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Category: Astronomy

Scientists uncover first evidence of the 4.5-billion-year-old ‘proto Earth’

Scientists uncover first evidence of the 4.5-billion-year-old ‘proto Earth’

Space.com reports: Scientists have identified what may be the first direct evidence of material left over from the “proto-Earth,” a primordial version of our planet that existed before a colossal moon-forming impact reshaped it forever. The study, published Tuesday (Oct. 14) in the journal Nature Geoscience, suggests that tiny chemical clues of this proto-Earth have survived deep within Earth’s rocks, essentially unaltered, for billions of years. The findings provide a rare window into the planet’s original building blocks and could…

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The universe began with the Big Bang and is predicted to end with a Big Crunch

The universe began with the Big Bang and is predicted to end with a Big Crunch

Science Alert reports: If recent discoveries that dark energy is evolving hold any water, our Universe will collapse under its own gravity on a finite timeline, new calculations suggest. Based on several recent dark energy results, a new model finds that the Universe has a lifespan of just 33.3 billion years. Since we are now 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, this suggests that we have a smidge less than 20 billion years left. For another 11 billion years,…

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Life on Earth probably needed supplies from space

Life on Earth probably needed supplies from space

University of Bern: Earth is so far the only known planet on which life exists—with liquid water and a stable atmosphere. However, the conditions were not conducive to life when it formed. The gas-dust cloud from which all the planets in the solar system formed was rich in volatile elements essential for life, such as hydrogen, carbon and sulfur. However, in the inner solar system—the part closest to the sun, where the four rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars…

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Building blocks of life may be far more common in space than we thought, study suggests

Building blocks of life may be far more common in space than we thought, study suggests

Live Science reports: Astronomers have discovered key components to life’s building blocks swirling around a remote baby star, hinting that the stuff of life is far more prevalent throughout the universe than once thought. The material, discovered circling the protostar V883 Orionis 1,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion, consists of 17 complex organic molecules that include ethylene glycol and glycolonitrile — precursors to components found in DNA and RNA. The finding, published July 23 in the The Astrophysical…

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How to see the cosmic web here on Earth

How to see the cosmic web here on Earth

Mark Neyrinck writes: The most familiar celestial objects, like Earth, the Moon and the Sun, are spheres. The solar system’s planets have orbits that are roughly circular, and zooming out a hundred-millionfold, the Milky Way is a flattened disk. But zooming out by a further factor of 1,000 from the Milky Way, to encompass our nearest non-satellite galaxy Andromeda, and dozens of others, the shapes look different. The arrangement may look haphazard, but it’s ordered in its own way, in…

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This star offers the earliest glimpse at the birth of a planetary system like ours

This star offers the earliest glimpse at the birth of a planetary system like ours

Science News reports: The birth of a new solar system may have been caught on camera. About 1,400 light-years from Earth sits a young sunlike star surrounded by cooling gas and teensy silicate minerals. These mineral solids — some of the building blocks of rocky planets — are among the first to condense from the gas, suggesting that they’re kick-starting the creation of planets in a system much like the one earthlings call home, researchers report in the July 17…

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Nearly half of the universe’s ordinary matter was uncharted, until now

Nearly half of the universe’s ordinary matter was uncharted, until now

Science News reports: Nearly half of the universe’s ordinary matter has been hiding — until now. Bursts of radio waves have illuminated the whereabouts of all ordinary matter, revealing its distribution between, around and within galaxies, researchers report June 16 in Nature Astronomy. And X-rays have uncovered details about a once hidden string of gas linking four galaxy clusters, another team reports in the June Astronomy and Astrophysics. “The two papers are very complementary,” says astrophysicist Jason Hessels of McGill…

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First images from Vera C. Rubin Observatory show 10 million galaxies

First images from Vera C. Rubin Observatory show 10 million galaxies

  Live Science reports: After decades of preparation, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first images to the world in a live stream on Monday (June 23). The photos, taken by the world’s largest digital camera, are highly-detailed and show relatively large areas of the sky. In a televised news conference, scientists from the observatory revealed new details about the images that far surpass the “sneak peek” images released earlier in the day. In fact, an awe-inspiring spiral galaxy…

