#Meteorite carries ancient water from Mars It may just look like your average rock, but in fact it's an extra-special delivery from the red planet.
Laboratory analysis has revealed that a specimen bought from a Moroccan meteorite dealer in 2011 is the first sample of Martian origin that is similar to the water-rich rocks examined by NASA s rovers.
The meteorite, dubbed Northwest Africa (NWA) 7034, contains a concentration of water by weight about ten times higher than in any of the other 100
or so known Martian meteorites#those rare rocks that get ejected from the Martian surface into space when an asteroid hits the planet,
and eventually find their way to Earth. It s also the only known Martian sample On earth that hails from a critical period, about 2 billion years ago,
when Mars is thought to have become colder and drier than it was originally. Carl Agee of the University of New mexico in Albuquerque and his colleagues report their findings from samples of the meteorite in Science online today1."
"Agee and his collaborators have thrown open the door to a whole new part of Mars, says planetary scientist Munir Humayun at Florida State university in Tallahassee,
who was involved not in the study. The meteorite, he adds, is"the first of a new class of Martian meteorites that provides more direct clues to the surface history of Mars. Moreover,
Humayun says, NWA 7034 may provide the only direct corroboration for the rovers observations for some time to come,
as the fate of a long-delayed mission to bring samples of Mars back to Earth is still uncertain.
Carl Ageethe rock found in the Sahara desert, has a higher water content than any Martian meteorite previously analysed.
The elemental composition of the meteorite strongly resembles that of rocks examined in 2005 by NASA s Spirit rover at Gusev Crater2.
Those rocks showed evidence of chemical alteration by interactions with liquid water, notes Agee. The composition of NWA 7034 also matches that of rocks studied by Curiosity, NASA s newest rover,
as described in preliminary reports from members of that mission. Dating from 2. 1 billion years ago,
NWA 7034 is the second-oldest Martian meteorite, and provides a missing link in the planet s geological record,
according to Agee. The oldest prospective Martian meteorite, ALH 84001, is 4. 5 billion years old,
whereas all other Martian meteorites are 1. 3 billion years old or younger.)Several lines of evidence indicate that parts of Mars were warmer and wetter,
and therefore a possible haven for carbon-based life, some 4 billion years ago. The relatively high water content of NWA 7034,
which could be as much as 0. 6%by weight, suggests that"crustal or surface processes involving water may have lasted well beyond the 4-billion-year mark,
That is not a surprise, given the map of hydrogen (a stand-in for water) generated by an instrument on the Mars Odyssey orbiting spacecraft and the presence of small amounts of water in younger Martian meteorites
The meteorite is made of volcanic rock, and the presence of water in it suggests that crustal rocks on Mars interacted with surface water that was delivered by volcanic activity,
near-surface reservoirs or by impacting comets, Agee says. But Jeffrey Taylor of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu says that
whether that water content truly reveals an abundance of surface water on Mars 2. 1 billion years ago awaits further study u
#Quantum gas goes below absolute zero It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time1.
#Ephemeral third ring of radiation makes appearance around Earth First discovered in 1958, the Van allen belts have been thought to comprise two reservoirs of high-speed,
electrically charged particles, corralled into separate doughnut-shaped rings by Earth s magnetic field. The outer ring orbits at a distance of some 10,000-60,000 kilometres above Earth,
and encircles an inner band of even more energetic particles, roughly 100-10,000 kilometres above Earth.
That s the configuration the belts were in when James Van allen first spotted them using satellite data half a century ago,
however, and Baker and his team now attributes its creation to an interplanetary shock wave#a travelling outburst of solar-wind particles from the Sun#that has been detected by other craft.
NASATHE two Van allen Probes orbit through the radiation belts that surround Earth, shown in cross section in this artist's impression.
#Moon-size exoplanet circling sun-like star smallest yet A newfound world called Kepler 37 b could easily blend in to the long and growing list of known extrasolar planets,
But the new addition to the catalogue of 800-plus exoplanets stands out in at least one major respect#it is far smaller than any planet yet discovered outside of our solar system.
