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Category: Astronomy

New finding boosts Panspermia, the theory that life on Earth originated in deep space

New finding boosts Panspermia, the theory that life on Earth originated in deep space

Lina Zeldovich writes: Floating in the middle of our galaxy, near the center of the Milky Way, inside a cloud of gas that swirls at the temperature of 100 Kelvin or -279.67 Fahrenheit, a molecule essential to life on Earth has just been discovered. It sounds inconceivable that such a level of cosmic cold could harbor anything remotely related to a living organism—and yet it does. In fact, without this molecule, humans—and all other breathing, growing things on the planet—would…

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James Webb Space Telescope prompts a rethink of how galaxies form

James Webb Space Telescope prompts a rethink of how galaxies form

Adam Mann writes: Katherine Whitaker was on a video call with colleagues last summer when NASA released the first pictures from the ultra-powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Among the many awe-inspiring images was one of a sliver of sky surrounding the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723: It was brimming with some of the oldest and most distant galaxies ever recorded. “We would zoom in and be like, ‘Oh wow,’ and ‘What the heck is that?’” recalls Whitaker, an astronomer at…

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A year of cosmic wonder with the James Webb Space Telescope

A year of cosmic wonder with the James Webb Space Telescope

The New York Times reports: By now, perhaps, we should be getting used to unreal images of the cosmos made with the James Webb Space Telescope. But a year after NASA released the cosmic observatory’s first imagery, the space agency has dropped yet another breathtaking snapshot of our universe. Wednesday’s image was Rho Ophiuchi, the closest nursery of infant stars in our cosmic backyard. Located a mere 390 light years away from Earth, this cloud complex is chock-full of stellar…

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The dark universe is waiting. What will the Euclid telescope reveal?

The dark universe is waiting. What will the Euclid telescope reveal?

The New York Times reports: At 11:12 a.m. on Saturday, the Euclid spacecraft launched into space on its mission to chart the history of our universe as far back as 10 billion years ago. The space telescope, built by the European Space Agency, will use its instruments to record more than a third of the extragalactic sky over the next six years, creating the most accurate three-dimensional map of the cosmos to date. Researchers plan to use Euclid’s map to…

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Neutrinos build a ghostly map of the Milky Way

Neutrinos build a ghostly map of the Milky Way

The New York Times reports: From ghostlike particles, astrophysicists have pieced together a new map of the galaxy we live in. For now, that map of the Milky Way is blurry and incomplete. But as more data is gathered, it will become clearer and will help illuminate galactic convulsions like the expanding remnants of exploded stars, providing clues to mysteries that are difficult to solve with only observations from conventional telescopes. “This is the first time we’ve seen our own…

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Scientists thrill at first hints of cosmic ‘hum’ from giant gravitational waves

Scientists thrill at first hints of cosmic ‘hum’ from giant gravitational waves

Scientific American reports: After nearly two decades of listening, astronomers are finally starting to “hear” the rumbles of gravitational waves they believe emanate from the behemoths of our universe: supermassive black holes. The result comes from a National Science Foundation–sponsored initiative known as the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav). Since 2004 NANOGrav has monitored metronomelike flashes of light from a Milky Way–spanning network of dead stars known as pulsars. Forged from the hearts of exploding massive stars,…

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Radical new theory gives a very different perspective on what life is

Radical new theory gives a very different perspective on what life is

Science Alert reports: Biologists usually define ‘life’ as an entity that reproduces, responds to its environment, metabolizes chemicals, consumes energy, and grows. Under this model, ‘life’ is a binary state; something is either alive or not. This definition works reasonably well on planet Earth, with viruses being one notable exception. But if life is elsewhere in the universe, it may not be made of the same stuff as us. It might not look, move, or communicate like we do. How,…

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This alien ocean is the first known to have all elements crucial for life

This alien ocean is the first known to have all elements crucial for life

The Washington Post reports: Saturn’s moon Enceladus has enticed scientists for years with its plumes fizzing their way up from an ocean beneath a thick crust of ice. Now there’s a new element to the story, literally: That cold, dark ocean appears to contain a form of phosphorus, an essential ingredient for life as we know it. That means Enceladus has the only ocean beyond Earth known to contain all six elements needed for life. The claimed discovery of dissolved…

