Recent research on an asteroid found on earth that originated from Mars has scientists in a tizzy. Apparently it gives a good indication not only that life once existed on Mars, but that it also still might.

From the Times Online article:

Nasa scientists have produced the most compelling evidence yet that bacterial life exists on Mars.

It showed that microscopic worm-like structures found in a Martian meteorite that hit the Earth 13,000 years ago are almost certainly fossilised bacteria. The so-called bio-morphs are embedded beneath the surface layers of the rock, suggesting that they were already present when the meteorite arrived, rather than being the result of subsequent contamination by Earthly bacteria.

“This is very strong evidence of life on Mars,” said David Mackay, a senior scientist at the Nasa Johnson Space Centre , who was part of the team of scientists that originally investigated the meteorite when it was discovered in 1984.

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Read the full article here.

Here's a neat little article about what factors make life on earth such an unlikely thing and how there are a bunch of other planets outside our solar system that might be better suited for life to develop and thrive upon.

From the yahoo article:

This greater gravity means a Super Earth can easily hold onto an atmosphere, so it would not end up with a tenuous atmosphere like Mars. But the role of a planet's atmosphere in creating prime conditions for life can be tricky. Venus has a surface temperature of nearly 900 F (480 C) due to the thick greenhouse atmosphere that doesn't let heat escape.

One of the biggest influences on a planet's climate is the star it orbits. Earth has a circular orbit 150 million kilometers away from the Sun, a yellow dwarf star. This helps keep conditions warm enough so that our oceans don't freeze over, but cool enough so that we don't lose all our water through evaporation.

The Super Earths discovered so far orbit a variety of stars. The first Earth-like extrasolar planets ever found orbit a pulsar, a rotating neutron star that emits high energy radiation. The other Super Earths orbit stars that are smaller and cooler than our Sun.

Most of the known Super Earths are very close to their stars, closer than the planet Mercury is to the Sun. Even though these stars don't burn as brightly as our Sun, the planets are so close they are like burnt cinders flickering close to a fire.

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Read the full article here.

Three telescopes have captured an image of the furthest cluster of galaxies ever observed.

From the Discover Bad Astronomy blog:

The image doesn’t look like much, but it’s scientifically amazing. When light left those galaxies, the Universe was only about 3.5 billion years old! Remember, for a long time the whole cosmos was just gas, and that took a long time to collect, clump up, and form stars and galaxies. It’s currently thought that it took a few billion years for clusters of galaxies to form after the Big Bang, so JKCS041 looks like it was an early bloomer. We may find even more distant clusters, but there probably aren’t too many more out there, and they almost certainly won’t be much farther away than this one.

Clusters are among the largest structures in the Universe (the only things bigger are superclusters; clusters of clusters if you like), so studying them tells us a lot about conditions in the early Universe. And, of course, the farther back we find them the more interesting things get! I suspect that the newly-refurbished Hubble may be pointed this way sometime soon, too, and I also imagine JKCS041 will be a good target for the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be the largest space telescope ever launched. When it’s observed by these observatories, what secrets about dark matter, dark energy, and the early Universe will the cluster reveal?

And since I hate ending posts with rhetorical flourishes, I’ll take a stab at a generic answer: surprises. Whenever we probe deeper, look farther, the one thing we discover is that the Universe will always have something unexpected up its sleeve. That’s one reason science is so much fun!

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Read the full article (and see the picture) here.

Reserachers investigating what factors impact tree growth in Britain have found a startling result: cosmic rays could be a culprit.

From the BBC article:

The researchers froze the trunk slices, to prevent the wood shrinking, then scanned them on to a computer and used software to count the number and width of the growth rings.

As the trees aged, they showed a usual decline in growth.

However, during a number of years, the trees' growth also particularly slowed. These years correlated with periods when a relatively low level of cosmic rays reached the Earth's surface

When the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the Earth's surface was higher, the rate of tree growth was faster.

The effect is not large, but it is statistically significant.

The intensity of cosmic rays also correlates better with the changes in tree growth than any other climatological factor, such as varying levels of temperature or precipitation over the years.

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They're not quite sure of what mechanism is leading to this increase in growth during periods of high cosmic radiation, but it's certainly fascinating to think about.

Read the full article here.

Ah, yes. Mars. What other planet in our solar system has such a death-grip on the imagination that Mars does. In the past, it seemed impossible to get man there, what with the trip taking two years, which is longer than any human has spent in space. But a breakthrough in propulsion technology might shave that trip down to a meager 39 days.

