Category Astronomy/Space

A universe aglow.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, ESO/ Lutz Wisotzki et al.

MUSE spectrograph reveals uncovered vast cosmic reservoirs of atomic hydrogen. An unexpected abundance of Lyman-alpha emission in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) region was discovered by an international team of astronomers using the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The discovered emission covers nearly the entire field of view – leading the team to extrapolate that almost all of the sky is invisibly glowing with Lyman-alpha emission from the early Universe.

Astronomers have long been accustomed to the sky looking wildly different at different wavelengths, but the extent of the observed Lyman-alpha emission was still surprising...

An artist’s conception of a distant Solar System Planet X, which could be shaping the orbits of smaller extremely distant outer Solar System objects like 2015 TG387 discovered by a team of Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard, Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo, and the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen.
Credit: Illustration by Roberto Molar Candanosa and Scott Sheppard, courtesy of Carnegie Institution for Science.

The newly found object, called 2015 TG387, will be announced Tuesday by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center. Astronomers have discovered a new extremely distant object far beyond Pluto with an orbit that supports the presence of an even-farther-out, Super-Earth or larger Planet X.

Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard and his colleagues – Northern Arizona University’s...

Two hands wearing blue gloves hold a metal bowl containing red-brown dirt to pour into another metal container.
Credit: Image courtesy of University of Central Florida

The University of Central Florida is selling Martian dirt, $20 a kilogram plus shipping. This is not fake news. A team of UCF astrophysicists has developed a scientifically based, standardized method for creating Martian and asteroid soil known as simulants.

The team published its findings this month in the journal Icarus “The simulant is useful for research as we look to go to Mars,” said Physics Professor Dan Britt, a member of UCF’s Planetary Sciences Group. “If we are going to go, we’ll need food, water and other essentials. As we are developing solutions, we need a way to test how these ideas will fare.”

For example, sci...

Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM

All living beings need cells and energy to replicate. Without these fundamental building blocks, living organisms on Earth would not be able to reproduce and would simply not exist. Little was known about a key element in the building blocks, phosphates, until now. University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers, in collaboration with colleagues in France and Taiwan, provide compelling new evidence that this component for life was found to be generated in outer space and delivered to Earth in its first one billion years by meteorites or comets. The phosphorus compounds were then incorporated in biomolecules found in cells in living beings on Earth.

The breakthrough research is outlined in “An Interstellar Synthesis of Phosphorus Oxoacids,” authore...