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Where Earth got its water

Where Earth got its water

Sean Raymond writes: When Carl Sagan famously called Earth the “pale blue dot,” he was judging a book by its cover. Even though three quarters of our planet’s surface is covered by oceans, our planet is actually very dry. Water makes up about one part in a thousand of Earth’s mass (most of it is simply rock and iron). I say “about” because we don’t know exactly how much water is trapped in Earth’s interior. Estimates range from less than…

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Weird black holes may hold secrets of the early universe

Weird black holes may hold secrets of the early universe

Ashley Yeager writes: Our galaxy’s heart is a gluttonous monster. Like the mythical Kammapa of the Sotho people of southern Africa, the Milky Way’s central, supermassive black hole has swallowed nearly everything around it, growing heftier and heftier the more it eats. And it’s not alone. Black holes weighing as much as thousands, millions or even billions of suns sit at the center of nearly all known massive galaxies. For decades, scientists thought that was the only place they’d find…

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Stars could be invisible within 20 years as light pollution brightens night skies

Stars could be invisible within 20 years as light pollution brightens night skies

Robin McKie writes: The Herefordshire hills basked in brilliant sunshine last weekend. Summer had arrived and the skies were cloudless, conditions that would once have heralded succeeding nights of coal-dark heavens sprinkled with brilliant stars, meteorites and planets. It was not to be. The night sky was not so much black as dark grey with only a handful of stars glimmering against this backdrop. The Milky Way – which would once have glittered across the heavens – was absent. Summer’s…

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The tiny physics behind immense cosmic eruptions

The tiny physics behind immense cosmic eruptions

Zack Savitsky writes: During fleeting fits, the sun occasionally hurls a colossal amount of energy into space. Called solar flares, these eruptions last for mere minutes, and they can trigger catastrophic blackouts and dazzling auroras on Earth. But our leading mathematical theories of how these flares work fail to predict the strength and speed of what we observe. At the heart of these outbursts is a mechanism that converts magnetic energy into powerful blasts of light and particles. This transformation…

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Gargantuan black hole 30 billion times the mass of the sun is one of the largest ever discovered

Gargantuan black hole 30 billion times the mass of the sun is one of the largest ever discovered

Live Science reports: Astronomers have discovered one of the largest black holes ever found — an ultramassive monster roughly 30 billion times the mass of the sun — using a space-time trick predicted by Albert Einstein. The colossal black hole, which lurks 2.7 billion light-years from Earth in the brightest galaxy of the galaxy cluster Abell 1201, was given away by a giant arc of warped light from a background galaxy that had been stretched and smudged by the black…

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The early universe was crammed with stars 10,000 times the size of our sun, new study suggests

The early universe was crammed with stars 10,000 times the size of our sun, new study suggests

Space.com reports: The first stars in the cosmos may have topped out at over 10,000 times the mass of the sun, roughly 1,000 times bigger than the biggest stars alive today, a new study has found. Nowadays, the biggest stars are 100 solar masses. But the early universe was a far more exotic place, filled with mega-giant stars that lived fast and died very, very young, the researchers found. And once these doomed giants died out, conditions were never right…

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Shadows in the Big Bang afterglow reveal invisible cosmic structures

Shadows in the Big Bang afterglow reveal invisible cosmic structures

Zack Savitsky writes: Nearly 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the primordial plasma of the infant universe cooled enough for the first atoms to coalesce, making space for the embedded radiation to soar free. That light — the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — continues to stream through the sky in all directions, broadcasting a snapshot of the early universe that’s picked up by dedicated telescopes and even revealed in the static on old cathode-ray televisions. After scientists discovered the CMB…

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The multiverse: Our universe is suspiciously unlikely to exist – unless it is one of many

The multiverse: Our universe is suspiciously unlikely to exist – unless it is one of many

Do universes pop up as bubbles from a multiverse? arda savasciogullari/Shutterstock By Martin Rees, University of Cambridge It’s easy to envisage other universes, governed by slightly different laws of physics, in which no intelligent life, nor indeed any kind of organised complex systems, could arise. Should we therefore be surprised that a universe exists in which we were able to emerge? That’s a question physicists including me have tried to answer for decades. But it is proving difficult. Although we…

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