Published on: 2025-04-20 00:03:54
A team of astronomers announced this week that they've detected a possible sign of life on an exoplanet 124 light years away using the James Webb Space Telescope. Even more enticingly, the exoplanet, dubbed K2-12b, was already suspected to be an ocean world. The biosignature is a molecule called dimethyl sulfide. On Earth, it's exclusively produced by phytoplanktons and other microbes. Thus, the authors of the new study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, maintain that the best exp
Keywords: 12b dimethyl exoplanet k2 sulfide
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-04-21 06:03:54
A team of astronomers announced this week that they've detected a possible sign of life on an exoplanet 124 light years away using the James Webb Space Telescope. Even more enticingly, the exoplanet, dubbed K2-12b, was already suspected to be an ocean world. The biosignature is a molecule called dimethyl sulfide. On Earth, it's exclusively produced by phytoplanktons and other microbes. Thus, the authors of the new study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, maintain that the best exp
Keywords: 12b dimethyl exoplanet k2 sulfide
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-04-22 03:02:54
On Wednesday, news broke that researchers had found the most compelling evidence yet of a "biosignature"—a chemical present at levels that are only consistent with life—on a distant exoplanet. It didn't take much time for some less-than-reliable news sources to go from there to talk of a planet that "could be 'teeming with life'" and the obvious follow-up, "Scientists reveal what aliens could REALLY look like on exoplanet K2-18b." Even in the best of circumstances, however, talk of a biosignatu
Keywords: atmosphere biosignature new planet properties
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-04-22 15:03:53
A team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge say they're closer to a statistically significant scientific finding that would show that signs of life they're detecting from the distant exoplanet dubbed "K2-18b" are no accident. The astronomers used data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which has only been in use since the end of 2021, to detect chemical traces of dimethyl sulfide and/or dimethyl disulfide, which they say can only be produced by life such as phytoplankton in the s
Keywords: earth life like planet team
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-04-22 19:32:00
Astronomers have found one of the most promising indications that there could be extraterrestrial life on another planet. With the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers have detected what they believe could be biosignatures of marine microorganisms on K2-18b, an exoplanet located in the habitable zone of its parent star 124 light-years away. According to research led by the University of Cambridge, the team detected traces of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) in
Keywords: hycean k2 life planet time
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-04-22 23:13:00
What just happened? It's one of humanity's oldest questions: are we alone in the universe? A team of researchers has found new evidence that there may be life on a planet two and a half times the size of Earth in another solar system. But don't get too excited just yet. A team of Cambridge researchers studying the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18b discovered chemical signatures of dimethyl sulphide (DMS) and dimethyl disulphide (DMDS). The molecules are tied to biological life, produced by m
Keywords: earth life planet sigma team
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-04-23 09:02:21
Astronomers say they've found "the most promising signs yet" of chemicals on a planet beyond our Solar System that could indicate the presence of life on its surface. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, the team found a possible 'biosignature' – the potential fingerprint of life – within its atmosphere, although they say they're remaining "cautious", and that this isn't a confirmed detection. The chemicals detected are the same as those produced by marine-dwelling organisms on Earth. The te
Keywords: 18b atmosphere dimethyl k2 planet
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-04-24 07:07:00
A rare celestial event on April 24-25 will give skygazers a creative way to see a smiley face in the early morning sky. While it's not exactly an emoji, this interesting grouping will show a crescent moon plus two rising planets, Venus and Saturn, close to the horizon. Together they'll form a quirky sideways "smile" for watchful viewers, creating plenty of potential for amateur photographers with the right angles. "Find Venus, Saturn, and the crescent moon gathered low in the east as dawn warms
Keywords: event horizon moon planets venus
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-04-25 18:00:00
It’s often the case that the more that planets are studied and understood, the more remote the possibility of inhabiting them seems. Mars, for example, is the closest celestial body to Earth in terms of distance, but data shows its conditions are extremely hostile for life. Despite this, NASA has plans to send astronauts to the Red Planet, and Elon Musk is a vocal proponent of establishing a human presence there. In the short term, the solution to colonizing Mars is the construction of special
Keywords: asteroid atmosphere earth mars planet
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-04-30 10:00:00
Rather, it’s asteroids a size range down—those upwards of 460 feet (140 meters) long—that are of paramount concern. About 25,000 of those are thought to exist close to our planet, and just under half have been found. The day-to-day odds of an impact are extremely low, but even one of the smaller ones in that size range could do significant damage if it found Earth and hit a populated area—a capacity that has led astronomers to dub such midsize asteroids “city killers.” If we find a city killer
Keywords: asteroid earth impact nuclear planet
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-04-30 07:00:22
Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just gave a cosmic mystery a serious plot twist. The event in question—a sudden brightening from a star about 12,000 light-years away—was initially chalked up to the star swelling into a red giant and engulfing a nearby planet, a typical tale in some star systems. But not this time. Webb’s perceptive infrared gaze, courtesy of its MIRI and NIRSpec instruments, peered deep into the dusty aftermath with its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and Ne
Keywords: infrared planet star telescope webb
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-04-30 03:00:46
Humans have been pondering the existence of life beyond Earth since ancient times. In the 1900s, scientists began actively searching for proof. Needless to say, we still haven’t found any. Although it’s only been a number of decades and technology is advancing every day, what if we continue to come up empty-handed? In a study published Monday in The Astronomical Journal, an international team of researchers tackled this question by arguing that what we don’t find can still be deeply informative
Keywords: exoplanets life planets scientists study
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-06 01:21:54
