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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Comet Impacts may have led to Life on Earth – and perhaps elsewhere

    August 19, 2015, Categories  Astronomy/Space, Chemistry/Nanotechnology, Biology/Biotechnology

    C/2006 P1 Comet McNaught, the 'Great Comet of 2007', as seen from Swift's Creek, Victoria, Australia on 23 January 2007. Image credit: Fir0002 / Flagstaffotos / Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0.

    C/2006 P1 Comet McNaught, the ‘Great Comet of 2007′, as seen from Swift’s Creek, Victoria, Australia on 23 January 2007. Image credit: Fir0002 / Flagstaffotos / Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0.

    Substantial synthesis of peptides – the first building blocks of life may have been driven by comet impacts. Dr Sugahara from JAMSTEC in Yokahama, and Dr Koichi Mimura, from Nagoya University performed a series of experiments to mimic the conditions of comet impacts on the Early Earth at the time when life first appeared, around 4 billion years ago.

    They took frozen mixtures of amino acid, water ice and silicate (forsterite) at cryogenic condition (77 K), and used a propellant gun to simulate the shock of a comet impact...

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    Solar System Formation don’t mean a thing without that Spin

    August 19, 2015, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    These images show the central plane of a rotating disk orbiting a newly formed protostar (dark dot) formed in a three-dimensional model of the shock-triggered collapse of a molecular cloud of gas and dust. Density is shown on the left, while the x velocity plot on the right shows how the shock (outer edge) has injected fingers with motions that are responsible for producing the spin of the disk around the central protostar. Image is provided courtesy of Alan Boss.

    These images show the central plane of a rotating disk orbiting a newly formed protostar (dark dot) formed in a three-dimensional model of the shock-triggered collapse of a molecular cloud of gas and dust. Density is shown on the left, while the x velocity plot on the right shows how the shock (outer edge) has injected fingers with motions that are responsible for producing the spin of the disk around the central protostar. Image is provided courtesy of Alan Boss.

    New details about the trigger that may have started the earliest phases of planet formation in our solar system. For decades, it’s been hypothesized that our Solar System’s genesis was initiated by a shock wave from a supernova...

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    NASA’s LADEE Spacecraft finds Neon in Lunar Atmosphere

    August 18, 2015, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist’s concept of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft in orbit above the moon. Credit: NASA Ames / Dana Berry

    Artist’s concept of NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft in orbit above the moon. Credit: NASA Ames / Dana Berry

    The presence of neon in the exosphere of the moon has been a subject of speculation since the Apollo missions, but no credible detections were made till now. There’s not enough neon to make the moon visibly glow because the moon’s atmosphere is extremely tenuous, about 100 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere at sea level. A dense atmosphere like Earth’s is relatively rare in our solar system because an object has to be sufficiently massive to have enough gravity to hold onto it.

    The behavior of a dense atmosphere is driven by collisions between its atoms and molecules...

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    Dark Energy Survey finds 8 more faint celestial objects near our Milky Way Galaxy.

    August 18, 2015, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The Dark Energy Survey has now mapped one-eighth of the full sky (red shaded region) using the Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile (foreground). This map has led to the discovery of 17 dwarf galaxy candidates in the past six months (red dots), including eight new candidates announced today. Several of the candidates are in close proximity to the two largest dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, both of which are visible to the unaided eye. By comparison, the new stellar systems are so faint that they are difficult to "see" even in the deep DES images and can be more easily visualized using maps of the stellar density (inset). Fourteen of the dwarf galaxy candidates found in DES data are visible in this particular image. Credit: Illustration: Dark Energy Survey Collaboration

    The Dark Energy Survey has now mapped one-eighth of the full sky (red shaded region) using the Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile (foreground). This map has led to the discovery of 17 dwarf galaxy candidates in the past six months (red dots), including eight new candidates announced today. Several of the candidates are in close proximity to the two largest dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, both of which are visible to the unaided eye. By comparison, the new stellar systems are so faint that they are difficult to “see” even in the deep DES images and can be more easily visualized using maps of the stellar density (inset)...

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