In fact, it is just a shade larger than Earth s moon.""What makes this very interesting is this is a planet smaller than anything we see in our own inner solar system,
says Thomas Barclay, a research scientist at the NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER in Moffett Field, Calif. Barclay is lead author of a study published online February 20 in Nature announcing the discovery of Kepler 37 b and two slightly larger worlds in the same planetary system.
The researchers used NASA s Kepler space telescope to identify the three planets orbiting Kepler 37, a star some 200 light-years away that is somewhat smaller than the sun. The spacecraft monitors more than 150,000 stars in the Milky way
or dips in brightness, that might be caused by a planet passing in front of its star, from the probe s perspective.
The Kepler mission has discovered already more than 100 new planets since its launch in 2009 and has identified thousands of additional candidates that await confirmation.
Planets smaller than Earth block relatively small amounts of starlight which limits astronomers ability to detect them with Kepler.
By observing the planet Kepler 37 b as it transited, or passed in front of its star, more than 50 times,
Barclay and his colleague drew out a subtle but recurrent pattern. Every 13 days or so the star dimmed by a tiny fraction#just 0. 002 percent#as the tiny planet passed across the star s face.
The exoplanet that previously held the record on the tiny end of the size spectrum#a Mars-size object known as Kepler 42 d#is nearly twice the diameter of Kepler 37 b. The newfound body is just 80 percent
Mercury s diameter and 30 percent that of Earth. Kepler measures the diameters and orbital properties of exoplanets but is usually unable to pinpoint their masses.)
All three of the exoplanets found by Barclay and his colleagues, in fact, will rank among the smallest known:
Kepler 37 c is 74 percent the diameter of Earth, and Kepler 37 d is roughly twice our planet s diameter.
Orbiting its star at one tenth the distance between Earth and the sun, tiny Kepler 37 b must be extremely hot."
"Any water on the surface would disappear very quickly, Barclay says.""There is almost no chance of an atmosphere or liquid on the surface.
The researchers predict that Kepler 37 b would be a barren, rocky world similar to Mercury.
The larger worlds in the planetary system orbit somewhat farther out but would still suffer scorching heat from the star.
All three planets keep closer to the star Kepler 37 than any planet orbits the sun."It just shows that Kepler has just an extraordinary ability to see a wide diversity of planetary architectures,
says Greg Laughlin, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa cruz, who did not contribute to the new study.
Kepler was built to search for exo-Earths#rocky planets in cooler orbits than the uninhabitable worlds of the Kepler 37 system.
"Our solar system just contains nothing whatsoever inside Mercury s orbit. But it turns out that the average planetary system has a lot going on in the inner region.
There is one catch in Kepler s search for worlds comparable with or smaller than Earth: Whereas giant Jupiter-size planets often exert a gravitational tug on their host stars that is detectable with Earth-based telescope spectrographs,
smaller exoplanet discoveries have proved difficult to confirm with observations other than Kepler s . So researchers have turned to statistical arguments
instead to quantify the probability of a false positive#for instance, a pair of undetected binary stars whose regular eclipses mimic a planetary signal.
Barclay and his colleagues used computer modeling to identify potential false positives and then rule them out with additional observations from the ground.
In the end, based on population estimates of exoplanets binary stars and other astronomical objects, the researchers calculated the probability that the signal collected from Kepler represents a true planet."
"In this case, with the innermost planet we are confident that it is a true planet orbiting the target star with a confidence of 99.95 percent,
Barclay says.""So we re very confident that this is what we think it is
#FDA Approves First Retinal implant An article by Scientific American. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Thursday approved the first retinal implant for use in the United states. The FDA s green light for Second sight s Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System gives hope to those blinded
#Computer program roots out ancestors of modern tongues In Fiji, a star is a kalokalo. For the Pazeh people of Taiwan, it is mintol,
and why we cannot detect any curvature in the fabric of space (other than the tiny indentations caused by massive objects such as black holes).
The sudden ballooning also amplified quantum fluctuations into clumps of matter that went on to seed the first stars,
or for eye-popping views of the Earth
#Waterproof transistor takes cell's electric pulse Think of it as a medical monitor for the cell.
"It is a bright star now in the literature, suggesting that it is not crazy to map every neuron in the brain of an animal.
