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    How ‘Our Moon’ shaped life on Earth and human history

    Our MoonRebecca BoyleRandom House, $28.99

    Science journalist Rebecca Boyle has an intergenerational connection with the moon. Her grandfather Pfc. John J. Corcoran was involved in the 1943 Battle of Tarawa on the namesake atoll in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. The United States’ narrow victory against Japan came at heavy human cost. One reason: A weak high tide forced American soldiers to wade through the ocean into Japanese gunfire rather than sail their boats to meet their enemies. More

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

    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

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    The James Webb telescope may have spotted stars powered by dark matter

    The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted objects in the early universe that might be a new kind of star — one powered by dark matter.

    These “dark stars” are still hypothetical. Their identification in JWST images is far from certain. But if any of the three candidates — reported in the July 25 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — turn out to be this new type of star, they could offer a glimpse of star formation in the early universe, hint at the nature of dark matter and possibly explain the origins of supermassive black holes.

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    First proposed in 2007 by cosmologist Katherine Freese and colleagues, dark stars might have been some of the first types of stars to form in the universe (SN: 1/1/08). Though dark stars have yet to be observed, they’re thought to be powered by heat from dark matter interactions rather than by nuclear fusion reactions like in the sun.

    Dark stars “would be very weird looking,” says Freese, of the University of Texas at Austin. The hypothetical stars would have formed from clouds of hydrogen and helium that drew in locally abundant dark matter as they coalesced. Though the true nature of dark matter isn’t known — its presence is inferred largely via its effect on how stars move within galaxies — it’s possible that dark matter particles can interact with themselves, annihilating each other when they collide and producing vast amounts of light and heat (SN: 7/7/22). That heat would keep the cloud of hydrogen and helium from condensing into a dense, hot core like the stars that exist today.

    Because the heat from dark matter annihilations would keep the gas cloud from condensing, dark stars could grow to gargantuan size. Theoretically, dark stars could be 10 times as wide as Earth’s orbit around the sun. They could also be millions of times as massive as the sun and shine billions of times brighter — bright enough, potentially, to be spotted by JWST.

    To see if any dark stars are lurking in data from the orbiting observatory, Freese and colleagues pored over images from a JWST survey of early galaxies. In such images, JWST has so far discovered over 700 objects that may have originated in the first few hundred million years of the universe — the epoch when dark stars would have emerged (SN: 12/16/22). Light from these remote objects is stretched, or redshifted, as the universe expands. So Freese and colleagues zeroed in on four objects already confirmed to be highly redshifted, making them some of the oldest objects seen to date.

    Those objects are currently thought to be small galaxies from the universe’s relative infancy. But because they’re so far away, JWST can’t resolve them well enough to determine whether they’re actually galaxies or large, ultrabright stars, the researchers say.

    Three dark star candidates were identified from data collected by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey. One of the candidates, JADES-GS-z13-0, is shown here (arrow).NASA, ESA, CSA, JADES Collaboration

    The team ran computer simulations of how much light a hypothetical dark star might produce at various wavelengths. They compared those spectra to light from images collected by JWST at different wavelengths for each of the four objects. JWST data from three of those objects are consistent with the simulated dark star patterns, Freese and colleagues report.

    Some scientists are skeptical. Known types of stars could also create the observed light from the three candidates, says Sandro Tacchella, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge. And identifying any of the objects as a dark star would require that the simulated patterns fit well to more detailed spectra, says Brant Robertson, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

    If dark stars were to be found, though, “that would be revolutionary,” says study coauthor Cosmin Ilie, an astrophysicist at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y.

    Detecting dark stars would confirm the existence of a dark matter particle and hint at how it works (SN: 7/7/22). “Just having the information that [dark matter] is something that could annihilate would be really, really powerful,” says Tracy Slatyer, a theoretical physicist at MIT who was not involved in the study. That knowledge could help scientists look for dark matter elsewhere in the universe, she says.

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    Dark stars could also help explain the formation of supermassive black holes (SN: 3/16/18). Once the dark matter inside the star has annihilated itself, the remaining hydrogen and helium — millions of times the mass of the sun in a relatively compact space — would collapse in on itself and form a black hole. Those black holes could merge over time into black holes like the ones at the centers of most galaxies, millions or billions of times as massive as the sun.

    Future experiments, like looking for brighter or dimmer light at certain wavelengths, could help confirm whether any of the three objects are dark stars. Freese also expects to find more dark star candidates in future JWST data, she says. But for now, whether dark stars truly exist remains a mystery. More

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    A cyclone has been spotted swirling over Uranus’ north pole for the first time

    Though it looks like a smooth, solid, pale blue orb, there’s more going on beneath the clouds of Uranus than meets the eye.

