The Building Blocks of Life Have Been Discovered in a Comet
The amino acid glycine, a fundamental building block of proteins, has been found in a comet for the first time, bolstering the theory that raw ingredients of life arrived on Earth from outer space, scientists said on Monday.
Microscopic traces of glycine were discovered in a sample of particles retrieved from the tail of comet Wild 2 by the NASA spacecraft Stardust deep in the solar system some 242 million miles (390 million km) from Earth, in January 2004.
Samples of gas and dust collected on a small dish lined with a super-fluffy material called aerogel were returned to Earth two years later in a canister that detached from the spacecraft and landed by parachute in the Utah desert.
Planet Discovered that Defies Laws of Physics
“This is another bizarre planet discovery. The situation is analogous to the way tidal friction is gradually causing the Earth’s spin to slow down, and the Moon to spiral away from the Earth,” he said. “In this case, however, the spin of the star is slower than the orbit of the planet, so the star should be spinning up, and the planet spiralling in,” he said.
WASP-18b, one of more than 300 known “exoplanets” orbiting distant stars, was discovered by a team led by Coel Hellier of Keele University, whose study is published in the journal Nature.
It is a hot, Jupiter-like planet where temperatures exceed 2,100C – high enough to create clouds of silica-based gems, according to Professor Cameron. If anyone could visit this planet, and survive, they might see a sky full of diamonds and sapphires, he said.
A barrage of comets may have delivered Earth’s oceans around 3.85 billion years ago, a new study suggests.
Scientists have long suspected that Earth and its near neighbors were walloped by tens of thousands of impactors during an ancient event known as the Late Heavy Bombardment.
This pummeling disfigured the moon, leaving behind massive craters that are still visible, preserved for millennia in the moon’s airless environment. But it’s been unclear whether the impactors were icy comets or rocky asteroids.
New Device Extracts Oxygen from Moon Rocks
To heat the reactor on the Moon would need just a small amount of power, Fray said, and the reactor itself can be thermally insulated to lock heat in. The three reactors would need about 4.5 kilowatts of power, which could be supplied by solar panels or even a small nuclear reactor placed on the Moon.
Astronaut Koichi Wakata, who has been living aboard the International Space Station since mid-March, has carried out a series of offbeat space experiments proposed by the Japanese public.
Nebula Offers Glimpse of the Inner Workings of a Star Factory
The Trifid Nebula not only appears to have three lobes when observed from afar, but closer inspection reveals that it is actually made of three distinct types of nebula clouds. This image comes from the La Silla Observatory in Chile, and it shows off, in the visible spectrum, the beauty of the Trifid Nebula’s three part cosmic factory.
Snapshots from Withing an Exploding Star
Physicists at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago have used the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer to model the extreme physics of a supernova explosion.
In 2002, several scientists claimed that bacteria high in Earth’s atmosphere came from space.
Last year, scientists said that bacteria in the upper atmosphere may actually make rain. Specifically, they said that bacteria can freeze at fairly warm temperatures, so that the “biological ice nuclei” form condensation nuclei which triggers rain.
Indeed, some scientists have speculated that bacteria cause rain as a means of transportation, so that they will “rain out” from the upper atmosphere to the surface of a planet.
Now, scientists have discovered a “hibernating” bacteria in a salt mine in Utah which they believe has been in suspended animation for 250 million years. There is evidence that this ability to hibernate for long periods of time is also useful for travel through space by the bacteria. . .
The vastest structure ever is a collection of superclusters a billion light years away extending for 5% the length of the entire observable universe.
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The great wall is a massive array of astronomical objects named after the observations which revealed them, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. An eight year project scanned over a quarter of the sky to generate full 3-D maps of almost a million galaxies. Analysis of these images revealed a huge panel of galaxies 1.37 billion light years long, and even the pedantic-sounding .07 there is six hundred and sixty billion trillion kilometers. This is science precisely measuring made-up sounding numbers.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D