astronomy-to-zoology:

Finding life in Europa’s Ocean.

From Aliens Of The Deep

Ahh, if only. Would be so cool if it were actually like this. We won’t know if we don’t go.

Curiosity Rover’s Secret Historic Breakthrough? Speculation Centers on Organic Molecules

Much of the internet is buzzing over upcoming “big news” from NASA’s Curiosity rover, but the space agency’s scientists are keeping quiet about the details.

The report comes by way of the rover’s principal investigator, geologist John Grotzinger of Caltech, who said that Curiosity has uncovered exciting new results from a sample of Martian soil recently scooped up and placed in the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument.

“This data is gonna be one for the history books. It’s looking really good,” Grotzinger told NPR in an segment published Nov. 20. Curiosity’s SAM instrument contains a vast array of tools that can vaporize soil and rocks to analyze them and measure the abundances of certain light elements such as carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen – chemicals typically associated with life.

The mystery will be revealed shortly, though. Grotzinger told Wired through e-mail that NASA would hold a press conference about the results during the 2012 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco from Dec. 3 to 7. Because it’s so potentially earth-shaking, Grotzinger said the team remains cautious and is checking and double-checking their results. But while NASA is refusing to discuss the findings with anyone outside the team, especially reporters, other scientists are free to speculate.

“If it’s going in the history books, organic material is what I expect,” says planetary scientist Peter Smith from the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Smith is formerly the principal investigator on a previous Mars mission, the Phoenix lander, which touched down at the Martian North Pole in 2008. “It may be just a hint, but even a hint would be exciting.”

Smith added that he is not in contact with anyone from the Curiosity team about their results and offered his assessment as an informed outside researcher.

Organic molecules are those that contain carbon and are potential indicators of life. During its mission, Phoenix heated a sample of soil to search for organics but these efforts were stymied by the presence of perchlorates, chemical salts that sit in the Martian soil. Perchlorates react to heat and destroy any complex organic molecules, leaving only carbon dioxide, which is abundant in the Martian atmosphere.

The Viking landers, which explored opposite sides of Mars in the late 1970s, also conducted a search for organic molecules and came up empty. For decades afterward, astronomers considered Mars to be a dead planet, with conditions not very conducive to life. After the results from Phoenix, scientists realized that perchlorates were probably messing with those earlier findings as well, and could account for their negative outcome.

Curiosity’s suite of laboratory instruments are able to slowly heat a sample in a way that doesn’t trigger the perchlorates. They can also weigh any molecules present, determining how much carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen they are made from. Simple organic compounds wouldn’t be completely shocking, said Smith, since these probably come from meteorites originating in the asteroid belt and probably are around on present-day Mars. But they would indicate that the building blocks for life are present on Mars and might only need the addition of water, which Mars had in the past, in order to produce organisms.

“If they found signatures of a very complex organic type, that would be astounding,” said Smith, since they would likely be leftovers from complex life forms that once roamed Mars. But the odds of finding such a startling result in a sample of sand scooped from a random dune are “very, very low,” Smith said.

Smith cautioned against speculating too much, since rumors have a way of spreading rapidly when it comes to any discussion of potential life on Mars. During his tenure on the Phoenix mission, his team was evaluating the interesting perchlorate results, which they kept secret during analysis. Rumors got out and then became worse when some unsubstantiated report claimed a member of his team meeting was meeting with the White House.

“When you keep things secret, people start thinking all kinds of crazy things,” he said.

(via ikenbot)

ikenbot:

‘Super-Jupiter’ Discovery Dwarfs Solar System’s Largest Planet

Astronomers have spotted a planet 13 times more massive than Jupiter, the largest planet in our own solar system.

Image: The “super-Jupiter” Kappa Andromedae b, shown here in an artist’s rendering, circles its star at nearly twice the distance that Neptune orbits the sun. With a mass about 13 times Jupiter’s, the object glows with a reddish color. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger

The planet orbits a star called Kappa Andromedae that is 2.5 times the mass of the sun and is located 170 light-years away from Earth. As a gas giant larger than Jupiter, it’s classified as a “super-Jupiter.”

Astronomers say the object’s immense size places it right on the edge of the classifications for giant planets and a type of failed star known as a brown dwarf. Its official name is Kappa Andromedae b, or Kappa And b for short, and it likely has a reddish glow, researchers said.