    A polar cyclone has been spotted at the planet’s north pole, researchers report in the May 28 Geophysical Research Letters. Observed with radio telescopes, the find is the first direct evidence of a cyclone on Uranus. A previous spacecraft flyby hinted at a similar storm at the planet’s south pole.

    “It’s really exciting to see this polar structure come into view,” says Michael Roman, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in England who was not involved with the research. The observations “show a rather unique structure that we simply have never been able to study before.”

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    In 1986, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft revealed winds at the center of Uranus’ south pole were moving faster than those in neighboring areas and were rotating. This evidence pointed to something dynamic like a cyclone occurring at the pole. But the spacecraft’s instruments weren’t sensitive enough to confirm the storm.

    In recent years, as the north pole of Uranus turned more toward Earth, scientists were able to probe the other side of the ice giant, where they spotted similar hints of a swirling storm. Using the Very Large Array radio observatory in New Mexico, planetary scientist Alex Akins and colleagues probed the temperature under the clouds for more atmospheric clues. “What we saw with the VLA was kind of the last piece of [evidence],” says Akins, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. 

    New thermal emission observations from 2021 and 2022 show a spot on the north pole where the gas beneath the clouds is warmer and drier than its surroundings, suggesting the presence of a low-pressure region in the midst of those spinning winds. “These contrasts look similar to what we see in hurricanes on Earth,” Akins says.

    Excluding Mercury, all the planets in our solar system have now been observed to host some kind of swirling air mass at their poles (SN: 10/14/08).

    Akins plans to continue to observe the cyclone to see how it changes. Previous observations from 2015 suggest it is growing stronger. Researchers wouldn’t expect Uranus’ atmospheric circulation to change on such a relatively short timescale, Akins says, so a continued strengthening of the storm would suggest there’s more to learn about how the planet’s atmosphere works.

    In 2022, experts brought together by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommended NASA send a probe to Uranus (SN: 4/20/22). “The more we can learn about Uranus as we begin to plan a mission,” Roman says, “the better we can focus our planning for that mission.” More

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    Salty water may have flowed near Mars’ equator as recently as 400,000 years ago

    Crusts, cracks and other geologic features on sand dunes near the Martian equator are leading researchers to believe there may have been water there much more recently than previously thought.

    The features, likely caused by the movement of thawed, salty water, turned up in images taken by China’s Zhurong rover. A chemical analysis from the rover shows that they may have formed as recently as 400,000 years ago, researchers report April 28 in Science Advances.

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    The results could help guide future missions to find life on Mars. Atmospheric conditions on Mars 400,000 years ago were similar to what’s seen now, suggesting it’s possible that there’s still liquid, salty water at the planet’s low latitudes, says Xiaoguang Qin, a geologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

    The Zhurong rover — China’s first Mars rover — landed on the Red Planet in May of 2021 in a region called Utopia Planitia, just north of the Martian equator (SN: 5/19/21). Over nine months, the rover gathered images and information on the chemical composition of the region’s dunes and took measurements of the cracks found along the sandy surfaces.

    When Qin and his team first saw the rover images they were surprised. The crust’s features appeared to be related to water activity. Wind wouldn’t leave those geologic tracks; it would instead erode the crust. Nor would dioxide frost; it wouldn’t exist at lower latitudes. Melting pockets of frozen water best explained the features found on the dunes, the team concluded.

    Mapping the number and size of meteorite impact craters in the area gave a rough estimate of the dunes’ age — they likely formed 1.4 million to 400,000 years ago. That suggests there was water in the region as recently as hundreds of thousands of years ago, not billions of years ago, as previously speculated.

    It’s the combination of the features seen in the dunes with the age which makes the new research special, says Aditya Khuller, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve seen these features before,” says Khuller. “But they’re usually much older.”

    Scientists also have previously found evidence for current-day water ice in the mid-latitude gullies of Mars. And data from NASA landers hint that liquid brines can exist on the planet at middle to high northern latitudes, although it would be too cold for life (SN: 5/11/20).  

    Qin says the findings from the Zhurong rover point to comparatively mild ground temperatures, which suggests the low-latitude sand dunes of Mars could be hospitable to life. More

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    Rocky planets might have been able to form in the early universe

    Rocky planets might have been forming since the beginning of the universe. A stellar nursery in a neighboring galaxy has the right materials for such planet formation, researchers report April 24 in Nature Astronomy.

    The overall chemical makeup of the tiny galaxy, called the Small Magellanic Cloud, is akin to that of the early universe. The finding suggests that rocky planets might have been able to develop in the relatively pristine chemical environment that pervaded the cosmos just a couple billion years after the Big Bang.

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    The Small Magellanic Cloud is one of the Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbors, though it’s very different from our galaxy. The tiny galaxy has a much lower abundance of heavy metal elements — such as iron, magnesium and aluminum — which are all crucial to the formation of rocky planets. This low-metal environment also mimics that of the early universe, an epoch before stars had enough time to forge the heavy elements and blow them out into space.

