Category Astronomy/Space

A team of researchers at MIT has found via theoretical modeling that the saltiness of the oceans on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, may be the right level to sustain life. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes the factors that went into building their model and the features of Enceladus that were used to measure the saltiness of its oceans.

The combined data from the Cassini and Galileo missions showed that Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa both hold potential for satisfying three of the main features believed to be necessary for supporting life on other celestial bodies: they have a source of energy, they have liquid water and they have a mi...

Researchers publish scenario that explains 2016 discovery by NASA’s Curiosity rover. Planetary scientists from Rice University, NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the California Institute of Technology have an answer to a mystery that’s puzzled the Mars research community since NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered a mineral called tridymite in Gale Crater in 2016.

Tridymite is a high-temperature, low-pressure form of quartz that is extremely rare on Earth, and it wasn’t immediately clear how a concentrated chunk of it ended...

An international team of 23 researchers led by Maria Dainotti, Assistant Professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), has analyzed archive data for powerful cosmic explosions from the deaths of stars and found a new way to measure distances in the distant Universe.

With no landmarks in space, it is very difficult to get a sense of depth. One technique astronomers use is to look for “standard candles,” objects or events where the underlying physics dictate that the absolute brightness (what you would see if you were right next to it) is always the same...

Shockwaves caused by asteroids colliding with Earth create materials with a range of complex carbon structures, which could be used for advancing future engineering applications, according to an international study led by UCL and Hungarian scientists.

Published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team of researchers has found that diamonds formed during a high-energy shockwave from an asteroid collision around 50,000 years ago have unique and exceptional properties, caused by the short-term high temperatures and extreme pressure.

The researchers say that these structures can be targeted for advanced mechanical and electronic applications, giving us the ability to design materials that are not only ultrahard but also malleable with tunable electronic pro...