The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, Tech

Gale Crater 'Curiosity Mission' Landing Site Formed During Mars' "Water Epoch"

          



Crater counts show that the western portions of the Medusae Fossae formation on Mars—an intensely eroded deposit near the northern edge of the cratered highlands-- are much older than previously thought, originating near the end of the Hesperian geologic epoch on Mars, around 3.5 billion years ago, which means that these deposits were emplaced during the epoch that shows evidence for the wide distribution of water at the surface of Mars.

New mapping has revealed the presence of Medusae Fossae (MFF) materials close to Gale crater (image above), the landing site chosen for the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity, en route to its landing the evening of Aug. 5, 2012, PDT (early Aug. 6, EDT). The primary goal for Curiosity is to look for chemical evidence of ancient life preserved within exposures near the base of a five-kilometers high mound of layered materials at the center of Gale crater.

New NASA Image of the Pinwheel Galaxy as it Appeared 21 Million Years Ago

 

          

This NASA image obtained May 25, 2012, of the Pinwheel Galaxy, or M101, combines data in the infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-rays from four of NASA's space telescopes.  The Pinwheel galaxy in the constellation of Ursa Major (also known as the Big Dipper), is about 70 percent larger than our own Milky Way galaxy, with a diameter of about 170,000 light-years, and sits at a distance of 21 million light-years from Earth, which means that the light we're seeing in this image left the Pinwheel galaxy about 21 million years ago -- many millions of years before homo sapiens ever walked the Earth.

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Image of the Day: ISS Robotic Arm Completes 1st-Ever Hookup with SpaceX's Dragon --Launching Commercial Space Era

 

          

The International Space Station's crew reached out today with a robotic arm to grab SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule and brought it in for the orbital outpost's first-ever hookup with a commercial spaceship.The unmanned capsule is carrying 1,000 pounds of supplies on this unprecedented test flight. If the long-range plan unfolds as NASA hopes, U.S. astronauts could be shuttled back and forth on the Dragon or similar spacecraft within just a few years.

"Looks like we got us a dragon by the tail." The relief in the words of U.S. astronaut  Don Pettit was audible as he grabbed the uncrewed SpaceX Dragon spacecraft using a robotic arm on board the International Space Station today. Pettit used the space station's 58-foot robot arm to snare the gleaming white Dragon after a few hours of extra checks and maneuvers. The two vessels came together while sailing above Australia.

Organic Carbon Found on Mars --From Volcanism Not Biology

 

                       

Molecules containing large chains of carbon and hydrogen--the building blocks of all life on Earth--have been the targets of missions to Mars from Viking to the present day. While these molecules have previously been found in meteorites from Mars, scientists have disagreed about how this organic carbon was formed and whether or not it came from Mars. 

Could the Quadrillions of Nomad Planets in Milky Way Sustain Life? Astrobiologists Say "Yes"

 

                        

A recent study proposes the galaxy is crowded with nomad planets adrift in space. If this is the case, nomad planets may play a dynamic role in the universe. Titled "Nomads of the Galaxy," the authors proposed an upper limit to the number of nomad planets that might exist in the Milky Way Galaxy: 100,000 for every star. And because the Milky Way is estimated to have 200 to 400 billion stars, that could put the number of nomad planets in the quadrillions.

"Light from the Most Ancient, Distant Galaxies will Never Reach Earth"

 

          

New research finds that the ideal time to study the cosmos was more than 13 billion years ago, just about 500 million years after the Big Bang - the era (shown in this artist's conception above) when the first stars and galaxies began to form. Since information about the early universe is lost when the first galaxies are made, the best time to view cosmic perturbations is right when stars began to form. Modern observers can still access this nascent era from a distance by using surveys designed to detect 21-cm radio emission from hydrogen gas at those early times.

Remnants of a Supersized Black Hole Eruption? Massive Bubbles Extend from Milky Way Center for 50,000 Light Years (Today's Most Popular)

 

          

In 2010 NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way that spans 50,000 light-years that may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy (image below). The structure spans more than half of the visible sky, from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus, and it may be millions of years old.

What atronomers saw "are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center," said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who first recognized the feature. "We don't fully understand their nature or origin."

"Stellar Extremophiles" --Found Where Star Formation Isn't Supposed to Happen

 

          



"We’re finding stars in extreme galactic environments where star formation isn't supposed to happen," explains NASA GALEX project scientist Susan Neff of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is a very surprising development."

The image above is Hubble’s close-up view of the myriad stars near the core of Galaxy M83, the bright whitish region at far right. Like our own Milky Way Galaxy. M83, is a prominent member of a group of galaxies that includes Centaurus A and NGC 5253, all of which lie about 15 million light years distant. To date, six supernova explosions have been recorded in M83.

