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How 'Snowball Earth' Was A Tug-Of-War

A new study by planetary scientists at Harvard offers an explanation for one of Earth’s great climate puzzles: how the Sturtian glaciation, an ancient ice age when the planet was nearly entirely frozen, could have lasted 56 million years. A large igneous province in Canada helped them figure it out. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/c4hJDkP via IFTTT
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Study Identifies Geyers the JUICE Mission Could Explore on Ganymede

A new international scientific study by the Hellenic Space Center (HSC) has identified some of the most promising candidate cryovolcanic regions on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. These regions represent important targets for future observations by the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE). from Universe Today https://ift.tt/twLUTnR via IFTTT

Molybdenum Was Scarce, But Early Life Chose It Anyway

Life on Earth depends on a critical dance of elements throughout the biosphere. One of these elements is Molybdenum, a transition metal that speeds up important biochemical reactions in cells. New research shows that despite its ancient scarcity, and despite the greater availability of other, similar metals, life "chose" Molybdenum earlier than thought. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/sHb3AZV via IFTTT

A Brief-ish History of SETI. Part III: Dyson and Kardashev

By the 1960s, two major contributions were made to the field of SETI, both of which considered how more advanced civilizations could be found based on the types of structures they might build and the levels of energy they could harness. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/2Aaif67 via IFTTT

New Model Finds the Lower Size Limit for Habitable Exoplanets

The search for Earth 2.0 has begun in earnest. But there’s a huge variety of exoplanets out there, so narrowing down the search to focus valuable telescope time on only the best candidates is critical. One variable of a planet that will have a huge impact on its habitability is its size. A new paper, now available in pre-print on arXiv, by researchers at the University of California Riverside, looks into the impact of a planet’s size on one of its more critical features for habitability - whether it holds onto an atmosphere - and determines that slightly smaller than Earth is likely the smallest a planet can be and still be viable for life to develop. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/72LObZP via IFTTT

Astronomers Find an X-Ray Key to the Red Dot Mystery

Ever since JWST first began peering out at the early Universe a few years ago, astronomers have been spotting strange "little red dots" (LRDs) in its infrared images. There are hundreds of these compact blobs at very high redshifts at distances of about 12 billion light-years. Astronomers think they began forming some 600 million years after the Big Bang. That makes them players in the infancy of the cosmos. They appear red in optical light and blue in the ultraviolet. So, what are these strange objects? from Universe Today https://ift.tt/G5uYsVQ via IFTTT

"Hypergravity" Rewires Biology Over the Long Haul

There’s a specific sequence in the anime Dragonball Z that for some reason has stuck in my head for over two decades. Goku, the main character of the show, travels to King Kai’s planet and can barely stand up when he arrives because the planet’s gravity is 10 times stronger than Earth’s. Over time, he trains in this gravity, and his body begins to adapt to it. Eventually, after leaving the planet, he’s stronger, faster, and more agile than he ever was before. But would that really happen if you were exposed to 10G over a long period of time? Researchers at the University of California Riverside (UCR) decided to test that idea and report their results in a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology. But instead of using anime characters, they used fruit flies as their test subjects. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/Qj7StDF via IFTTT