“According to conventional models of planetary formation, Kappa And b falls just shy of being able to generate energy by fusion, at which point it would be considered a brown dwarf rather than a planet,” Michael McElwain, a member of the discovery team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a Nov. 19 statement. “But this isn’t definitive, and other considerations could nudge the object across the line into brown dwarf territory.”

ikenbot:

‘Super-Earth’ Alien Planet May Be Habitable for Life

Astronomers have detected an alien planet that may be capable of supporting life as we know it — and it’s just a stone’s throw from Earth in the cosmic scheme of things.

Image: This artist’s impression shows the newfound potentially habitable alien planet HD40307g in the foreground, with its host star and two other worlds in the six-planet system also depicted. The atmosphere and continents shown are neither detected nor constrained by the discovery team’s observations. Credit:

The newfound exoplanet, a so-called “super-Earth” called HD 40307g, is located inside its host star’s habitable zone, a just-right range of distances where liquid water may exist on a world’s surface. And the planet lies a mere 42 light-years away from Earth, meaning that future telescopes might be able to image it directly, researchers said.

“The longer orbit of the new planet means that its climate and atmosphere may be just right to support life,” study co-author Hugh Jones, of the University of Hertfordshire in England, said in a statement. “Just as Goldilocks liked her porridge to be neither too hot nor too cold but just right, this planet or indeed any moons that it has lie in an orbit comparable to Earth, increasing the probability of it being habitable.”

HD 40307g is one of three newly discovered worlds around the parent star, which was already known to host three planets. The finds thus boost the star’s total planetary population to six.

The star HD 40307 is slightly smaller and less luminous than our own sun. Astronomers had previously detected three super-Earths — planets a bit more massive than our own — around the star, all of them in orbits too close-in to support liquid water.

In the new study, the research team re-analyzed observations of the HD 40307 system made by an instrument called the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS.

HARPS is part of the European Southern Observatory’s 11.8-foot (3.6 meters) telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The instrument allows astronomers to pick up the tiny gravitational wobbles an orbiting planet induces in its parent star.

The researchers’ new analysis techniques enabled them to spot three more super-Earths around the star, including HD 40307g, which is thought to be at least seven times as massive as our home planet.

HD 40307g may or may not be a rocky planet like Earth, said study lead author Mikko Tuomi, also of the University of Hertfordshire.

“If I had to guess, I would say 50-50,” Tuomi told SPACE.com via email. “But the truth at the moment is that we simply do not know whether the planet is a large Earth or a small, warm Neptune without a solid surface.”

A jam-packed extrasolar system

HD 40307g is the outermost of the system’s six planets, orbiting at an average distance of 56 million miles (90 million kilometers) from the star. (For comparison, Earth zips around the sun from about 93 million miles, or 150 million km, away.)

The other two newfound exoplanets are probably too hot to support life as we know it, researchers said. But HD 40307g — which officially remains a “planet candidate” pending confirmation by follow-up studies — sits comfortably in the middle of the star’s habitable zone.

Further, HD 40307g’s orbit is distant enough that the planet likely isn’t tidally locked to the star like the moon is to Earth, researchers said. Rather, HD 40307g probably rotates freely just like our planet does, showing each side of itself to the star in due course.

The lack of tidal locking “increases its chances of actually having Earth-like conditions,” Tuomi said.

The new study has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

ikenbot:

Quantum Entanglement With the Past

Side Note: Remember when I was going off on my ramblings about using quantum entanglement to somehow communicate with the past? Well this may not be as imaginative and hopeful about communicating with the past in our dimension as opposed to that of the quantum world but here’s an awesome article from livescience getting into this recent experiment physicists did back in April of this year, 2012. Basically they showed that in theory, it is possible to send a particle from one computer into another across vast distances long after one particle has ceased to exist, showing that quantum entanglement works both ways. A particle in the future can alter one in the past. This kind of experiment and discovery is paramount to the future of how we use our communications technology.

Entanglement is a weird state where two particles remain intimately connected, even when separated over vast distances, like two die that must always show the same numbers when rolled. For the first time, scientists have entangled particles after they’ve been measured and may no longer even exist.

If that sounds baffling, even the researchers agree it’s a bit “radical,” in a paper reporting the experiment published online April 22 in the journal Nature Physics.

“Whether these two particles are entangled or separable has been decided after they have been measured,” write the researchers, led by Xiao-song Ma of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the University of Vienna.

Essentially, the scientists showed that future actions may influence past events, at least when it comes to the messy, mind-bending world of quantum physics.

In the quantum world, things behave differently than they do in the real, macroscopic worldwe can see and touch around us. In fact, when quantum entanglement was first predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein expressed his distaste for the idea, calling it “spooky action at a distance.”

The researchers, taking entanglement a step further than ever before, started with two sets of light particles, called photons.

