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      Citizen scientists make cosmic discoveries with a global telescope network

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      In January in Monterrey, Mexico, Iván Venzor was one of only a dozen people in the world to glimpse a potential Jupiter-sized planet crossing in front of a distant star.

      It happened too fast to see by eye — just a seconds-long flicker of light — but Venzor’s backyard telescope recorded the data, allowing him to verify the event with researchers. “I’m having dinner with my family, and I’m trying to discover a new kind of planet from a few meters outside,” says Venzor, a hobby astronomer. “It’s effortless.” More

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      The universe’s first supernovas probably produced water

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      The first generation of stars in the universe could have produced significant amounts of water upon their deaths, just 100 million to 200 million years after the Big Bang.

      Signatures of water have previously been observed some 780 million years after the Big Bang. But now, computer simulations suggest that this essential condition for life existed far earlier than astronomers thought, researchers report March 3 in Nature Astronomy.

      “The surprise was that the ingredients for life were all in place in dense cloud cores [leftover after stellar deaths] so early after the Big Bang,” says astrophysicist Daniel Whalen of the University of Portsmouth in England. More

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      A private mission to Venus aims to look for signs of life

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      BOSTON —Droplets of Venus’ clouds may someday come to Earth. Researchers are testing a device that can gather mist from our planetary neighbor’s atmosphere and deliver it to scientists so they can test the samples for signs of life.

      Venus is not an obvious place to look for life. Its globe-spanning cloud decks are made of sulfuric acid, “a feature that was long believed to be sterile for any organic chemistry,” said MIT planetary scientist Iaroslav Iakubivskyi in a Feb. 15 talk at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

      But in the last few years, lab experiments by Iakubivskyi and colleagues have suggested that sulfuric acid can support the organic chemistry that gives rise to stable nucleic and amino acids — the building blocks of DNA and proteins. Together, the data suggest that “rather than being a disruptive force, sulfuric acid might actually serve as a potential solvent for life-essential molecules,” he said. “Still, we have to go to Venus to test it.”

      A future mission to Venus could include floating a cloud-catching device from a giant balloon in the planet’s sulfuric acid atmosphere, as shown in this illustration.W. Buchanan

      Iakubivskyi’s team is working with the private spaceflight company Rocket Lab on a series of Venus probes called the Morning Star Missions. The first, a probe that will fall through Venus’ atmosphere and measure the sizes of sulfuric acid droplets, is slated to launch in 2026. A later mission would use a two-ton rocket to launch samples into Venus’ orbit to be picked up by a spacecraft returning to Earth. If successful, Morning Star would be the first private mission to another planet.

      Inspired by fog-catching plants in the Atacama desert, the team built a prototype cloud catcher from four layers of wire mesh. The wires can be charged to ionize atmospheric droplets and attract them to the mesh. More

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      Some of Earth’s meteors are probably coming all the way from a neighboring star system

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      Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun, is probably shedding comets and asteroids into our solar system — and even producing a few meteors in our sky.

      Located just 4.3 light-years from Earth, Alpha Centauri consists of three stars that revolve around one another. If Alpha Centauri has an Oort cloud of distant comets as the sun does, about a million of these objects larger than a football field are now in our solar system, astronomers Cole Gregg and Paul Wiegert of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, estimate in work submitted February 5 to arXiv.org. More

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      Ancient Mars wasn’t just wet. It was cold and wet

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      Frigid water helped paint Mars red and may have shaped a vast coastline, two new studies into the planet’s history reveal.

      Scientists have detected a possible ancient beach in Mars’ northern hemisphere and identified a water-containing mineral responsible for the planet’s rosy hue. The findings reveal details about conditions on Mars when the planet last contained large volumes of liquid water more than 3 billion years ago.

      “Early Mars has historically been thought of as either ‘cold and dry’ or ‘warm and wet,’” says Alberto Fairén, an astrobiologist at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid and at Cornell University who was not involved in the new work. “The two new studies, together, resolve the second part of the equation: Early Mars was wet; it was never dry.” More

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      A weird ice that may form on alien planets has finally been observed

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      A strange type of ice thought to dwell deep in the oceans of alien planets has finally been proven to exist.

      For the first time, researchers have directly observed a sort of hybrid phase of water called plastic ice, which forms at high temperatures and pressures and exhibits traits of both solid ice and liquid water. The observations, reported February 12 in Nature, may help researchers better understand the internal architecture and processes of other worlds in our solar system and beyond, some of which might be habitable. More

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      A fast radio burst from a dead galaxy puzzles astronomers

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      A staccato blast of electromagnetic energy has been tracked to an old, dead galaxy for the first time. The discovery supports the idea that there are more ways to produce such flares, called fast radio bursts, than originally thought.

      Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are millisecond-long eruptions of intense radio waves. Astronomers have observed thousands of these blasts, but only about 100 have been traced back to their origins, says astronomer Tarraneh Eftekhari of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Almost all of them came from lively neighborhoods full of young stars. More

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      The moon’s two grand canyons formed in less than 10 minutes

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      A giant impact 3.8 billion years ago sent a curtain of rock flying away from a point near the moon’s south pole. When that curtain fell, its rocks plunged up to 3.5 kilometers into the lunar surface with energies 130 times greater than the global inventory of nuclear weapons, new calculations show.

      And that’s how a hailstorm of boulders carved out two gargantuan canyons on the moon in less than 10 minutes.

      “They landed in a staccato fashion, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang,” says planetary geologist David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, who reports the finding February 4 in Nature Communications. More