Life

Salt lakes under the south pole of Mars Life
Nov 1 2020

Salt lakes under the south pole of Mars

Several liquid deposits of different sizes have been discovered by researchers below the south pole of Mars, according to a publication published in Nature Astronomy. The results suggest that there may be lakes below the south pole of Mars that remain liquid due to their high salt concentration. It is known that subglacial lakes exist in the terrestrial Antarctic. Previous research has shown a similar lake below the southern Martian polar region, which was discovered by the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) on board the spacecraft Mars Express. The presence of a subglacial lake could…
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BepiColombo photographs Venus in flight Life
Oct 27 2020

BepiColombo photographs Venus in flight

The ESA-JAXA mission BepiColombo has completed the first of two flybys of Venus needed to put it on course for the innermost planet of the solar system, Mercury. The closest approach to the Earth's hot sister took place this morning (15. 10.) at 03:58 GMT at a distance of about 10 720 km from the planet's surface. Launched on 20 October 2018, the spacecraft will require nine gravity assist fly-bys - one to Earth, two to Venus and six to Mercury - before it can enter orbit around Mercury in 2025. The flybys will use the gravitational pull of…
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Who’s watching us? Life
Oct 23 2020

Who’s watching us?

Earthly astronomers are busy scanning distant star systems for planets. There is one limitation: With the popular transit method, we can only detect planets if they move in front of their star from our point of view and change its brightness. Of course, this limits the selection quite a bit, it is a big coincidence if the orbital plane of an exoplanet is roughly parallel to our viewing direction to the star. Now you can also ask different questions. Let's assume that aliens were looking for other planets that harbor life, just like us. Where would they have to…
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Astronomers are searching for the super planet Life
Oct 21 2020

Astronomers are searching for the super planet

Again and again, astronomers proudly present exoplanets that would be suitable for life as we know it - i.e. made of solid rock and illuminated by their stars in such a way that water exists on their surface in a liquid state. But is our home planet really ideal for the development of life? After all, when the sun was still young and shone with a third less power, it was still quite cold here until CO2 finally created a greenhouse effect. A study under the direction of the scientist Dirk Schulze Makuch of the Washington State University and…
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Fresh frozen items delivered to Enceladus’s north pole too Enceladus
Oct 1 2020

Fresh frozen items delivered to Enceladus’s north pole too

No, unfortunately nobody’s opened a new Ben and Jerry’s on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Not yet, at least. But a new paper just published in the magazine, Icarus, shows again just how valuable the images are from the joint NASA-ESA mission Cassini, even years after the probe was intentionally crashed into Saturn. Specifically, Cassini also delivered the most detailed global infrared images ever taken of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Combined with photos of Cassini’s other cameras, they provide convincing evidence that the northern hemisphere of the moon is covered with relatively fresh ice from its interior. The scientists that were part of…
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Signs of life from the clouds of Venus? Life
Sep 25 2020

Signs of life from the clouds of Venus?

Our hot sister planet, Venus, basically has no potential for life on its surface – the pressure and temperature are much too high. Nevertheless, in “The Clouds of Venus,” a team from NASA made an interesting discovery. I was reminded of this when I read a new press release from Cardiff University. Astronomer Jane Greaves and her colleagues have been analyzing Venus’s atmosphere for years and stumbled across an interesting substance: phosphane (older, but chemically incorrect name: phosphine). On Earth, phosphane, a compound of phosphorus and hydrogen (PH3), is a gas produced predominantly by anaerobic biological sources. The conditions on…
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Panspermia: colonies of bacteria can survive in interplanetary space Life
Sep 11 2020

Panspermia: colonies of bacteria can survive in interplanetary space

Deinococcus radiodurans is one tough bacterium. Neither the detonation of atom bombs nor the terrors of empty space bother it. But could it travel from planet to planet as a stowaway? Imagine microscopically small lifeforms being transported through space and landing on another planet. Bacteria that find suitable conditions for their survival on the new planet could then multiply and spawn life on the other side of the universe. This theory, which is known as “panspermia,” postulates that microbes could travel between planets and spread life throughout the universe. Panspermia has been debated for a long time, because it obviously…
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How many planets fit into a star’s habitable zone? Life
Aug 9 2020

How many planets fit into a star’s habitable zone?

The habitable zone of our Solar System is relatively narrow. Mars is at the very outer edge of it, while Venus, which orbits closer to the Sun than Earth, is not quite inside it. Of eight planets, only the Earth is at just the right distance from its host star. A ratio like this would naturally lower the chances of finding inhabitable worlds in the universe. But is the Solar System an exception or the rule? Astronomers have, in fact, found other star systems that give a rosier outlook. For instance, three planets are in the habitable zone of…
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