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Deinococcus radiodurans is an extremophile microbe capable of surviving freezing cold temperatures, ionizing radiation, ultraviolet light, and dehydration. And as new research published today in Frontiers in Microbiology shows, this bacterium can also survive the harsh conditions of outer space. Dried out samples of Deinococcus were brought back to life after spending over three years on a panel outside the International Space Station. Back in 2008, Yamagishi and his colleagues used aircraft and balloons to detect and document microbes floating in the upper atmosphere. Naturally, samples of Deinococcus radiodurans—a microbe Guinness World Records lists as the most radiation-resistant lifeform—were found...

The so-called Fast Radio Burst repeats every 157 days with the power of millions of suns and its latest barrage arrived right on time last week. Known as FRB 121102, scientists hope that studying the strange blinkering signal could unlock the secret to what FRBs are and where they come from. Fast Radio Bursts are intense pulses of radio waves that last no longer than the blink of an eye and come from far beyond our Milky Way galaxy. Their origins are unknown. . The group’s findings, to The Astronomer’s Telegram, suggest the burst is currently in its active phase...

Artist’s conception of SIMP J01365663+0933473, a planetary-mass object beyond our Solar System. The object, about a dozen times more massive than Jupiter is traveling through space unaccompanied by any parent star.. Credit: Chuck Carter, NRAO/AUI/NSF ================================================================================ Upcoming NASA mission will search for planets in the Milky Way without their own sun. An upcoming NASA mission could find that there are more rogue planets — planets that float in space without orbiting a sun — than there are stars in the Milky Way, a new study theorizes. “This gives us a window into these worlds that we would otherwise not have,”...

New simulations show that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be able to reveal myriad rogue planets – freely floating bodies that drift through our galaxy untethered to a star. Studying these island worlds will help us understand more about how planetary systems form, evolve, and break apart. Astronomers discovered planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, in the 1990s. We quickly went from knowing of only our own planetary system to realizing that planets likely outnumber the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. Now, a team of scientists is finding ways to improve our understanding...

Explanation: Do other stars have planets like our Sun? Previous evidence shows that they do, coming mostly from slight shifts in the star's light created by the orbiting planets. Recently, however, and for the first time, a pair of planets has been directly imaged around a Sun-like star. These exoplanets orbit the star designated TYC 8998-760-1 and are identified by arrows in the featured infrared image. At 17 million years old, the parent star is much younger than the 5-billion-year age of our Sun. Also, the exoplanets are both more massive and orbit further out than their Solar System analogues:...

Posted on August 12, 2020 by David Dickinson Hubble Examines Earth’s Reflection as an ‘Exoplanet’ During a Lunar Eclipse What would we look for in a distant exoplanet in the hunt for Earth-like worlds, and perhaps life? A recent observation carried out by the Hubble Space Telescope found tell-tale signatures from our home planet by looking at a familiar source under extraordinary circumstances: Earth’s Moon, during a total lunar eclipse.The experiment was carried out by the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990 and now in its 30th year of operation. Orbiting the Earth once every 96 minutes, Hubble is...

On Monday (Aug. 10), an auxiliary cable supporting a platform that is suspended above the 1,000-foot-wide (300 meters) radio dish broke and crashed into the telescope's reflector panels, creating a gash in the dish measuring about 100 feet (30 m) long. In a news conference with reporters Friday (Aug. 14), Arecibo director Francisco Cordova said that 250 of the observatory's primary reflector dish panels were damaged, along with several support cables underneath the dish. But observatory officials have not yet fully assessed the extent of the damage or determined the cost of the repairs needed to get the 56-year-old radio...

Findings also suggest exoplanets lying within habitable zones may be susceptible to ice ages. ============================================================================= At least twice in Earth’s history, nearly the entire planet was encased in a sheet of snow and ice. These dramatic “Snowball Earth” events occurred in quick succession, somewhere around 700 million years ago, and evidence suggests that the consecutive global ice ages set the stage for the subsequent explosion of complex, multicellular life on Earth. Scientists have considered multiple scenarios for what may have tipped the planet into each ice age. While no single driving process has been identified, it’s assumed that whatever triggered...

...for astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, it was a much quieter affair. "It wasn't like there was a eureka moment," he says. "The evidence just built up slowly." He's a master of understatement. Ever since he and his collaborator Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona University, first published their suspicions about the unseen planet in 2014, the evidence has only continued to grow. Yet when asked how convinced he is that the new world, which he calls Planet X (though many other astronomers call it Planet 9), is really out there, Sheppard will only...

