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IN 2013, SCIENTISTS were stunned to find microbes thriving deep inside volcanic rocks beneath the seafloor off the Pacific Northwest, buried under more than 870 feet of sediment. The rocks were on the flank of the volcanic rift where they were born, and they were still young and hot enough to drive intense chemical reactions with the seawater, from which the microbes derived their energy. Now, however, another team of researchers have discovered living cells inside exceedingly old, cold oceanic crust in the middle of the South Pacific. It isn’t yet clear how these new microbes are managing to survive—and...

The huge "potentially hazardous" asteroid 1998 OR2 is just a few weeks away from its close encounter with Earth, and you can watch the giant space rock's approach online or with a small telescope.While asteroid 1998 OR2 is large enough to wreak havoc on Earth if it were to strike our planet, it won't come anywhere near a collision when it flies by on April 29. "On April 29, asteroid 1998 OR2 will safely pass by 3.9 million miles/6.2 million kilometers," scientists with NASA's Asteroid Watch program said in a Twitter update as they debunked a Daily Express report...

Venus and Earth are in what's a called a near resonance. As a result, Earth and Venus return to nearly the same positions in their orbits at eight-year intervals, which is why we get an event like this Friday's infrequently. Venus visits the Pleiades' neighbourhood often, but it's only once every eight years that the planet strolls right through the cluster. Since the orbital paths of Venus and Earth are elliptical and not perfect circles, this resonance effect is imprecise. In addition, Venus's orbit is tilted with respect to Earth's path around the Sun by 3.4 degrees, which results in...

Scientists: Astronauts Could Build Moon Base Using Human Urine Need a resilient lunar building material? Urine luck. VICTOR TANGERMANN5 HOURS AGO In cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA), a team of European researchers have conducted a… strange experiment. They mixed urea — the main compound found in mammalian urine — with materials, including Moon rocks, to test if we could one day use astronaut pee to build a lunar base. The urea itself acted as a “plasticizer” — stuff that allows us to shape other harder materials into different forms. In their unusual experiment, the team used an analog...

Buried inside data that NASA's iconic Voyager 2 spacecraft gathered at Uranus more than 30 years ago is the signature of a massive bubble that may have stolen a blob of the planet's gassy atmosphere. That's according to scientists who analyzed archived Voyager 2 observations of the magnetic field around Uranus. These measurements had been studied before, but only using a relatively coarse view. In the new research, scientists instead looked at those measurements every two seconds. That detail showed what had previously been missed: an abrupt zigzag in the magnetic field readings that lasted just one minute of the...

NASA's DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission is scheduled to launch on July 22, 2021. It's a demonstration mission to study the use of kinetic impact to deflect an asteroid. It'll head for the tiny binary asteroid system called Didymos, (or 65803 Didymos.) This double asteroid system poses no threat to Earth. The larger of the pair, named Didymos A, is about 780 meters (2560 ft.) in diameter, while the smaller one, Didymos B, is only about 160 meters (535 ft.) DART will crash itself into the Didymos B. It's close to the typical size of an asteroid that threatens...

As NASA reports in a new post, researchers recently discovered that Voyager 2 cruised through a blob of charged gas called a plasmoid as it passed the planet. The spacecraft’s journey through the plasmoid lasted only about a minute, but that was still long enough for scientists to spot the anomaly in the decades-old data. The scientists believe that gas loss may have already drained as much 55% of the planet’s atmosphere. Loss of atmosphere resulting in plasmoids has been observed around other planets in our solar system, including Saturn and Jupiter, though it’s thought that Uranus has leaked far...

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) delivers once again! Using its advanced imaging instrument, the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera, the orbiter captured a breathtaking image (shown below) of the plains north of Juventae Chasma. This region constitutes the southwestern part of Valles Marineris, the gigantic canyon system that runs along the Martian equator. The image was originally taken in July of 2007 by the HiRISE camera and showcases three distinct types of terrain. In the top half of the image, this includes plains with craters and sinuous ridge features. These features are of particular interest since they could be...

At the center of almost every galaxy in the universe is a supermassive black hole gobbling up incredible amounts of matter, and belching out incredible amounts of radiation. The biggest and hungriest of these gobblers — called quasars (or quasi-stellar objects, because they look deceptively like stars when seen through most telescopes) — are some of the most energetic objects in the universe. As infalling matter swirls around the quasar's maw at near-light-speed, that matter heats up and flies outward, propelled by the incredible force of its own radiation. All that intergalactic indigestion makes a quasar an awesome sight, capable...

The way the fabric of space and time swirls in a cosmic whirlpool around a dead star has confirmed yet another prediction from Einstein's theory of general relativity, a new study finds. That prediction is a phenomenon known as frame dragging, or the Lense-Thirring effect. It states that space-time will churn around a massive, rotating body. For example, imagine Earth were submerged in honey. As the planet rotated, the honey around it would swirl — and the same holds true with space-time. Satellite experiments have detected frame dragging in the gravitational field of rotating Earth, but the effect is extraordinarily...

