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“Simplified Proteins” Reveal the Biochemical Dawn of Early Earth When researchers look up at the sky and wonder if we’re not alone, they also realize the origins of life here on Earth might hold the key to finding out. The chaotic chemical soup of our early world eventually led to the staggering complexity of modern life, but how exactly did it start? Proteins were one of the key ingredients in the early years, but we’re still only just discovering how these marvels of modern biology first managed to fold, function, and survive. A new review paper, The borderlands of foldability: lessons from simplified proteins, publishedRead More →

A Brief-ish History of SETI. Part I: “Where is Everybody?” The history of SETI is long and varied, with countless contributions made by some of the most brilliant minds humanity has ever produced. In this series, we will look into the milestones and principles that have led the field to where it is today. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

The Asteroid Hunter Somewhere out there, hurtling through space in the darkness, is an asteroid with our name on it. We just don’t know which one yet. NASA’s answer to that uncomfortable truth is NEO Surveyor, a purpose built infrared space telescope currently taking shape in laboratories across America, and scheduled for launch in 2027. The stakes, quite literally, could not be higher. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

How Massive Star Clusters Shape Galaxy Evolution A team of researchers used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope together with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe almost 9,000 star clusters in four nearby galaxies. They studied younger clusters that were still embedded in their natal gas clouds, and older ones that had dissipated that gas. Their results show that more massive star clusters emerge more quickly from their birth, clearing away gas and filling the galaxy with ultraviolet light. The research presents a better understanding of star formation in galaxies, something lacking in scientific simulations, as well as how and where planets can form.Read More →

Ringing the GONG: New Details About the Sun’s Far-side Activities For years, when something happened on the far side of the Sun, we didn’t know much, if anything about it. Sunspots could form there, flares could lash out and the corona could send masses of material out to space. However, we didn’t know about any of this until those active regions rotated around to our view. In the late 1900s, scientists came up with a technique called helioseismology to analyze sound waves created by such activity as they echoed through the Sun. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Astronomers Witness the Awesome Power of a Black Hole’s “Dancing Jets” New Curtin University-led research has used a radio telescope that spans the Earth to snap images that measure the immense power of jets from black holes, confirming scientists’ theories of how black holes help shape the structure of the Universe. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Data Fusion Provides a High-Definition Look At Mars’ Temperature Maps In-situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is our best bet for “living off the land” for a future Martian base, but tracking down those resources is no easy task. As of now, we have two options – send a rover to a specific location to scout it, or monitor it from orbit. Since rovers are expensive, and there are an absolute ton of sites that we would eventually want to scout, doing so from orbit would seem a better option. But monitoring for temperature, one of the most important orbital scans we can do, is notoriously blurryRead More →

To Build a City on Mars, We Might Need to Plunder the Asteroid Belt Rome wasn’t built in a day, and a city on Mars is likely going to take even longer to build than Rome itself. At the time of the first Martian colonists, it is likely that the entirety of humanity’s industrial capacity, including the infrastructure to make critical materials like metals, will be based in the Earth-Moon system. While Mars has some iron, it also lacks many of the materials needed to make advanced materials, like boron and molybdenum. To alleviate that resource bottleneck, a new study, available in pre-print on arXivRead More →

Closing The Exoplanet Radius Gap Kepler and TESS showed us that there’s a radius gap in the exoplanet population. There are very few planets between 1.5 and 2 Earth radii, according to the data. But new research shows that the gap may not be as significant as thought. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

First Images From the Pandora Exoplanet Mission A new mission promises to ‘open the box’ on exoplanet science. Scientists and engineers recently released the first engineering images from the Pandora exoplanet survey mission. The pictures represent the first ever images from a NASA Astrophysics Pioneers Program mission. Established in 2020, the program looks to test the feasibility of small low cost missions designed to address key questions in astronomy and astrophysics. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →