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    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Space & Astronomy

      NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter officially ends its mission on Mars

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      After nearly three years, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, the first spacecraft to undertake a powered flight on another world, has ended its mission. Officials at the agency confirmed on January 25 that the history-making quad-copter has sustained damage to one of its rotor blades and is no longer capable of flying.

      “While we knew this day was inevitable, it doesn’t make it any easier,” said Lori Glaze, NASA’s planetary science division director, during a news conference on the status of the quad-copter. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Space & Astronomy

      Astronomers are puzzled over an enigmatic companion to a pulsar

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      Circling around a pulsar in our galaxy is a mysterious entity that is either a very heavy neutron star, one of the lightest black holes ever discovered, or an exotic and never-before-seen quasi-stellar object.

      The new finding comes from the MeerKAT Radio Telescope in South Africa, which carefully monitored 13 millisecond pulsars in a dense cluster of stars 40,000 light years from Earth. These pulsars are a type of neutron star that quickly spin, rotating in fractions of a second, while sending out powerful beams of radiation like a cosmic lighthouse. More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in Space & Astronomy

      The strongest known fast radio burst has been traced to a 7-galaxy pileup

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      NEW ORLEANS — A mind-bogglingly strong spurt of electromagnetic energy has for the first time been traced back to a cluster of seven merging galaxies. The finding could bolster the hypothesis that such mysterious flareups, known as fast radio bursts, originate from bizarre, highly magnetized dead stars called magnetars.

      Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are fleeting explosive events: They last fractions of a second but release as much energy as the sun does in a month. It remains unclear what causes these strange spectacles, first discovered in 2007 (SN: 7/25/14). More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Space & Astronomy

      Salt may have carved out Mercury’s terrains, including glacierlike features

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      Mercury’s surface might not be quite so terra firma, at least on geologic timescales.

      The closest planet to the sun is a world sculpted by volatiles — ephemeral compounds that can freeze, flow or float into space over time, analogous to water on Earth. Salt, the primary volatile on Mercury, appears to have reshuffled the planet’s landscape over billions of years and might even flow — very slowly — in glacierlike landforms, researchers report in the November Planetary Science Journal. The volatile could possibly even form habitable niches deep underground, the authors speculate. More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Space & Astronomy

      A toxic gas that could help spawn life has been found on Enceladus

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      SAN FRANCISCO — For those delighted by the possibility of alien life, Enceladus, the wintry moon of Saturn, is a gift that just keeps giving.

      Key compounds that could support alien microbes or help life emerge have been detected in the enormous plume of water that erupts from vents in Enceladus’ icy shell, biophysicist Jonah Peter of Harvard University reported December 15 at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting. These include hydrogen cyanide, which can be toxic to humans, though Peter noted it’s also “a key building block for synthesizing more complex compounds including amino acids, sugars and nucleobases, which in turn are precursors for proteins, RNA and DNA.”

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      The findings are good tidings for the NASA team developing the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor, or EELS, a snakelike robot that could one day crawl into Enceladus’ frozen crust to seek out signs of life in the ocean below.

      Though that ocean has never been directly observed, it is thought to be the source of the huge water plume spouting from Enceladus’ south pole (SN: 6/9/23). Researchers had previously reported that the plume contains phosphorous in the form of phosphate, establishing Enceladus as the first alien ocean world known to possess all the elements essential for life (SN: 12/16/23). The detection of phosphorus bolstered the moon as a prime candidate for hosting extraterrestrial life, and the new findings from Peter’s team offer even more support.

      With hydrogen cyanide and phosphate, “Enceladus might be seen as a favorable prebiotic system,” or a chemical setting capable of giving rise to life, said Christopher Glein, a geochemist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio who was not involved in the study.

      Peter and colleagues conducted a detailed analysis of data collected by NASA’s Cassini probe as it flew through Enceladus’ plume in 2011 and 2012. In addition to hydrogen cyanide, the spray contains acetylene, ethane and various alcohols, the team also reported December 14 in Nature Astronomy. These compounds fuel some microbes on Earth, Peter said, “and could supply large amounts of metabolic energy for any potential life” on Enceladus.

      Though NASA has no missions scheduled for Enceladus, its habitability has already spurred the development of EELS. The 100-kilogram, 4-meter-long robot consists of ringed, cylindrical segments. These pieces can be angled and rotated in different ways to make EELS slither, sidewind or move vertically inside crevasses.

      The EELS robot (seen here) operates on the snow at the Big Bear Mountain Resort in Southern California, during a field test in February 2023.JPL-Caltech/NASA

      The robot’s most recent field test occurred in September, on the Athabasca Glacier in Alberta, Canada, reported technologist Masahiro Ono on December 13 at the meeting. On the glacier, Ono, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and his colleagues tested the vertical mobility of EELS inside three ice shafts, or moulins. The robot first succeeded at holding itself steady in the moulins, unfurling its body to lodge itself between the frozen walls. Then, by carefully rotating treaded rings on its body, EELS safely completed multiple 1.5-meter descents.

      Following further tests on the glacier, the next step for EELS might be Earth’s moon. For instance, a small version of the space snake could be deployed to assist stationary lunar landers, Ono said. This robot “is a game changer,” he said, “and not just for Enceladus.” More

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      in Space & Astronomy

      A bar of stars at the center of the Milky Way looks surprisingly young

      by

      The biography of our home galaxy may be due for some revisions. That’s because a bar-shaped collection of stars at the center of the Milky Way appears to be much younger than expected.

