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Microbes can live and grow in an atmosphere of pure hydrogen, lab experiments show. The finding could widen the range of environments where astronomers seek signs of alien life. “We’re trying to expand people’s view of what should be considered a habitable planet,” says exoplanet astronomer Sara Seager of MIT (SN: 10/4/19). “It seems to […] More
The sun might be a magnetic slacker. A census of stars similar to the sun shows that our own star is less magnetically active than others of its kind, astrophysicists report in the May 1 Science. The result could support the idea that the sun is in a “midlife crisis,” transitioning into a quieter phase […] More
In the most comprehensive lunar map yet, the moon looks like it’s been playing paintball. Each splash of color identifies a discrete rock or sediment formation, including craters, basins and ancient lava fields. For instance, “the darker, more earth tones are these highland-type terrains, and the reds and the purples tend to be more of […] More
Counting universes ought to be easy. By definition, you can stop at 1. Trouble is, definitions change. A century ago, the “universe” was defined as the Milky Way galaxy. Heretics who disagreed had long been ridiculed— until science staged what became known as the Great Debate, on April 26, 100 years ago. On that date, […] More
The barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300 is one of the most spectacular galaxies in the heavens, but the dramatic bar that pierces its heart produces few if any stars — even though the bar abounds with the raw material for creating them. New computer simulations may explain the paradox in this and other galaxies with […] More
A new look at the nitrogen on Venus may overturn a decades-old assumption about the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists long thought that atmospheric turbulence would create a uniform mixture of gases in Venus’s atmosphere below an altitude of about 100 kilometers. That’s how it works on Earth. But data from NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft now indicate that […] More
Comet 2I/Borisov, the solar system’s second known interstellar visitor, probably hails from a planetary family that is chemically distinct from our own. During Borisov’s brief sojourn through the inner solar system, it was enveloped in its own tenuous gas cloud created as the sun baked ice on the comet’s surface (SN: 10/14/19). New observations of […] More
As far as odd couples go, this is one for the record books. The ripples in spacetime stirred up by two distant, merging black holes suggest that one of the pair was much bigger than the other. It’s the first definitively mismatched black hole pair spotted by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations, which search for […] More