Using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), astronomers have discovered a transiting Saturn-like exoplanet circling NGTS-11 (also known as TOI-1847 and 2MASS J01340514-1425090), a mid K-type star located 624 light-years away in the constellation of Cetus. Named NGTS-11b (TOI-1847b), the planet has an equilibrium temperature of just 162 degrees Celsius (324 degrees Fahrenheit), making it one of the coolest known transiting gas giants. NGTS-11b has a radius of 0.82 times that of Jupiter and a mass of 0.34 Jupiter masses. The planet orbits its host star every 35 days at a distance...

The first ever photo of two planets orbiting a Sun-like star 309-light years from the Earth has been captured by astronomers using a ground-based telescope. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile was used to capture the image of the two giant exoplanets orbiting the very young star. Astronomers say this image is a snapshot of an environment similar to our Solar System - but at an earlier stage in its evolution.

California Institute of Technology (or Caltech) accidentally discovered the bacteria after performing unrelated experiments using a chalk-like type of manganese, a commonly found chemical element. Dr. Jared Leadbetter, professor of environmental microbiology at Caltech in Pasadena, left a glass jar covered with the substance to soak in tap water in his office sink, and left the vessel for several months when he went to work off campus. When he returned, Leadbetter found the jar coated with a dark material. Researchers discovered that the black coating found on the jar was oxidized manganese which had been generated by newly discovered bacteria...

Over the past few years, researchers have noticed an odd clustering in the orbits of multiple trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), which dwell in the dark depths of the far outer solar system. Some scientists have hypothesized that the TNOs' paths have been sculpted by the gravitational pull of a big object way out there, something five to 10 times more massive than Earth (though others think the TNOs may just be tugging on each other). This big "perturber," if it exists, may be a planet — the so-called "Planet Nine," or "Planet X" or "Planet Next" for those who will always...

LONDON (Reuters) - Could SARS have come from outer space? Some scientists think so. Instead of jumping from an unknown animal host in southern China, a few researchers in Britain believe the virus that has baffled medical experts descended from the stratosphere. "I think it is a possibility that SARS came from space. It is a very strong possibility," Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe told Reuters. The director of the Cardiff Center for Astrobiology in Wales and a proponent of the theory that life on Earth originated from space, admits the theory defies conventional wisdom. But in a letter published in The...

The interior ocean in Jupiter's moon Europa may be able to sustain life, NASA scientists believe. Their work is based on computer simulations of the reservoirs below the ice-shell surface of Europa, one of the largest moons in the Solar System.

A new estimate suggests the Milky Way is home to six billion Earth-like planets. So far, we’ve found just one potential candidate. In 2009, the Kepler space telescope constantly watched over some 200,000 stars in our corner of the Milky Way. It was looking for where life might exist—by pinpointing small, rocky planets in the temperate zones of warm, yellow suns, and figuring out just how special Earth is in the grand scheme of things. While the mission revolutionized the study of exoplanets, those main objectives went largely unfulfilled. A mechanical failure cut short Kepler’s initial survey in 2013. Astronomers...

A new study... provides an updated estimate of the likely number of alien civilizations that could exist in the Milky Way. The analysis...starts with revising the Drake equation... "The classic method for estimating the number of intelligent civilizations relies on making guesses of values relating to life," said Westby in a press release. "Our new study simplifies these assumptions using new data, giving us a solid estimate of the number of civilizations in our Galaxy." Westby and Conselice...built a key assumption in to their estimate: Life on another planet will arise in a similar way to how it did on...

Complex organic molecules that could serve as building blocks for life are more ubiquitous than previously thought in cold clouds of gas and dust that give birth to stars and planets, according to astronomers at the University of Arizona Steward Observatory. These molecules also appear much earlier than conventional wisdom suggested, hundreds of thousands of years before stars actually begin to form, the researchers found. Published in The Astrophysical Journal, the results challenge existing theories that require an environment heated by proto-stars—stars in the making—for complex organic molecules to become observable. The study is the first to look for the...

The scientists warned that they still require more data to confirm that their discovery is indeed a planet and not some “statistical fluke or a systematic measurement error”. A massive exoplanet that orbits a star located some 3,000 light years away from our world was discovered by scientists who suggest that it may be potentially habitable, Fox News reports citing a statement issued by the Max Planck Institute. According to the media outlet, while the planet, KOI-456.4, is "less that twice the size of Earth", orbits a "sun-like" star, making the two practically a "mirror image" of our own planet...

An international team of researchers from University College Dublin (UCD) and University of Saskatchewan, Canada, have observed 'proton-hopping' movement in a high-pressure form of ice (Ice VII lattices). Ordinary water ice is known as Ice I, while Ice VII is a cubic crystalline form of ice which can be formed from liquid water above 3 GPa (30,000 atmospheres) by lowering its temperature to room temperature, or by decompressing heavy water (D2O) Ice VI below 95 K. Ice VII has a simple structure of two inter-penetrating, and effectively independent, cubic-ice sub-lattices, and is stable across a wide-ranging region above 2 GPa....