      The bar is a prominent feature of our galaxy (SN: 6/25/21). It spans thousands of light-years and links the galaxy’s spiraling arms of stars, making them resemble streams of water coming from a spinning lawn sprinkler. In computer simulations of the Milky Way’s evolution, the bar tends to form early in the galaxy’s roughly 13-billion-year lifetime. But the ages and locations of metal-rich stars suggest the bar finished forming just a few billion years ago, researchers report. The study, submitted November 28 to arXiv.org, is in press at Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters.

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      “These metal-rich stars are basically like fossil records of ancient stars that are telling the story of our home galaxy,” says Samir Nepal, an astrophysicist at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany.

      Stars with large proportions of metal elements are built from the remnants of stars that have since exploded, ejecting the metals they forged from lighter elements. Those spewed metals enrich the materials in the core of galaxies like the Milky Way, which is why a new generation of metal-rich stars can form only deep inside galaxies. The spinning bar at the center of the Milky Way then scattered some of those stars throughout our galaxy.

      Using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, Nepal and colleagues reconstructed the development of the Milky Way bar through its influence on the distribution of metal-rich stars (SN: 5/9/18). They inferred the bar’s history, just as you might deduce where the batters stand in a baseball game by looking at the flight of the balls they hit, even if you can’t see home plate.

      In tracking the ages of the metal-rich stars, the researchers identified a burst of star formation in the central part of the galaxy that petered out about 3 billion years ago. The downturn seems to mark the end of the Milky Way bar’s developmental phase, the researchers report. After that burst, they say, the inflow of new material into the bar probably dropped off substantially. That suggests the bar we see today is a stable feature that’s about 10 billion years younger than the galaxy as a whole.

      The new insights about the metal-rich stars “are like the tip of the iceberg” of data coming from the Gaia telescope, says astrophysicist Cristina Chiappini, also with the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam. Assuming the revised age estimate of the bar is confirmed, future models of the galaxy’s evolution will have to account for why the bar developed so late.

      The study has broader implications than correcting the history of our galaxy, says Ortwin Gerhard, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, who was not involved in the research. “The possibility of detailed observations of the motions and chemical abundances of stars in the Milky Way, particularly based on [data] from the Gaia satellite,” he says, means we can “expect to learn about the evolution of bars [in other galaxies] generally by studying the bar in the Milky Way.” More

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      in Space & Astronomy

      How tiny red stars can test ideas about the origin of life

      by

      A survey of small, cool stars is helping to narrow in on the conditions that might set the stage for life beyond our solar system.

      A look at about 200 ultracool dwarf stars shows that they lack sufficient ultraviolet light intensity to have the potential to jump-start life, researchers report December 1 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. That may initially seem to be bad news for finding signs of alien life on distant planets. But the diminutive stars could instead serve as test beds to determine what other conditions can create the chemical foundations of life.

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      Compared with our sun, the dwarf stars in the new study are minuscule, roughly the size of Jupiter and weighing about a tenth as much as the sun. They’re also among the most common types of stars. And because they’re cool and comparatively dim, it’s often easier to spot planets orbiting them than it is in the glare of large bright stars. Astronomers studying the tiny red star TRAPPIST-1, for example, found that it hosts seven Earth-sized planets, including three that may be within the star’s habitable zone, where conditions are amenable to life (SN: 2/22/17).

      For life to exist on a habitable planet, though, it must start somehow. One possibility is that UV starlight provides the energy needed to link together the hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and other atoms that make up the compounds that are precursors to life.

      With that in mind, space scientist Antígona Segura and colleagues used the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite to measure the amount of UV radiation — among other things — emitted from 208 comparatively nearby ultracool dwarfs within 130 light-years from Earth (SN: 4/12/18). The stars they studied do emit UV light, as our sun does, and many produce bursts of UV when they let off flares. But overall, the UV energy the small stars release is too low to forge the chemicals needed to kick-start life, the team found.

      The dearth of UV light doesn’t necessarily quash hopes of finding life around such stars. “UV is an energy source for prebiotic chemistry that we can measure, and that is why we focused on it,” says Segura, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. “But there are many other energy sources, like cosmic and stellar particles, and particles, radiation and heat produced by radioactive decay, to name a few.”

      Ultracool stars might be useful to discover whether something other than UV light can get life going. “We should search for life on the planets that have the least [UV] activity, where we can know with confidence that UV-driven prebiotic chemistry cannot happen,” says Paul Rimmer, a University of Cambridge astrophysicist who was not involved in the study. “If we find evidence of life on these [types of] planets, this will show that there are other paths to life.”

      Also, Segura notes, sources of energy that could start life can also make planets less habitable for more complex life-forms. “We cannot currently say which [effects] would prevail. The best approach now is to study case by case and wait for more observational constraints, like for the case of the TRAPPIST-1 system.”

      If astronomers eventually find life on planets orbiting ultracool dwarfs, it will confirm the potential for UV-free origins of life. But, Rimmer says, if it turns out that there are no signs of habitability on planets around the many small, dim dwarf stars we see, that would lower estimates of the likelihood of finding life outside our solar system. Either way, future surveys of ultracool dwarf stars could give researchers a better handle on the possible prevalence of extraterrestrial life in the universe. More