#Life found deep under the sea For the first time, scientists have discovered microbes living deep inside Earth s oceanic crust#the dark volcanic rock at the bottom of the sea.
and covers 60%of the planet s surface, making it the largest habitat On earth. The microbes inside it seem to survive largely by using hydrogen,
which uses sunlight for the same purpose. Chemosynthesis also fuels life at other deep-sea locations such as hydrothermal vents
the crust"would be the first major ecosystem On earth to run on chemical energy rather than sunlight,
The pits are among the largest and deepest pockmarks ever found in Earth lakes, the researchers said.
which would (hypothetically, at least) be repelled by magnetic forces from the Earth itself. Duru's real-life flying skateboard is a bit simpler than Mcfly's:
Interaxon, the company behind the Muse headband and a Mars venture client, claims that sustained use of the device will train one brain to stay more naturally calm and focused.
as the poles of Mars and almost 200 degrees hotter than the surface of Venus. They can also detect temperature changes across distances as small as 5 m (roughly the size of a sperm cell head) and on timescales as short as 800 picoseconds(.
a rare-earth metal that is highly magnetic and sometimes given to patients to increase contrast in an MRI.
because pentaquarks might be formed inside collapsing stars, their discovery might tell us more about what stars are composed of
and how they evolve. The new data might also lead to the discovery of other pentaquarks with different masses."
#Red planet racers: Next Mars rovers get a speed boost IT'S time for Martian rovers to put the pedal to the metal.
the Curiosity rover our best on the Red planet only covers about 200 metres per day. That's because when a rover encounters an obstacle it can't negotiate by itself it must wait for instructions from its minders On earth a huge waste of time.
In 2012 Seeker was tested for the first time in the Atacama desert in Chile a landscape similar to that of Mars. There it guided the Robovolc rover built to traverse the edge of volcanoes over several kilometres in a single day.
#Red planet racers: Next Mars rovers get a speed boost IT'S time for Martian rovers to put the pedal to the metal.
the Curiosity rover our best on the Red planet only covers about 200 metres per day. That's because when a rover encounters an obstacle it can't negotiate by itself it must wait for instructions from its minders On earth a huge waste of time.
In 2012 Seeker was tested for the first time in the Atacama desert in Chile a landscape similar to that of Mars. There it guided the Robovolc rover built to traverse the edge of volcanoes over several kilometres in a single day.
#China set to launch probe on round trip to the moon China is planning to launch an uncrewed spacecraft on a quick jaunt around the moon in a test of technology designed to return rocks from the lunar surface to Earth.
It will fly around the back of the moon and return to Earth using a parachute to slow its decent through the atmosphere about 8 days later.
It's a precursor to a more advanced mission planned for 2017. This future mission will send a lunar orbiter that will release a lander to touch down on the moon's surface and collect 2 kilograms of soil and rock.
The lander will then blast off and dock with the orbiter for the return trip to Earth.
China's most recent moon mission Chang'e 3 placed a lander and rover on the moon last year.
Chang'e 5-T1 will test China's heat-shield technology which is essential for surviving a high-speed re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
The country is following a path blazed by other major spacefaring nations: the US sent humans to retrieve rocks during the Apollo moon landing missions
and plants exposed to radiation beyond low Earth orbit. China has partnered also with a Luxembourg-based firm called Luxspace to send a tiny spacecraft called the Manfred Memorial Moon Mission around the moon.
It will ride on the same rocket as Chang'e 5-T1 and broadcast a ham radio signal for amateurs to tune in to o
When the Rosetta spacecraft sends its lander to the surface of a comet on 12 november the lander will follow prearranged orders from Earth to touch down safely
or vapour on a celestial body's surface with the goal of directing another instrument to make follow-up observations.
Comets asteroids and icy moons have shown all signs of venting plumes into space. But because these bodies are far from Earth
and the jets are not always active exploring them remotely is challenging. The more the spacecraft can do without waiting for communication with Earth the better they can explore especially
when they encounter activity that may be short-lived or only within viewing range for a short time Wagstaff says.
The researchers tested the software on unprocessed images of comet Hartley 2 and Saturn's moon Enceladus.
The program looks for bright material outside the limb of the moon or comet checks that the material meets up with the surface
But the software will be of even more benefit on future missions to the outer solar system and eventually planetary systems outside our solar system.