From the Canada.com article:

Because Mars and Earth only pass close together every two years, space experts have always assumed a crew would have to travel one way, wait a year, then fly back the next time the planets were close together - raising huge problems for food, air and water storage.

But ion drive could make a return trip possible during a single close approach of Earth and Mars.

“We built an ion propulsion engine down in Houston,” said Chris Hadfield, a veteran Canadian astronaut.

“A whole bunch of countries (were involved), but Canada has one of the main pieces of hardware. And this engine can get us to Mars in 39 days.

“And this just happened in the last couple of weeks.”

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Another article, appearing in the Houston Chronicle outlines a rather ghoulish plan (reminiscent of the plot of Red Mars, if you ask me) that calls for astronauts to give their lives for the sake of discovery.

From the article:

But what if NASA could land astronauts on Mars in a decade, for not ridiculously more money than the $10 billion the agency spends annually on human spaceflight? It's possible, say some space buffs, although there's a catch.

The astronauts we'd send would never come home.

The concept of a one-way mission to Mars has circulated among space buffs for years, with a Houston-based former NASA engineer, James C. McLane III, among its chief champions. Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin has endorsed the plan.

Relieving NASA of the need to send fuel and rocketry to blast humans off the Martian surface, which has slightly more than twice the gravity of the moon, would actually reduce costs by about a factor of 10, by some estimates.

And it would captivate the country, if not the world.

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Read the full article about the ion propulsion engine here.

Read the full article about sending people to Mars here.

Everyone has heard about how NASA sent rockets to the moon to probe for water to see if our astral companion might hold promise as a future base of operations for refueling. Now the first pictures have been released.

From the Register article:

Exploitable reserves of water would be hugely useful for exploration of the Moon and perhaps for space operations in general. Water could be used to produce hydrogen for rocket fuel, and this could be important even for operations in Earth orbit - it would potentially be easier and cheaper for spacecraft and operations there to use fuel from the Moon, rather than supplies boosted up through Earth's more powerful gravity and troublesome atmosphere.

Hence NASA's efforts to find out if there might be water deposits in the chilly, eternally dark polar craters. The LCROSS impacts were watched with great interest on Friday, but disappointingly it appeared that no debris was thrown high enough above the obscuring crater walls to enter sunlight and so be visible to ordinary visual observation. Neither Earthly telescopes nor the plunging LCROSS follower saw any sunlit plume after the two-ton Centaur smashed into the deeps of Cabeus, and the follower craft similarly appeared to have little effect.

However, NASA had another card to play. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which went into space atop the same booster stack as the LCROSS, has been orbiting the Moon since June. Given the lack of any lunar atmosphere, the satellite can orbit safely just 30 miles up, scanning the surface beneath with an array of instruments.

Just 90 seconds after the LCROSS craft plummeted into Cabeus, the LRO made its first pass overhead. Over the weekend NASA assembled imagery of the strike zone, and pictures were released yesterday.

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Read the full article here.

And who really couldn't resist an article that uses the word "embiggen". Really.

From the Discover Magazine blog:

Incredibly, even though hundreds of billions of stars are involved, each individual star is far too small to suffer a physical collision. But gas and dust clouds are much bigger than stars (they can be hundreds of trillions of kilometers across, as opposed to stars which are a trifling million or so kilometers in diameter), so collisions between them are common. When clouds collide they collapse and undergo violent bouts of star formation. This too is clear in the image: the blue clumps in the tidal tails are vast regions of clusters of stars being born; over 100 such clusters have been identified in this image in the tail on the right alone.

Collisions like this blast out energy, not just in visible light, but at other wavelengths as well. In infrared alone, NGC 2623 radiates with the power of 400 billion times the Sun’s energy. This makes NGC 2623 a ULIRG: an ultraluminous infrared galaxy. Although relatively rare locally, they are so common at great distance (and therefore earlier on in the age of the Universe) that they comprise as much as half of all the infrared background glow we see in the Universe. The huge amount of infrared comes from the collision itself; star formation produces prodigious amounts of dust which absorb ultraviolet light from newly-born stars and re-radiate it in the infrared. The collision also dumps gas and dust into the central supermassive black holes in the cores of the two colliding galaxies, which piles up in a flat disk outside the black hole, heats up hugely, and again glows brightly.