Searching Earth for Clues to What Mar's Curosity Rover Might Find

 

          


Carl Sagan made a point of saying that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." If life ever existed on Mars, evidence of its presence may be signaled by a distinctive magnetic signature as a definitive test for Martian life that the Mars' Curosity rover could detect after its landing the evening of Aug. 5, 2012, PDT (early Aug. 6, EDT and Universal Time), according to a 2011 study led by Victoria Petryshyn of the University of Southern California. 

A mission to hunt for fossils remnants of eraly life on the Red Planet could  search for deposits of magnetite or other iron-bearing minerals in Martian sediment mounds similar to communities of micro-organisms on Earth that build large sedimentary mounds called microbialites (see below). The microbes clump together in slimy mats or films, which grow layer by layer as the microbes reproduce, creating microbialites. 

Image of the Day: Human-Made Shadow on Mars

 

          

 

NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity catches its own late-afternoon shadow in this dramatically lit view eastward across Endeavour Crater on Mars. The rover used the panoramic camera (Pancam) between about 4:30 and 5:00 p.m. local Mars time to record images taken through different filters and combined into this mosaic view. 

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A Universe with Billions of Binary Planets?

 

           



The discovery that there are perhaps billions of solo rogue planets and binary planet systems in the Milky Way alone has led to a new theoretical study by astronomer Hagai Perets and his colleague at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that proposes a possible answer: the distant planets are not part of the original stellar system - they were captured by the star. 

Mystery Pulsar with Unknown Wave Form Discovered

 

          

The Large Area Telescope (LAT), built by SLAC for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, collects information on high-energy gamma rays from numerous sources in the sky. Among these are small, elusive objects called pulsars, which spin up to hundreds of times per second. Their name derives from the beams their magnetic fields produce as a result of this spin, which look like the pulsing beam of a lighthouse when, by chance, they happen to sweep across our field of view.

One especially interesting object discovered with this technique seems to have a previously unknown waveform – a gamma-ray peak before and after each radio peak – an effect the team could not explain using standard models of pulsar geometry. This suggests that the radio part of the beam may originate at two distinct points above the object’s surface. This variation increases the mystery and allure of these fascinating astrophysical phenomena.

Image of the Day: Space X Falcon 9 'Dragon' Launch to the ISS

 

           

 

The Space X company made history as its Falcon 9 rocket rose from its seaside launch pad and pierced the pre-dawn sky, aiming for a rendezvous in a few days with the space station and launching the commercial space era. It is the first time a private company has launched a rocket to the International Space Station.

"Why Super-Massive Black Holes Formed Less than 1 Billion Years After Big Bang" --A Mystery

 

          



In the early days of the universe, a mere 700 to 800 million years after the Big Bang, most things were small. The first stars and galaxies were just beginning to form and grow in isolated parts of the universe. According to astrophysical theory, black holes found during this era also should be small in proportion with the galaxies in which they reside. However, recent observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have shown that this isn't the case — enormous supermassive black holes existed as early as 700 million years after the Big Bang.

EcoAlert: NASA Updates Hazardous Asteroid Count --Only 20-30% of 4700 Objects Found

 

          


New results from NASA's NEOWISE survey find that more potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs, are closely aligned with the plane of our solar system than previous models suggested, coming within 5 million miles (about 8 million kilometers) of Earth.

"We were very surprised to find that," says Amy Mainzer, , NEOWISE principal investigator, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We were not expecting to find [that result] at all. If you find things 20 to 30 years before a potential impact would take place, then you have time to deflect them," she says. "If we find them days before impact, then it's much worse."

Image of the Day: Super-Massive Galaxies of the Early Universe

 

                           

 

Sensitive infrared cameras staring over large fields of view are the best way to find large numbers of very distant objects for analyses SAO astronomers Jia-Sheng Huang, Giovanni Fazio, and Matt Ashby, together with a team of colleagues, used the infrared camera on the Spitzer Space Telescope to undertake a very deep and sensitive search for distant infrared galaxies in an area of the sky one twentieth the size of the full moon.

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Tonight's 'Ring of Fire' Eclipse --First Since 1994

 

 

           



Tonight's  "time traveling" annular solar eclipse hundreds of miles wide and thousands of miles long, will turn the familiar disk of the sun into a ring of fire for sky-watchers in parts of Asia and the U.S. West. An annular eclipse happens when the moon lines up between Earth and the sun. But in this case, the dark moon's apparent diameter is smaller than the visible disk of the sun, leaving a fieryring—or annulus—of light around the edges. The event is the first of its kind to be visible from the mainland United States since 1994. The region won't see another such eclipse until 2023. 