The basic setup goes like this:

Both pairs of photons are entangled, so that the two particles in the first set are entangled with each other, and the two particles in the second set are entangled with each other. Then, one photon from each pair is sent to a person named Victor. Of the two particles that are left behind, one goes to Bob, and the other goes to Alice.

But now, Victor has control over Alice and Bob’s particles. If he decides to entangle the two photons he has, then Alice and Bob’s photons, each entangled with one of Victor’s, also become entangled with each other. And Victor can choose to take this action at any time, even after Bob and Alice may have measured, changed or destroyed their photons.

“The fantastic new thing is that this decision to entangle two photons can be done at a much later time,” said research co-author Anton Zeilinger, also of the University of Vienna. “They may no longer exist.”

Such an experiment had first been predicted by physicist Asher Peres in 2000, but had not been realized until now.

“The way you entangle them is to send them onto a half-silvered mirror,” Zeilinger told LiveScience. “It reflects half of the photons, and transmits half. If you send two photons, one to the right and one to the left, then each of the two photons have forgotten where they come from. They lose their identities and become entangled.”

Zeilinger said the technique could one day be used to communicate between superfast quantum computers, which rely on entanglement to store information. Such a machine has not yet been created, but experiments like this are a step toward that goal, the researchers say.

“The idea is to create two particle pairs, send one to one computer, the other to another,” Zeilinger said.”Then if these two photons are entangled, the computers could use them to exchange information.”

ikenbot:

Oldest, Farthest Star Explosions Discovered in Distant Universe

The most distant star explosions in the universe have now been discovered, suggesting scientists may one day see the deaths of the first stars to arise after the Big Bang, researchers say.

Image: High-resolution simulation of a galaxy hosting a super-luminous supernova and its chaotic environment in the early Universe. Credit: Adrian Malec and Marie Martig (Swinburne University)

Future research into such remote, powerful explosions could shed light on the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang, investigators added.

The most powerful star explosionsare supernovas, which are bright enough to briefly outshine all the stars in their home galaxies. In the past 12 years, astronomers have detected a new class of supernova, so-called super-luminous supernovas, which areup to 100 times brighter than all the others.

“Super-luminous supernovae are very energetic events and extremely rare,” lead study author Jeff Cooke, an astronomer at the Swinburne University of Technology in Hawthorn, Australia, told SPACE.com. “They are very destructive as well. In the early universe, many galaxies were quite small but vigorously forming stars. A single supernova of this type could disrupt a significant fraction of such a galaxy and, in some cases, cause the star formation process to come to a halt.”

However, in larger galaxies where super-luminous supernovas make less of an overall impact, the material blown off them “provides the seeds to form new stars, and the shock waves from the explosions can help to compress gas in those galaxies to accelerate the star formation process,” Cooke added. “So they can be the bringers of death or the bringers of life to stars. Detecting and measuring the rate of super-luminous supernovae in the early universe helps clarify their role in the formation and evolution of galaxies.”

Full Article

ikenbot:

The Return of Sauron’s Planet

New analysis shows an object orbiting the star Fomalhaut may actually be a planet, enveloped in a cloud of dust. We can’t for sure it exists, but we can’t say it doesn’t, either! Earlier claims of it not existing may have been premature.

ikenbot:

Galaxy Evolution Discovery Surprises Scientists

Disk galaxies like our own Milky Way put the finishing touches on their stunning shapes relatively recently, a new study suggests.

Image: This spectacular image of the large spiral galaxy NGC 1232 was obtained on Sept. 21, 1998, during a period of good observing conditions. Credit: ESO

The find will likely surprise many scientists, who had thought such galaxies had been static for more than half of the universe’s 13.7-billion-year existence.

“Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into their present form by about eight billion years ago, with little additional development since,” lead author Susan Kassin, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement. “The trend we’ve observed instead shows the opposite — that galaxies were steadily changing over this time period.”

Kassin and her colleagues used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to study 544 blue galaxies, whose color indicates that stars are forming within them.

They found that the most far-flung, ancient galaxies tend to be the most disordered, with organization steadily increasing as galaxies are observed closer and closer to the present day. Over time, the galaxies’ rotation speeds increase, and they settle into proper, well-behaved disks.

The trend holds for galaxies of all masses, but the biggest systems are always the most highly organized, researchers said.

“Previous studies removed galaxies that did not look like the well-ordered rotating disks now common in the universe today,” said co-author Benjamin Weiner of the University of Arizona. “By neglecting them, these studies examined only those rare galaxies in the distant universe that are well-behaved and concluded that galaxies didn’t change.”

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