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Life Might Be Easiest to Find on Planets that Match an Earlier Earth
We’re inching closer and closer to reliably detecting biosignatures on distant planets. Much of the focus is on determining which chemicals indicate life’s presence. But life can also create free energy in a system, and excess energy can create chemical disequilibrium. That’s what happened on Earth when life got going. Could chemical disequilibrium be a…
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Australian astronomy center achieves gender parity in astronomy in just five years
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Around the world, research agencies are struggling to achieve gender parity. A paper published in Nature Astronomy reports how a national Australian astronomy center achieved equal numbers of women and men using science. “We used research in sociology and psychology to develop evidence-based strategies, and to create a supportive and positive…
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NASA’s Hubble Measures the Size of the Nearest Transiting Earth-Sized Planet | Center for Astrophysics
Cambridge, MA — NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has measured the size of the nearest Earth-sized exoplanet that passes across the face of a neighboring star. This alignment, called a transit, opens the door to follow-on studies to see what kind of atmosphere, if any, the rocky world might have. The diminutive planet, LTT 1445Ac, was…
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Daily Telescope: Imaging a nearly 4-billion-year-old region on the Moon
Enlarge / Mare Imbrium and its vicinity. Katie’s Observing Log Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a…
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How long is Earth’s day? We now have the most precise answer to date
Clocks tell us that a day on Earth lasts for 24 hours, or 86,400 seconds. But that number is not precise and unchanging. The exact length of a day on Earth depends on how long our planet takes to complete one rotation, and that often changes ever so slightly, thanks to dramatic events like earthquakes…
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Samples of Asteroid Ryugu Show Signs of Ancient Water
An artist’s impression of Hayabusa 2 at asteroid Ryugu.JAXA/ISAS While most planetary geology is done from afar, it’s amazing what we can do when samples are brought back to Earth. In a recent study of pieces returned from the asteroid 162173 Ryugu, scientists report in Science Advances that the rubble-pile asteroid hailed from a parent…
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FAA Clears SpaceX For Nov. 17 Launch Attempt
FAA Clears SpaceX For Nov. 17 Launch Attempt | Aviation Week Network https://aviationweek.com/themes/custom/particle/dist/app-drupal/assets/awn-logo.svg Skip to main content Irene Klotz November 15, 2023 Starship Credit: SpaceX SpaceX is targeting launch of its second Starship-SuperHeavy vehicle on Nov. 17 from Boca Chica Beach, Texas. “The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements,”…
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Slow-Spinning Neutron Stars
Neutron stars are a soup of neutrons; city-sized remnants of supernovae. These ultra-compact stars have immense gravities creating escape velocities over half the speed of light. Neutron stars rotate at incredible speeds of mere seconds – the fastest spins at a stunning 716 times per second. Recently, Dr. Natasha Hurley Walker discovered two very unusual…
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Q&A with Jason Hessels, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Transient Astrophysics
Jason Hessels is Canada Excellence Research Chair in Transient AstrophysicsKirsten van Santen In a ceremony today at Simon Fraser University, the Honourable Terry Beech, Minister of Citizens’ Services, announced that Professor Jason Hessels has been named the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Transient Astrophysics at McGill University. Hessels, who joins McGill from the University of…
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We Have a UFO Problem. What We Don’t Have (Yet) is a Serious Answer.
The U.S. government has studied UFOs on and off now for 80 years, dating back to the dawn of the “flying saucer” age in 1947, when an Idaho businessman flying near Mount Rainer reported seeing bright saucer-like objects moving through the skies at tremendous speeds. It was hardly the first time humans spotted strange things…