'Dark Rivers' of the Taurus Molecular Cloud --The Hidden Life Cycle of Stars

 

          

A new image from the APEX (Atacama Pathfinder Experiment) telescope in Chile shows a sinuous filament of cosmic dust more than ten light-years long hiding newborn stars. Dense clouds of gas are on the verge of collapsing to form yet more stars. It is one of the regions of star formation closest to us. The cosmic dust grains are so cold that observations at wavelengths of around one millimetre.

The Taurus Molecular Cloud, in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull), lies about 450 light-years from Earth. This image shows two parts of a long, filamentary structure in this cloud, which are known as Barnard 211 and Barnard 213. Their names come from Edward Emerson Barnard’s photographic atlas of the “dark markings of the sky”, compiled in the early 20th century. In visible light, these regions appear as dark lanes, lacking in stars. Barnard correctly argued that this appearance was due to “obscuring matter in space”.

Weekend Feature: The Case of the Vanishing Alien Planet --A Kepler Mission Discovery

 

 

           

Astronomers may have detected evidence of a possible planet disintegrating under the searing heat of its host star located 1,500 light-years from Earth. Similar to a debris-trailing comet, the super Mercury-size planet candidate is theorized to fashion a dusty tail. But the tail won't last for long. Scientists calculate that, at the current rate of evaporation, the dusty world could be completely vaporized within 200 million years.

Weekend Feature: 1st Ever Supernova Wave Observed Blasting Through Gas Shell

 

           

New observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have provided the first X-ray evidence of a supernova shock wave breaking through a cocoon of gas surrounding the star --SN 2010jl, the very bright X-ray source near the top of the galaxy in the image above that exploded in the galaxy UGC 5189A, located about 160 million light years away on November 3, 2010.  This discovery may help astronomers understand why some supernovas are much more powerful than others.

Weekend Feature: Search for Advanced Extraterrestrial Life --"Probe Mars for Artifacts" Say Leading Astrophysicists

 

          


The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has a low probability of success, but it would have a high impact if successful. Physicists Paul Davies and Robert Wagner of Arizona State University argued last year that it makes sense to widen the search to scour the Moon for possible alien artifacts. At Penn State, researchers propose the same type of searchsearch for Mars. To date, SETI has been dominated by the paradigm of seeking deliberately beamed radio messages.

Did Black Holes Exist Prior to the Big Bang? (Today's Most Popular)

 

          


In recent years, cosmologists have begun to think seriously about processes that occurred before the Big Bang. Alan Coley from Canada's Dalhousie University and Bernard Carr from Queen Mary University in London, published a paper in 2011, where they theorized that some so-called primordial black holes might have been created in the Big Crunch that came before the Big Bang, which supports the theory that the Big Bang was not a single event, but one that occurs in recurring cycles.

Bacteria Found Thriving in 86-Million-Year-Old Seabeds

 

           


Live bacteria that use miniscule amounts of oxygen has been discovered trapped in red clay deposited on the ocean floor some 86 million years ago. The bacteria use. Researchers led by Hans Røy from the Center for Geomicrobiology at Aarhus University in Denmark, extracted samples from columns of sediment up to around 30 meters beneath the sea floor in the region of rotating currents north of Hawaii known as the North Pacific Gyre. 

Birth of the Largest Galaxy Supercluster in Universe Discovered

 

          

 

The Herschel Space Observatory has discovered a giant, galaxy-packed filament ablaze with billions of new stars. The filament connects two clusters of galaxies that, along with a third cluster, will smash together and give rise to one of the largest galaxy superclusters in the universe.  

Microbial Life at Glacier Edges --Points to Possible Life Forms on Mars, Europa, Enceladus

 

               

Microbes living at the edges of Arctic ice sheets were methane is released could help researchers find evidence for similar microorganisms that could have evolved on Mars, the Jovian moon Europa, or Saturn's moon Enceladus. Ice sheets similar to thos on Earth exist elsewhere in the solar system, such as the buried water ice glaciers in the Hellas Basin region on Mars (image above). 

Cosmic HyperEvolution --"Early Galaxies of Universe Harbored Potential for Planets & Life"

 

                                     

The case for highly evoloved advanced technological civilizations billions of years older than Earth-based humans just grew stronger according to new research from the Niels Bohr Institute. All objects in the image are distant galaxies - not stars. Early galaxies from the infancy of the Universe more than 12 billion years ago evolved much more quickly than previously thought, new research shows. This means that already in the early history of the Universe, there was potential for planet formation and life. 

Is the Earth a Sentient Living Organism? New Study May Provide the Proof

 

                    

 

Is the Earth a giant living organism as the Gaia hypothesis predicts? A new discovery made at the University of Maryland may provide a key to answering this question. This key of sulfur could allow scientists to unlock heretofore hidden interactions between ocean organisms, atmosphere, and land -- interactions that might provide evidence supporting this famous theory.