The image of a black hole has a bright ring of emission surrounding a "shadow" cast by the black hole. This ring is composed of a stack of increasingly sharp subrings that correspond to the number of orbits that photons took around the black hole before reaching the observer. Credit: George Wong (UIUC) and Michael Johnson (CfA) _________________________________________________________________________________ Last April, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) sparked international excitement when it unveiled the first image of a black hole. Today, a team of researchers have published new calculations that predict a striking and intricate substructure within black hole images from extreme...

KEY POINTS NASA detected four asteroids approaching Earth The biggest asteroid in the group measures 180 feet wide All four asteroids will approach Earth this weekend NASA’s automated asteroid tracking system has detected four near-Earth objects that are expected to approach the planet this weekend. According to the agency, the biggest asteroid in the group is about as big as the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy. The first asteroid that will approach Earth this weekend has been identified by NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) as 2020 FK. As indicated in CNEOS’ database, this asteroid has an estimated...

Signals from existing global navigation satellites near the Earth could be used to guide astronauts in lunar orbit, 385,000 km away. Cheung and Lee plotted the orbits of navigation satellites from the United States’s Global Positioning System and two of its counterparts, Europe’s Galileo and Russia’s GLONASS system—81 satellites in all. Most of them have directional antennas transmitting toward Earth’s surface, but their signals also radiate into space. Those signals, say the researchers, are strong enough to be read by spacecraft with fairly compact receivers near the moon. Cheung, Lee and their team calculated that a spacecraft in lunar orbit...

NASA unsticks its Martian digging probe by whacking it with a shovel. ______________________________________________________________________ The robotic scoop-arm pins “the mole” against the side of its hole in an attempt to get it moving.NASA/JPL-Caltech ___________________________________________________________________ Every day, the InSight lander’s suite of instruments sends back data proving that the Red Planet isn’t really dead. Marsquakes rumble the seismometer. Swirling vortices register on onboard pressure sensor. And temperature sensors help track the weather and changing of the seasons. Despite the lander’s successes, however, one gauge has met with resistance from the Martian environment while trying to carry out its mission. Something has stopped...

A comet is currently brightening faster than expected, giving hope that it will become a prominent object visible with the unaided eye in May. An image of Comet C/2019 ATLAS taken from Walmer, Kent, UK, on March 12th, 2020. Image credit: Paul Sutherland The celestial visitor is labelled C/2019 Y4 ATLAS, indicating that it was discovered in 2019 by a sky survey called the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS). This robotic survey, based in Hawaii, searches for small objects to help defend Earth against possible future impacts, and has found several comets as well as asteroids. Comet C/2019 Y4...

NASA’s Juno mission captured this look at the southern hemisphere of Jupiter on Feb. 17, 2020, during the spacecraft’s most recent close approach to the giant planet. Not only is Jupiter the largest planet orbiting the Sun, it contains more than twice the amount of material of all other objects in the solar system combined — including all the planets, moons, asteroids and comets. In composition, Jupiter resembles a star, and scientists estimate that if it had been at least 80 times more massive at its formation, it could have become a type of star called a red dwarf rather...

With concerns of the Coronavirus Outbreak the media has been less involved with other matters. As a result I would like to post something unrelated to that of the virus. The linked asteroid collision map is a simulation that lets ordinary users like you take the powers of nature into your hands and view the destruction of asteroid collisions in different magnitudes and mediums. It's extremely interesting to see how a relatively small object can wreak havoc on society because of it's high impact speed. I believe that having tools similar to this is important because it raises awareness to...

As an ancient, carbon-rich asteroid, Ryugu is thought to be a time capsule of solar system history. To read that history, Hayabusa2 explored Ryugu from June 2018 to November 2019, and grabbed two samples from the asteroid to bring back to Earth (SN: 7/11/19). Hayabusa2 observed how the asteroid’s surface retained and released heat, a clue to its composition and structure. Dense rocks take in heat slowly and hold that heat for longer; more porous rocks change temperature quickly, like sand on a beach. Ryugu’s heat map shows that it’s about 50 percent porous, meaning half of it is holes,...

Early Tuesday morning, the waning crescent moon will be visible with the four planets down and to the left. As the sky begins to brighten, Mercury will rise and both Saturn and Mars will begin to fade from view. Both the Moon and Jupiter will remain visible as it gets lighter. By Wednesday morning, the moon will be closest to Jupiter and Mars. Jupiter is currently the brightest morning planet and it will be easy to pick out. Mars will be much dimmer in comparison. The moon will continue to get thinner as the week goes on. On Thursday morning,...

The race for the Democrat nomination has narrowed to two leading candidates. President Trump is undoubtedly preparing for either Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden as his 2020 election opponent. We should be able, at this point, to make a reasonable guess at how the president would fare against either of these candidates.