Life

How the ice moon Enceladus got its tiger stripes Enceladus
Dec 20 2019

How the ice moon Enceladus got its tiger stripes

Saturn’s ice moon, Enceladus, is one of the most promising worlds in terms of the search for places where extraterrestrial life might exist. Of course, as a reader of the Ice Moon series, you’ve already known that for a long time. Near its south pole there are deep fissures in its crust, through which water is constantly being forced outward. This allows researchers to look under the ice, which is up to 100 kilometers thick, without having to drill through it. A new study tries to explain the unusual appearance of these sulci, which are also called “tiger stripes.”…
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Water detected on one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa Life
Dec 10 2019

Water detected on one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa

The hottest candidates for the development of extraterrestrial life are one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, and one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa – even though it’s very cold on its surface. Life, in fact, might be hiding in an underground ocean under the 50-100 kilometer thick layer of ice. Its existence is indicated, among other things, by the countless fault lines criss-crossing across its surface. Proof of this underground sea, however, has not yet been found. But now, with the help of the Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea (Hawaii), astronomers have found more evidence, as they have written in an…
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A place on Earth where everything’s dead Life
Nov 29 2019

A place on Earth where everything’s dead

So far, the Earth is the only place in the universe where life has been proven to exist. But even on our planet, there are places that life cannot survive. The geothermal fields in the Ethiopian region of Dallol are one of these places. Near the Danakil Depression in northeastern Ethiopia, close to the border with Eritrea, a volcanic explosion in 1926 formed a crater with a diameter of 30 meters (98 ft), exposing hot salt springs. The emerging water is 70°C (158°F) and extremely acidic with a pH value below 1. At the same time, the air temperature…
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Could an Earth-like planet also survive in an eccentric solar system? Life
Nov 14 2019

Could an Earth-like planet also survive in an eccentric solar system?

HR5183 is a yellow dwarf star, not very different from our own Sun and located about 103 light-years from Earth. After more than 20 years of observation, astronomers finally found a planet, of about three times Jupiter’s mass, orbiting the star this past summer. Why did it take so long? The planet, HR5183 b, needs 75 years to complete one orbit around its star. Therefore, the period at which it affects the light curve of its star is also correspondingly long. But what surprised the astronomers even more was the planet’s unusual orbit. HR5183 b comes about as close…
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New organic molecules discovered on Saturn’s moon Enceladus Enceladus
Nov 12 2019

New organic molecules discovered on Saturn’s moon Enceladus

Two years ago, the Cassini probe was sent plummeting into Saturn to its fiery demise – but researchers are still finding new discoveries in the data it sent back. Now, scientists from the Free University Berlin have reported findings from the CDA, the “Cosmic Dust Analyzer,” which was on board Cassini. This instrument was developed in Germany and was designed to study very small particles. The CDA could detect particles with a velocity of 5 kilometers per second and a mass of only 1013 grams (a ten-millionth of a millionth of a gram, which corresponds to a size of two-thousands of…
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Water vapor in the atmosphere of an inhabitable rocky planet Life
Oct 5 2019

Water vapor in the atmosphere of an inhabitable rocky planet

There’s no shortage of water in the universe. Water molecules have even been found in the cold interstellar medium. After hydrogen, water is the second most abundant substance in the atmosphere of hot gas planets. Neptune, Uranus, and their siblings in space are not called ice giants for no reason – they also contain a large amount of water ice. On rocky planets, water could be a sign of good conditions for life. This, however, would also depend on where the water is located. Researchers already think that some planets have large quantities of water due to their densities.…
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Life might also exist on cold planets Life
Aug 18 2019

Life might also exist on cold planets

Our Earth has already lived through several ice ages, during which the oceans were covered with ice all the way down to the equator – so-called Snowball eras. Life on our planet has survived all these times; primarily due to one reason: at the time, life existed only in the oceans, and the depths of the oceans still offered good conditions for life. What would have happened if life had already made its way onto land? That was the basis of a study done by Canadian researchers. Snowball Earths result basically when the percentage of carbon dioxide (CO2) in…
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Transforming Mars into a second Earth – a simple trick Life
Jul 24 2019

Transforming Mars into a second Earth – a simple trick

In the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers have presented an exciting method for transforming Mars into a fertile planet: they want to cover our neighbor with a thin layer made of silicate aerogels. How is that supposed to work? The Red Planet has two properties that make the existence of life on its surface more difficult. First, it is significantly too cold there, and second, life can be destroyed by the cosmic radiation that is incident on the Mars surface in much higher amounts than on the Earth due to Mars’s thin atmosphere. If we wanted to create Earth-like conditions, for…
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