Paul Sutter writes: You wouldn’t know it by looking at it, but the moon is a time capsule. Its surface has been completely exposed to vacuum for almost 4.5 billion years; meanwhile, it has been soaked by particles from the sun and beyond the solar system. Those particles remain, buried under the lunar surface, providing a detailed record of the history of our solar system and even our entire galaxy. It’s all right there. We just need to dig it…
Michael Marshall writes: On 18 February next year, a NASA spacecraft will plummet through the Martian atmosphere, fire its retro-rockets to break its fall and then lower a six-wheeled rover named Perseverance to the surface. If all goes according to plan, the mission will land in Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometre-wide gash near the planet’s equator that might once have held a lake of liquid water. Among the throngs of earthlings cheering on Perseverance, John Sutherland will be paying particularly close…
The New York Times reports: Mars was once home to seas and oceans, and perhaps even life. But our neighboring world has long since dried up and its atmosphere has been blown away, while most activity beneath its surface has long ceased. It’s a dead planet. Or is it? Previous research has hinted at volcanic eruptions on Mars 2.5 million years ago. But a new paper suggests an eruption occurred as recently as 53,000 years ago in a region called…
Science Alert reports: There are many unanswered questions about our place in the Universe. Why are we here? What is the likelihood of our existence? Could there be others like us out there in the galaxy? One of the numbers that could help us answer these questions is this: How many rocky planets like Earth are orbiting stars like the Sun at a temperate distance amenable to life as we know it? Now, we have an answer, based on data…
Vice reports: On a dark winter night in 2018, hundreds of people across the Great Lakes region witnessed a radiant meteor brighten the skies. Mere days after the fireball streaked overhead on that night in January, scientists were able to track down precious pieces of the ancient space rock using weather radar reports. The scattered remnants of the object, known as the Hamburg meteorite, contain a “high diversity” of extraterrestrial organic compounds that are preserved “in a pristine condition,” according…
Marina Koren writes: The first picture ever captured of a black hole, one situated in the center of another galaxy, was pretty blurry. Seen in silhouette, it appeared fuzzy, as did the ring of hot gas surrounding it. The reaction of the public did not necessarily match the unalloyed joy of astronomers accustomed to extracting cosmic wonders from lines in a graph. To anyone more familiar with black holes from epic space films, this one mostly looked like a flame-glazed…
Caleb Scharf writes: Once upon a time there was a molecule. That molecule, when it reacted with other molecules, set in motion a story that would result in the universe making another molecule almost exactly like that first one. Then that new molecule, when it reacted with other molecules, set in motion a story that would result in another molecule almost exactly like it. And all across the galaxy there were molecules setting stories in motion. A fundamental property of…
Natalie Wolchover writes: Anytime astronomers figure out a new way of looking for magnetic fields in ever more remote regions of the cosmos, inexplicably, they find them. These force fields — the same entities that emanate from fridge magnets — surround Earth, the sun and all galaxies. Twenty years ago, astronomers started to detect magnetism permeating entire galaxy clusters, including the space between one galaxy and the next. Invisible field lines swoop through intergalactic space like the grooves of a…
The New York Times reports: Monuments and memorials bearing the names of men who fought to preserve slavery and uphold white supremacy are facing a reckoning, as demonstrations against police brutality have erupted across the country in response to the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. The protests have also reignited a debate within the military community over 10 Army bases named after Confederate leaders, which as recently as February the service said it had no intention…
Katherine Johnson died on February 24 at the age of 101. In 2016, Margot Lee Shetterly wrote: It had always been Katherine Goble’s great talent to be in the right place at the right time. In August 1952, 12 years after leaving graduate school to have her first child, that right place was in Marion, Virginia, at the wedding of her husband, Jimmy Goble’s, little sister Patricia. Pat, a vivacious college beauty queen just two months graduated from Virginia State…
Ed Yong writes: The first clear evidence that some animals have a magnetic sense came from a simple-enough experiment—put an animal in a box, change the magnetic fields around it, and see where it heads. German scientists first tried this in the 1960s, with captive robins. When it came time to migrate, the birds would hop in a particular direction, as if they innately knew the way to fly. But when the team altered the magnetic fields around the robins’…
Paul M. Sutter writes: The universe is permeated by a vast, invisible web, its tendrils weaving through space. But despite organizing the matter we see in space, this dark web is invisible. That’s because it is made up of dark matter, which exerts a gravitational pull but emits no light. That is, the web was invisible until now. For the first time, researchers have illuminated some of the darkest corners of the universe. A long time ago, the universe was…
David J. Eicher writes: Decades of astrophysical research beginning in the late 19th century established the universe as we see it, culminating with the Big Bang theory. We now know the universe is about 13.8 billion years old and at least 150 billion trillion miles across. But in recent years, astronomers have begun to address a staggering possibility — the universe we can observe, and in which we live, may be one of many that makes up the cosmos. The…
Ethan Siegel writes: If you were to go as far out into space as you can imagine, what would you encounter? Would there be a limit to how far you could go, or could you travel a limitless distance? Would you eventually return to your starting point, or would you continue to traverse space that you had never encountered before? In other words, does the Universe have an edge, and if so, where is it? Believe it or not, there…
They probably won’t look anything like this. Martina Badini/Shutterstock By Samantha Rolfe, University of Hertfordshire Life is pretty easy to recognise. It moves, it grows, it eats, it excretes, it reproduces. Simple. In biology, researchers often use the acronym “MRSGREN” to describe it. It stands for movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion and nutrition. But Helen Sharman, Britain’s first astronaut and a chemist at Imperial College London, recently said that alien lifeforms that are impossible to spot may be living…
Corey S. Powell writes: One of the greatest debates in the long history of astronomy has been that of exceptionalism versus mediocrity—and one of the great satisfactions of modern times has been watching the arguments for mediocrity emerge triumphant. Far more than just a high-minded clash of abstract ideas, this debate has shaped the way we humans evaluate our place in the universe. It has defined, in important ways, how we measure the very value of our existence. In the…