock waves ever seen (the green arc above), produced by one galaxy falling toward another at over a million miles per hour. It is made up of data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and a ground-based telescope in Spain. What makes the Stephan's Quintet of galaxies so fascinating are the rare red blobs found in NGC 7320, the brightest of the group. 

"Solar Systems Common Across the Milky Way," NASA Probe Hints --Bodes Well for a Habitable Zone 'Super-Earth' Discovery

 

          

 

NASA's Kepler Mission astronomers are looking for environments that make complex chemistry viable --pathways to life in the Universe. Ideal planets will maintain surface temperatures in which large molecules can survive and can attain chemical concentrates that can be stable over time.

Russia's Obsession with Mars' Mystery Moon --A New Mission to Phobos?

 

                

 

Russia will send another sample mission to the Martian moon Phobos if the European Space Agency (ESA) decides not to include Russia in its ExoMars program, the head of Russia’s space agency said on Tuesday. The space agency also announced that cosmic radiation was the most likely cause of the failure of the Phobos-Grunt probe that crashed to Earth this month, and suggested that a low-quality imported component may have been vulnerable to the radiation.

Phobos-Grunt, Russia's most ambitious planetary mission in decades, was launched on November 9, but failed due to propulsion failure and crashed back to Earth on January 15.

Image of the Day: The Milky Way Over Tenerife

      

The awesome iamge of the Milky Way arch above is actually a deep digital fusion of nine photos that created a panorama fully 360 across. Taken in Teide National Park in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, the image includes the Teide volcano, visible near the image center, behind a volcanic landscape that includes many large rocks. 

24 Million Generations! Evolutionary Change in Body Size on Earth --From Mouse to Elephant

 

          

Evolutionary changes in body size take a very long time. A mouse-to-elephant size change would take at least 24 million generations based on the maximum speed of evolution in the fossil record,  Becoming smaller can happen much faster than becoming bigger: the evolution of pygmy elephants took 10 times fewer generations than the equivalent sheep-to-elephant size change.

Earth's Largest Telescope Soon to Scan Cosmos for Extraterrestrial Signals

 

          

 

The image above shows the supermassive black hole in the core of a distant galaxy known as Cygnus A spews jets of gas into space over distances of more than 200,000 light-years. The jets (orange) were imaged by the new International Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) Telescope in Europe. The picture shows how the jets slam into the hot gas surrounding the galaxy (blue, imaged by NASA's Chandra x-ray space telescope). 

Light from a 25-Million-Year Old Epic Catastrophe in an Odd Galaxy Reached Earth this Month

                


The image above shows the aftermath of a stellar explosion of epic proportions that happened 25 million years ago in an odd-shaped galaxy that may have merged with a second galaxy, while saber-toothed cats and mammoths roamed the Earth.

A star tens of times more massive than our sun 25 million light years away blew up in supernova explosion. The burst of light from that explosion raced through the universe to finally reach Earth a few weeks ago, when amateur astronomers, who regularly survey the sky looking for these events, noticed a small blob in the glow of the galaxy that wasn't there in older pictures.

NASA Smackdown -- 2011 Mono Lake Arsenic-Based Life Claims Refuted

 

        

 

"We have cracked open the door to what is possible for life elsewhere in the universe," Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and U.S. Geological Survey, who led the NASA Mono Lake study.

Rosie Redfield of the University of British Columbia has steadfastly raised doubts about the headline-grabbing news about arsenic-based life discovery at Mono Lake in November 2010. Redfield then she set out to replicate the initial findings, getting the original bacteria and seeing whether they can build DNA from arsenic when deprived of phosphorus. She then started to chronicle her experiences on her blog. 

Image of the Day: Pandora's Cluster --The Most Colossal Known Galaxy Mashup

 

          

This is the most colossal known smash-up observed in the universe. This awesome bundle of galaxies, nicknamed Pandora's cluster, turns out to be the result of a violent mashup between at least four separate galaxy clusters that occured over hundreds of millions of years.

Strange Red Galaxy --Harbors a Monster Black Hole 100 Million Times Mass of Sun

 

          

A monster black hole 100 million times the mass of the Sun is feeding off gas, dust and  a ring of stars at the centre of Galaxy NGC-1097 50 million light-years away. The star-ringed black hole forms the eye of the galaxy which was photographed by the US space agency's Spitzer Space Telescope in California.

NASA Solves Mystery of Earth's 'Missing Energy'

 

        

Two years ago, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., released a study claiming that inconsistencies between satellite observations of Earth's heat and measurements of ocean heating amounted to evidence of "missing energy" in the planet's system. 

Where was it going? Or, they wondered, was something wrong with the way researchers tracked energy as it was absorbed from the sun and emitted back into space? asked an international team of atmospheric scientists and oceanographers, led by Norman Loeb of NASA's Langley Research Center in and including Graeme Stephens of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

Was the Moon Once Powered by a Dynamo Core? MIT Research Says "Yes"

 

                 

MIT's research on an ancient lunar rock suggests that the moon once harbored a long-lived dynamo — a molten, convecting core of liquid metal that generated a strong magnetic field 3.7 billion years ago. The findings, published today in Science, point to a dynamo that lasted much longer than scientists previously thought, and suggest that an alternative energy source may have powered the dynamo.  

CERN Zeroes In on the 'Great Antimatter Mystery'

                    


The question of whether normal matter's shadowy counterpart anti-matter exerts a kind of "anti-gravity" is soonto be answered, according to researchers at the University of California Riverside, who are getting closer to addressing the question once and for all. The team says it has prepared stable pairs of electrons and their anti-matter particles, positrons. A beam of these pairs can be used to finally solve the anti-gravity puzzle.

EcoAlert: Bus-Sized Object Buzzed Earth Today

 

           

A small asteroid the size of a city bus zoomed between Earth and the moon's orbit today, Friday Jan. 25, days after its discovery, but it never posed a threat to our planet, NASA says.The asteroid, 2012 BX34 passed within 36,750 miles (59,044 kilometers) of Earth when it made its closest approach at 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT). The space rock is about 37 feet (11 meters) wide and would have disintegrated in Earth's atmosphere long before it reached the ground, if it had reached the planet at all, NASA scientists said.

Image of the Day: Massive Elliptical Galaxy & Cosmic Wave a Million Light years Long

 

         

A Naval Research Laboratory scientist is part of a team that has recently discovered that vast clouds of hot gas are "sloshing" in Abell 2052, a galaxy cluster located about 480 million light years from Earth. The scientists are studying the hot (30 million degree) gas using X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical data from the Very Large Telescope to see the galaxies.