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Read the full article (with the gorgeous Hubble pic from 2007) here.

Feels like an astronomy kind of Sunday. Here's a wonderful article about the prevalence of water in the solar system and why it's so darn important.

From the Scientific American article:

But is that because the rest of the cosmos has much in common with Earth or vice versa? Water, the unique molecule that cradles and nurtures life here, is apparently common and perhaps abundant in the solar system. Observational evidence suggests that water as a solid, liquid or gas is present at the poles of Mercury, within the thick clouds of Venus, on Mars, inside asteroids and comets, and on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Scientists also have speculated that Jupiter's moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto have vast subsurface oceans of liquid water. They have also detected through spectroscopy water frost on Pluto's moon, Charon. Of course, scientists have known that H₂O also seems to be ubiquitous beyond the solar system. They've detected it in one form or another in interstellar gas and even in such unlikely places as the atmospheres of stars. Perhaps it shouldn't be such a revelation. After all, hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, followed by helium and oxygen.

"It's not a surprise that the simple (molecules) would show up again and again," says Pamela Conrad, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena and part of the science team for the next-generation Mars Science Laboratory headed to the Red Planet in late 2011. "But I think its discovery on specific planets or other bodies in the solar system has a significance beyond whether or not we're surprised that it's there. It gives us permission to speculate on whether or not there is other chemistry that would be relevant to the origin or the sustenance of life."

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Really interesting read. You can catch the full article here.

In 1957, millions of people all over the world looked up to the sky, knowing for the first time that space could be conquered. It's been 52 years since Sputnik was launched, becoming the first satellite ever to orbit the earth. It drove the US space program forward and, over a decade later, the first man walked on the moon.

From Tom's Astronomy Blog:

On October 4, 1957, the USSR launched the first Earth satellite, Sputnik I.  Its launch stunned the world and jump-started the “space race”.
Sputnik (literally means “traveler” or “companion”) was not visible from the Earth.  People who thought they saw Sputnik actually saw the second stage booster rocket which followed Sputnik in its orbit.

The world stood transfixed as the first man-made object was launched into orbit.

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See the full blog post (with pics!) here.

A story on FoxNews covers the latest finding on a rocky body found outside of our solar system.

From the article:

Because the planet is so close to the star, it is gravitationally locked to it in the same way the Moon is locked to Earth. One side of the planet always faces its star, just as one side of the Moon always faces Earth.

This star-facing side has a temperature of about 4,220 degrees Fahrenheit (2,326 degrees Celsius) — hot enough to vaporize rock.

So unlike the much cooler Earth, COROT-7b has no volatile gases (carbon dioxide, water vapor, nitrogen) in its atmosphere. Instead it's atmosphere consists of what might be called vaporized rock.

"The only atmosphere this object has is produced from vapor arising from hot molten silicates in a lava lake or lava ocean," said Bruce Fegley Jr., of Washington University in St. Louis.

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Read the full article here.www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,558545,00.html

There's a neat article in the Discover Magazine blogs about how the Kepler telescope detects planets orbiting distant stars and the first numbers are in. It works!

Scientists at NASA have revealed their first findings relating to the Kepler space telescope, which is designed to detect the faintest dips in the brightness of distant stars - dips that could indicate that an earth-like planet is in orbit around those stars.

From the article:

Kepler stares at a single spot in the sky, taking many many measurements of the brightnesses of about 100,000 stars all at once. If a planet is circling one of those stars, and its orbit is edge-on to us, then once every orbit the planet passes directly between us and the star. This is like an eclipse, and the light we see from the star drops a little bit. A planet like Jupiter orbiting a star like the Sun will cause a 1% drop in the light we see, because Jupiter has a radius 1/10th of the Sun’s, so the surface area of the planet is 1% of that of the star (remember, area = π x the radius squared, so 1/10 x 1/10 = 1/100 or 1%). Therefore the planet blocks 1% of the star’s surface, and we see the corresponding drop in starlight.

Earth is smaller than Jupiter, about 1/10th the radius. That means that an Earth orbiting a star blocks 1/10,000th the light of the star, or 0.01%. That’s a tiny fraction! From the ground, that’s impossible to measure due to fluctuations in Earth’s atmosphere changing the amount of light we see from the star. But from space — hey, that’s where Kepler is! — we can make far more accurate measurements.

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Read the full article here.