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      The universe may have a complex geometry — like a doughnut

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      The cosmos may have something in common with a doughnut.

      In addition to their fried, sugary goodness, doughnuts are known for their shape, or in mathematical terms, their topology. In a universe with an analogous, complex topology, you could travel across the cosmos and end up back where you started. Such a cosmos hasn’t yet been ruled out, physicists report in the April 26 Physical Review Letters. 

      On a shape with boring, or trivial topology, any closed path you draw can be shrunk down to a point. For example, consider traveling around Earth. If you were to go all the way around the equator, that’s a closed loop, but you could squish that down by shifting your trip up to the North Pole. But the surface of a doughnut has complex, or nontrivial, topology (SN: 10/4/16). A loop that encircles the doughnut’s hole, for example, can’t be shrunk down, because the hole limits how far you can squish it.  More

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      A weaker magnetic field may have paved the way for marine life to go big

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      Earth’s magnetic field protects life from harmful cosmic radiation. But sometime between about 590 million and 565 million years ago, that security blanket seems to have been much thinner — with far-reaching effects for the development of life on Earth, researchers suggest.

      A weaker magnetic field could account for the higher levels of oxygen recorded in the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans around that time — and for the ensuing proliferation of macroscopic marine animals, the team reports in the May 2 Communications Earth & Environment. More

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      Separating science fact from fiction in Netflix’s ‘3 Body Problem’ 

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      The orbits of a trio of stars can be so chaotic that it’s impossible to precisely calculate the stars’ future trajectories. That’s the real science behind the name of the hit Netflix show, 3 Body Problem. Much of the sci-fi show’s action hinges on a variety of other physics concepts. But in service of the plot, some of that science is taken to implausible — or even physically impossible — lengths.

      To get a handle on what’s real and what’s fiction, Science News spoke with cosmologist Jacques Delabrouille of CNRS in Paris and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.  More

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      Pluto’s heart-shaped basin might not hide an ocean after all

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      Rather than a vast ocean, Pluto’s heart might be hiding a huge, heavy treasure.

      Computer simulations suggest that an object about 730 kilometers wide, slightly larger than the asteroid Vesta, could have slammed into the dwarf planet billions of years ago, forming the famous Sputnik Planitia and leaving behind a rocky remnant, researchers report April 15 in Nature Astronomy.

      Sputnik Planitia first appeared in images taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it zipped past Pluto in 2015 (SN: 7/15/15). The heart-shaped feature, which has roughly the same area as the Democratic Republic of Congo, sits three to four kilometers below the rest of Pluto’s surface and is filled with frozen nitrogen. More

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      Our picture of habitability on Europa, a top contender for hosting life, is changing

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      THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS — On stage, before a silent assembly of scientists, many of whom are experts on alien worlds, planetary scientist Paul Byrne assumed his position behind the podium. He had come to present research on Europa, a moon of Jupiter that almost certainly harbors a subsurface ocean. The moon is thought to be among the most promising places to explore for life in our solar system. But much of that promise clings to an unknown — the geologic activity of Europa’s seafloor.

      “I don’t think there’s anything happening on the ocean floor,” said Byrne, of Washington University in St. Louis, to the crowd gathered at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference on March 11. More

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      How a sugar acid crucial for life could have formed in interstellar clouds

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      Researchers may have figured out how a crucial ingredient that cells need to produce energy could form in deep space.

      Calculations and lab experiments suggest that glyceric acid can arise from radiation blasting carbon dioxide and ethylene glycol in interstellar clouds, researchers report in the March 15 Science Advances.

      The study is “a great start to understand how these molecules are formed in space,” says Anthony Remijan, an astrochemist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va., who was not involved in the research. The finding suggests that “if you put the right mixture together, in the right conditions, maybe you can even afford more complex molecules in space,” he says. More

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      The largest 3-D map of the universe reveals hints of dark energy’s secrets

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      A massive survey of the cosmos is revealing new details of one of the most mysterious facets of the universe, dark energy. Intriguingly, when combined with other observations, the data hint that dark energy, commonly thought to maintain a constant density over time, might evolve along with the cosmos.

      The result is “an adrenaline shot to the cosmology community,” says physicist Daniel Scolnic of Duke University, who was not involved with the new study.

      Dark energy, an invisible enigma that causes the universe’s expansion to speed up over time, is poorly understood, despite making up the bulk of the universe’s contents. To explore that puzzle, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, DESI, has produced the largest 3-D map of the universe to date, researchers report April 4 in 10 papers posted on the DESI website, and in talks at a meeting of the American Physical Society held in Sacramento, Calif. By analyzing patterns in the distributions of galaxies and other objects on that map, scientists can determine the history of how the universe expanded over time. More

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      Did the James Webb telescope ‘break the universe’? Maybe not

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      Reports that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope broke the universe may have been exaggerated.

      In its first images, JWST captured what appeared to be gargantuan galaxies in the early universe — ones much too big to be explained by current cosmological theories (SN: 2/22/23). But a new analysis of old data from the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that those alleged behemoths probably have more prosaic explanations fitting in with our standard understanding of the universe, cosmologist Julian Muñoz and colleagues report in the Feb. 9 Physical Review Letters. More