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James Webb telescope unveils largest-ever map of the universe, spanning over 13 billion years

James Webb telescope unveils largest-ever map of the universe, spanning over 13 billion years

Live Science reports: Scientists have unveiled the largest map of the universe ever created. Stretching across a tiny sliver of space and almost all cosmic time, it includes almost 800,000 galaxies imaged across the universe. Some are so far away that they appear as they existed in the infant universe, about 13 billion years ago. The map, released Thursday (June 5) by scientists at the Cosmic Evolution Survey collaboration , covers a 0.54-degree-squared arc of the sky, or about three…

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What blew up the Local Bubble?

What blew up the Local Bubble?

Paul Sutter writes: In our neighborhood of the Milky Way, we see a region surrounding the solar system that is far less dense than average. But that space, that cavity, is a very irregular, elongated shape. What little material is left inside of this cavity is insanely hot, as it has a temperature of around a million Kelvin. What’s going on? We call this region surrounding the solar system the Local Bubble, which is a bit unimaginative, but it gets…

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Distant planet might be brimming with life, astronomers suggest

Distant planet might be brimming with life, astronomers suggest

The New York Times reports: The search for life beyond Earth has led scientists to explore many suggestive mysteries, from plumes of methane on Mars to clouds of phosphine gas on Venus. But as far as we can tell, Earth’s inhabitants remain alone in the cosmos. Now a team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a…

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Bennu asteroid reveals its contents to scientists − and clues to how the building blocks of life on Earth may have been seeded

Bennu asteroid reveals its contents to scientists − and clues to how the building blocks of life on Earth may have been seeded

This photo of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 Polycam images collected on Dec. 2, 2024, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. NASA By Timothy J McCoy, Smithsonian Institution and Sara Russell, Natural History Museum A bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this meteorite, discovered by beaver trappers, fell over a lake. A layer of ice saved them…

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Extraterrestrial life may look nothing like life on Earth − so astrobiologists are coming up with a framework to study how complex systems evolve

Extraterrestrial life may look nothing like life on Earth − so astrobiologists are coming up with a framework to study how complex systems evolve

Evolution, the process of change, governs life on Earth − and potentially different forms of life in other places. Just_Super/E+ via Getty Images By Chris Impey, University of Arizona We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways? How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like? These questions are preoccupying astrobiologists, who are scientists who look…

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The cosmos teems with complex organic molecules

The cosmos teems with complex organic molecules

Elise Cutts writes: Ten years ago, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe pulled up alongside a dusty, icy lump the size of a mountain. The probe would follow its quarry, a comet called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, for two years as onboard instruments caught and analyzed the dust and gas streaming away from the comet. Scientists sought hints about how our solar system came to be — and about the origin of one class of molecules in particular. Organic molecules — compounds containing…

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Stunning images from Jupiter created out of latest NASA Juno spacecraft flyby

Stunning images from Jupiter created out of latest NASA Juno spacecraft flyby

my god.https://t.co/jTnhJ3O2jU pic.twitter.com/egWqXk9JS5 — remnynt (@remnynt) November 6, 2024 CNET reports: Since NASA’s Juno spacecraft entered Jupiter’s orbit in July 2016 and began transmitting image data, the world has gotten glimpses of the solar system’s largest planet and its moons. But a new batch of images that have been contributed by spacewatchers using data from the mission are stunning, even by these standards. The most recent perijove, or the point when it’s closest to the planet, occurred for Juno on…

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The ‘beautiful confusion’ of the first billion years comes into view

The ‘beautiful confusion’ of the first billion years comes into view

Rebecca Boyle writes: The galaxies were never supposed to be so bright. They were never supposed to be so big. And yet there they are — oddly large, luminous objects that keep appearing in images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Kevin Hainline is part of a team that uses the JWST to find these galaxies, whose brightness, apparent mass, and sheer existence a virtual eyeblink after the Big Bang are among the biggest surprises from the three-year-old…

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