Category Astronomy/Space

Methanogens in solution inside a planetary simulator at the University of Arkansas. Credit: Russell Cothren

University of Arkansas researchers recently took a step toward answering a question for the ages: Is there life on Mars? Answer: they can’t rule it out. 2 recent publications suggest that life, in the form of ancient, simple organisms, methanogens, could survive the harsh conditions found near the surface of Mars, and deep in its soils. Using methanogens to test for survivability is particularly relevant because scientists have detected their byproduct, methane, in the Martian atmosphere. On Earth, methane is strongly associated with organic matter, though there are non-organic sources of the gas, including volcanic eruptions.

Scientists aren’t yet sure what the presence of Martian m...

This is an artist impression illustrating a supermassive black hole with X-ray emission emanating from its inner region (pink) and ultrafast winds streaming from the surrounding disk (purple). Credit: The European Space Agency (ESA)

Temperature swings of black hole winds measured for the 1st time. Black holes feed on the large disks of gas that swirl around them. Occasionally the black holes eat too much and burp out an ultra-fast wind, or outflow. These winds may have a strong influence on regulating the growth of the host galaxy by clearing the surrounding gas away and suppressing star formation. Scientists have now made the most detailed observation yet of such an outflow, coming from an active galaxy named IRAS 13224-3809...

This is a 3-D visualization of reconstructed dark matter clump distributions in a distant galaxy cluster, obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields data. The unseen matter in this map is comprised of a smooth heap of dark matter on which clumps form. Credit: Yale University

The dark matter map is derived from Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields data of a trio of galaxy clusters that act as cosmic magnifying glasses to peer into older, more distant parts of the universe, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan led an international team of researchers that analyzed the Hubble images...

Caption: An artist’s conception of a free-floating planet analog courtesy of NASA/JPL.

There may be a large number of undetected bright, substellar objects similar to giant exoplanets in our own solar neighborhood, according to new work from a team led by Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné and including researchers from the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at Université de Montréal. Similarly-aged stars moving through space together in a group, ie an association – are of great interest to researchers, as they are considered a prime target to hunt for brown dwarfs and free-floating planet-like objects.

Recent studies of an association of stars called TW Hya have revealed some of the first known isolated giant planet-sized objects in the neighborhood of our own Sun, ~100 light years a...