#Desktop sonic black hole emits Hawking radiation A model black hole that traps sound instead of light has been caught emitting quantum particles thought to be the analogue of the theoretical Hawking radiation.
The effect may be the first time that a lab-based black hole has created Hawking particles in the same way expected from real black holes.
Black holes are ultra-dense concentrations of matter left behind when a star or other massive body collapses.
Given that physicists expected that black holes would be well black. But in 1974 Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge predicted they should emit a faint glow of particles now known as Hawking radiation.
But if one gets caught inside a black hole's event horizon the other is free to escape
The glow from real-life black holes would be too faint to see so to confirm Hawking's prediction physicists have built artificial black holes that mimic the event horizon.
In 2010 a team led by Francesco Belgiorno at the University of Milan made a model black hole the horizon
whether it used the same physics as a real black hole horizon. A quantum mechanical fluid should be able to mimic the exact physics of a black hole's event horizon albeit at a much smaller scale.
In 2009 Jeff Steinhauer at the Technion-Israel Institute of technology in Haifa and his colleagues made just such a model black hole using Bose-Einstein condensates (BECS) a quantum state of matter where a clump of super
-cold atoms behaves like a single atom. Now the team claims that their black hole has produced just the kind of Hawking radiation expected of a real black hole.
This tells us that the idea of Hawking actually works Steinhauer says. A black hole should really produce Hawking radiation.
The team used one laser to confine the BEC to a narrow tube and another to accelerate some of it faster than the speed of sound.
The Hawking effect comes from quantum noise at the horizon says William Unruh at the University of British columbia in Canada one of the first to propose fluid-based black hole analogues.
but the phonons inside the black hole bounce back and forth between the inner and outer horizons triggering the creation of more Hawking phonons each time much like a laser amplifies light.
Physicists call this effect a black hole laser The Hawking radiation exponentially grows it self-amplifies Steinhauer says.
whether the pairs of phonons are entangled another predicted feature of real black holes that may have fiery consequences.
This work is really impressive says Daniele Faccio at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh in the UK who was on the team that made the fibre-optic based black hole.
It is of course clear that black holes differ from flowing BECS and showing that the effect occurs in a BEC does not prove it would occur in black holes.
However it sure increases my confidence that it does. The mathematics and the results are too similar to just be a coincidence.
#Martian methane sniffer adapted for Earth WHAT'S that gassy smell? The hypersensitive methane detector on NASA's Mars rover curiosity is being repurposed to ferret out gas leaks On earth.
It's the same technology as on Mars she says. When it picks up trace amounts of methane it kind of sings to the operator
and Earth observation privacy law to ensure that people can wield authentic imagery that stands up in court.
But most of the work will involve images taken by orbiting satellites especially as recent earth observation start-ups like Planet Labs
These images show the carbon monoxide gas detected in neighbouring galaxies 40 to 600 million light years from Earth in their final stages of merging.
#Water-splitter could make hydrogen fuel on Mars Making fuel on site for a return trip to Mars may be a step closer.
That means renewable energy sources like wind or sunlight which are often patchy are not reliable enough.
which make fuel from sunlight just like plants says Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow UK.
or for making fuel on Mars to power a rocket back to Earth. It is unclear
#Supernova find backs dark energy and universe expansion Astronomers have had long a dark secret: one of the cornerstones of the Nobel prizewinning discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating had never been tested directly.
which a white dwarf star somehow reaches a critical mass of about 1. 4 solar masses and explodes.
because no type IA had gone off near Earth in recent decades. That changed on 21 january
when Steve Fossey of University college London and his students stumbled upon a type IA supernova in M82 or the Cigar galaxy.
They found the classic signature of a thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf. The process begins with the compression of the white dwarf leading to the formation of nickel-56
which decays to cobalt-56 which in turn decays to a stable isotope of iron producing characteristic gamma rays.
In the favoured model called the single degenerate system a white dwarf reaches its critical mass by stealing material from an ordinary companion star.
In an alternative double degenerate model two white dwarfs orbiting each other cause the explosion either by merging or by one poaching matter from the other.
In a single degenerate system the shock wave from the white dwarf explosion should smash into the surrounding gas from the companion star generating radio waves.
so concluded SN 2014j probably began as two white dwarfs. Robert Kirshner of Harvard university who studies type IA supernovae is convinced not yet.
though it could also be a sign of more prosaic processes such as rapid star formation or an actively feeding black hole at the galaxy's centre.
