The first-stage booster pictured above pushed the limits during SpaceX’s 4th successful landing last Friday with a speed that was very close to the designed maximum for the rocket and the support systems for its legs. Although the 15-story rocket was leaning on the barge and in danger of tipping over, it remained upright as it […]
Archive | Space
Gaian bottleneck means alien life never persists, say Oz astrobiologists
Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, according to a new paper by astrobiologists at the Australian National University. In research aiming to understand how life might develop, the scientists realised new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets. “The universe […]
NASA discover Earth’s twin 1,400 light-years away
The Kepler mission has found the first near-Earth-size planet – called Kepler-452b – in the “habitable zone” around a G2 star much like our own sun. The Kepler-452 system is located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. “On the 20th anniversary year of the discovery that proved other suns host planets, the Kepler exoplanet […]
Latest images of Ceres show detail of bright spot
New images of the dwarf planet Ceres, taken from 2,700 miles above by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, show the surface of this mysterious world in sharper detail than ever before. The new images are of the brightest spots, which are located in a crater about 55 miles across. The largest bright area in this crater is […]
Stars can create DNA precursors, suggests new experiment
Scientists at Berkeley Lab and the University of Hawaii have shown how DNA’s molecular precursors – carbon ring structures with embedded nitrogen atoms – could be created in the region surrounding a star. The new work adds to previous intriguing observations of what appear to be organic molecules in distant stellar environments. In the new […]
Mars astronauts will suffer significant brain damage
Scientists at the University of California, Irvine have been investigating what might happen to an astronaut’s brain during the long journey to Mars and found that constant exposure to highly energetic charged particles – much like those found in the galactic cosmic rays that bombard astronauts during extended spaceflights – cause significant damage to the […]
Search of 100,000 galaxies for advanced civilizations yields no obvious candidates
Using data from NASA’s WISE orbiting observatory, a team of scientists say they have found no evidence of the mid-infrared energy emissions we would expect to observe from other advanced civilizations. The research is a significant expansion of earlier work in this area, which looked at only 100 or so galaxies. “The idea behind our […]
Mars may have liquid water
We’ve known for a long time that there is water in the form of ice on Mars. But now, new data from NASA’s rover Curiosity indicates that it’s possible that there is liquid water on the surface of Mars. Scientists from the University of Copenhagen say the water doesn’t freeze because of calcium perchlorate, which […]
Rare spectacle of three moons transiting Jupiter’s face captured by Hubble
New images from the Hubble Space Telescope have captured a rare occurrence as three of the Jupiter’s largest moons – Europa, Callisto and Io – parade across the giant gas planet’s banded face. There are four Galilean satellites – Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto; named after the 17th century scientist Galileo Galilei who discovered them. […]
Tiny vibrations could reveal extraterrestrial life
Looking for life on other planets is not straightforward. Usually, chemical detection is used, but such tests are limited in scope and might be completely irrelevant to esoteric alien biology. Motion is a trait of all life, but detecting the tiny movements of microorganisms requires incredible sensitivity. Now, Swiss scientists say they have developed an […]