    Because of the lack of these elements, astronomers have been unsure if rocky planets are able to form in the Small Magellanic Cloud. And previous telescopes did not have the ability to really probe young stars with a mass less than or equal to that of the sun, so astronomers couldn’t measure the star systems’ dust content, which is needed to infer if planets could be being born. But with the sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, astronomers can now gather more light and see smaller, fainter stars in greater detail (SN: 12/7/22).

    Astrophysicist Olivia Jones and colleagues used an infrared camera on JWST to look at a region of the Small Magellanic Cloud called NGC 346, where young stars are forming. “It’s the first time ever we’ve really been able to look at how solar-size stars form in an environment akin to the early universe,” says Jones, of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.

    The team detected signatures that suggest that lots of dust is orbiting and falling toward hundreds of stars in the region. As these dust grains orbit, they could begin to stick together and eventually accrete to create rocky planets.

    “One of the things we would love to understand better is how the environmental context impacts star formation and then, later on, the planet-forming populations around those young, forming stars,” says Michael Meyer, an astronomer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who was not involved in the research.

    Because the Small Magellanic Cloud is the nearest example of a cosmic region with a much different chemical composition than the Milky Way, he says, it provides the first touchstone to study how star and planet formation depend on the stellar environment.

    The low-metal stellar environment in the Small Magellanic Cloud is comparable to that of faraway galaxies that were developing around 11 billion years ago. During this time, a period called “cosmic noon,” there was a surge of star formation throughout the cosmos. If rocky planets could be accreting around stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, the researchers suggest, such worlds could have been forming in the early years of the universe as well.

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    The young stars in NGC 346 are also relative lightweights. One reason scientists are interested in studying the possibility of planet formation around low-mass stars is because they are the most common type of stars in the universe and the longest-lived, says Penn State astronomer Kevin Luhman, who was not involved in the research.

    “They offer the longest period of time in which life might form and survive on any planets around them,” Luhman says. “If the most common star in the universe lived for only a million years, then exploded, that would be kind of bad for life.” The fact that these types of stars can potentially form rocky planets, he says, is a good sign for life developing elsewhere in the universe.

    Follow-up research will focus on determining what chemical signatures can be found developing around the stars, Jones says. This could clue the researchers in to what the chemical elements are that make up any rocky planets. More

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    A crucial building block of life exists on the asteroid Ryugu

    Uracil, a building block of life, has been found on the asteroid Ryugu.

    Yasuhiro Oba and colleagues discovered the precursor to life in samples collected from the asteroid and returned to Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft, the team reports March 21 in Nature Communications.

    “The detection of uracil in the Ryugu sample is very important to clearly demonstrate that it is really present in extraterrestrial environments,” says Oba, an astrochemist at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.

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    Uracil had been previously detected in samples from meteorites, including a rare class called CI-chondrites, which are abundant in organic compounds. But those meteorites landed on Earth, leaving open the possibility they had been contaminated by humans or Earth’s atmosphere. Because the Ryugu samples were collected in space, they are the purest bits of the solar system scientists have studied to date (SN: 6/9/22). That means the team could rule out the influence of terrestrial biology.

    Oba’s team was given only about 10 milligrams of the Ryugu sample for its analysis. As a result, the researchers were not confident they would be able to detect any building blocks, even though they’d been able to previously detect uracil and other nucleobases inmeteorites (SN: 4/26/22).

    Nucleobases are biological building blocks that form the structure of RNA, which is essential to protein creation in all living cells. One origin-of-life theory suggests RNA predated DNA and proteins and that ancient organisms relied on RNA for the chemical reactions associated with life (SN: 4/4/04).

    The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 collected these samples of Ryugu on two separate touchdowns on the asteroid. The sample on the left contains 38.4 milligrams of material and the one on the right, 37.5 milligrams. Analysis of about 10 milligrams of the sample revealed the presence of uracil, a key building block of life.Y. Oba et al/Nature Communications 2023, JAXA

    The team used hot water to extract organic material from the Ryugu samples, followed by acid to further break chemical bonds and separate out uracil and other smaller molecules.

    Laura Rodriguez, a prebiotic chemist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who was not involved in the study, says this method leaves the possibility that the uracil was separated from a longer chain of molecules in the process. “I think it’d be interesting in future work to look at more complex molecules rather than just the nucleobases,” Rodriguez says.

    She says she’s seen in her research that the nucleobases can form bonds to create more complex structures, such as a possible precursor to the nucleic acid which may lead to RNA formation. “My question is, are those more complex structures also forming in the asteroids?”

    Oba says his team plans to analyze samples from NASA’s OSIRIS-REX mission, which grabbed a bit of asteroid Bennu in 2020 and will return it to Earth this fall (SN: 10/21/20). More