The next step is to look at the stars and galaxies that raised the infrared flag in the WISE survey
what because it's cataloguing the mid-infrared of our stars and galaxies he says.
Like our exoplanet search and using rovers to look for microbes on Mars this search for extraterrestrial life is driving useful science.
This article appeared in print under the headline Spot ET's waste heat for chance to find alien lif f
The results hint at the mysterious conditions deep inside giant planets. The dense atmospheres of gas giants Jupiter and Saturn contain carbon.
Chemical modelling suggests pressure deep inside the planets would crush it into a rain of diamond chips
and perhaps create chunks of diamond large enough to impress even the Kardashians. But until now no one had been able to replicate such pressures On earth
The team's data can now be used to improve models of gas giants and the suspected diamond in their depths.
These findings contribute to an ongoing effort to put together an understanding of the cores of giant planets says Stevenson.
Nikku Madhusudhan at the University of Cambridge says the results can also aid our understanding of the insides of diamond planets.
These exoplanets are rocky like Earth but are rich in carbon rather than silica and may contain large layers of diamond.
because we can now use direct experimental data to model the deep interiors of carbon-rich planets says Madhusudhan.
#Cool planet hints at potential for life in double stars It's a cool planet in a tight spot.
A frigid world about 3000 light years away offers the first evidence that rocky planets can form in Earthlike orbits even
Although this planet probably cannot support life as we know it the discovery greatly expands the places we can look for potentially habitable worlds outside our solar system.
In a binary star system the two partners are locked in an orbital embrace. Astronomers have found a handful of planets that orbit both partners in close binary pairs.
But no one was convinced that a planet could orbit just one star at a sufficient distance to host life.
Most stars are part of binary systems and a significant fraction of these are close binary systems so if you want to maximise the places you can look for habitable planets you're going to want to look at these close binaries as well says Scott Gaudi at Ohio State university (OSU) in Columbus. Gaudi
and his team used a technique called gravitational microlensing to study a binary system with two red dwarfs small stars that are dimmer than the sun. The distance between the stars is about 10 to 15 times that of Earth
and the sun. The team found a planet about twice the mass of Earth orbiting just one of the two stars at about the same distance as we are to our home star.
Some scientists argue that the planet formation process would get too disrupted if a star has a tight stellar companion
and the further it is from the star the more difficult it would be for planets to form.
But this discovery argues that yes indeed at least in this system of two red dwarfs you can form planets at these sorts of longer distances says Gaudi.
Jean-Philipe Beaulieu at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics in France called the newfound planet an important discovery.
This shows more than ever that our solar system is not the paradigm in our galaxy says Beaulieu.
While the planet is most likely rocky based on its mass its surface is a frigid-213°C That's
because at its orbital distance it does not get enough heat from its dim host star.
But the same planet orbiting a sun-like star in a binary system would be in the habitable zone where conditions could support liquid water
and perhaps life as we know it. The discovery was announced the same week that other scientists sounded a note of caution on exoplanet finds.
An analysis led by astronomer Paul Robertson at Pennsylvania State university concluded that Gliese 581 d and g two of the first potentially habitable worlds ever found are created actually illusions by sunspots on the parent star.
Gaudi's co-author Andrew Gould also at OSU says his team's evidence for the existence of their frozen planet is airtight.
Microlensing detects planets by watching how their gravity affects the light of a distant background star.
As one star passes in front of another as seen from Earth light from the background star is bent gravitationally
and magnified projecting images next to the foreground star. But if the foreground star hosts a planet the world's gravity can sometimes eliminate one of these images.
The planet isn't blocking the background star's light. It's just that the mathematics of focusing is disrupted by the planet's gravity he says.
There's absolutely no doubt that what we've detected is a rocky planet in a binary star system adds Gould.
Ten thousand years from now people will go visit this system and find out that it's exactly
what we say it is. Beaulieu also expressed confidence in the frozen exoplanet discovery: In the case of the planet announced by Gould's team stellar variability could not mimic the observed signal.
This is a very robust detection. Journal reference: Scienc n
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