The secret to the formation of planets may lie in ordinary static electricity—the same phenomenon that can make your hair stand on end or give you an electric shock after walking across a carpet. A new study, published in Nature Astronomy, suggests that static electricity allows tiny dust particles in protoplanetary disks—the rotating platters of gas and dust that form around young stars—to clump together into “pebbles” that are large enough to play a role in the formation of planets. The imag
Keywords: charge dust particles planets static
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-11 09:22:46
Protoplanetary Disks Are Smaller Than Expected In astronomy, the first thing you see may be the least typical. A case in point: ‘Hot Jupiters.’ A few prescient souls, among them Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes in their novel Encounter with Tiber, speculated about gas giants that survived incredibly tight orbits around their star, and when asked about this in the 1990s, Greg Matloff ran the numbers and confirmed to his surprise that there was a theoretical case for their existence. Let me quote Matl
Keywords: discs disks planets protoplanetary stars
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-22 20:15:54
For many years, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been hellbent on sending humans to the surface of Mars. With the help of his space company's massive Starship rocket, the mercurial entrepreneur is hoping to build an entire city on the Red Planet — a quest that feels more pertinent than ever as his key ally, president Donald Trump, signals enthusiasm for expediting the first astronauts to Mars even at the cost of NASA's scheduled missions to the Moon. But a pesky foe could derail all that. As detailed
Keywords: astronauts dust major mars planet
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-27 12:00:06
The Webb Space Telescope has given us our first glimpse of Neptune glowing with bright auroras, a visually stunning phenomenon that has long evaded scientists studying the ice giant. Using Webb’s near-infrared spectrograph, astronomers have captured new images of Neptune that finally reveal the planet’s mysterious auroral activity. Faint hints of Neptune’s auroras were first detected during Voyager 2’s flyby of the planet, but Webb’s latest discovery is the first direct evidence of the phenomen
Keywords: activity auroral auroras neptune planet
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-31 20:00:00
Carbon dioxide has been detected on a planet outside our solar system for the first time. The gas has been observed directly by the James Webb Space Telescope on four exoplanets, all belonging to the HR 8799 system, located 130 light-years from Earth. The detection of CO 2 offers clues as to how distant planets form, with the observations providing strong evidence that these four giant planets formed in much the same way as Jupiter and Saturn, through the slow formation of solid cores. The findi
Keywords: formation planets said solar space
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-31 18:40:21
Introduction On a typical day, there are greater than 10,000 aircraft (commercial, private, and military) in flight at any given time. The precise departure (point A) and destination (point B) locations, as well as the timing of flight activity, provide critically important information for myriad industries. For instance, in the defense and intelligence sector, being able to identify how many aircraft were stationed at one foreign government’s airbase (point A) and how many are gone the next da
Keywords: aircraft detection imagery planetscope resolution
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-01 09:40:21
Introduction On a typical day, there are greater than 10,000 aircraft (commercial, private, and military) in flight at any given time. The precise departure (point A) and destination (point B) locations, as well as the timing of flight activity, provide critically important information for myriad industries. For instance, in the defense and intelligence sector, being able to identify how many aircraft were stationed at one foreign government’s airbase (point A) and how many are gone the next da
Keywords: aircraft detection imagery planetscope resolution
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-03 02:15:15
Astronomers using the mighty James Webb Space Telescope have captured direct images of four planets in a star system 130 light years from Earth — an astonishingly eagle-eyed feat of cosmic photography. The planets, all young gas giants, were spotted in HR 8799, a system that's only around 30 million years old. Though already extensively probed, these latest observations, as detailed in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, provide compelling evidence that the nascent worlds are ri
Keywords: balmer gas light planets star
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-02 22:00:08
Saturn will temporarily lose its iconic look from our viewpoint on Earth, appearing as a pale, yellow sphere without its swirling rings shrouding the gas giant. The billions of rocky and icy chunks swirling around Saturn will disappear from our viewpoint on Sunday, March 23 as the thin edges of the planet’s rings are aimed toward Earth, seemingly vanishing from sight. The rare phenomenon occurs every 13 to 15 years, with Earth passing through Saturn’s ring plane. The last time Earth got this ra
Keywords: according earth planet rings saturn
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-13 14:01:25
Astronomers have spotted four smaller-than-Earth exoplanets orbiting the closest single-star system to us, called Barnard's Star. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, an international team of researchers discovered that the star — a small red dwarf star just 16 percent of our own Sun's mass and just under six light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus — has four tiny and seemingly rocky worlds orbiting it. According to the astronomer
Keywords: earth exoplanets orbiting planets star
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-13 22:30:31
NASA’s Webb Space Telescope has captured direct images of carbon dioxide in a planet beyond our solar system for the first time. The images feature HR 8799, a multiplanet system 130 light-years from Earth. The discovery not only reveals a chemical compound essential on Earth for processes including photosynthesis and the carbon cycle, but also indicates that gas giant planets elsewhere in the galaxy formed in a similar way to our local giants, Jupiter and Saturn. The team’s analysis of the Webb
Keywords: 8799 carbon planets solar webb
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-17 17:25:41
The Hera probe has swung around Mars, using the planet’s gravitational pull to fling itself toward its asteroid target. During its brief rendezvous with the Red Planet, Hera caught a glimpse of the less-seen side of Mars’ smaller, tidally-locked moon as it orbited its home planet. The European Space Agency (ESA) launched its Hera mission on October 7, 2024, to inspect the damage caused by NASA’s DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) when it smashed into an asteroid to redirect its orb
Keywords: asteroid hera mars mission planet
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-20 13:40:54
Astronomers have identified four exoplanets orbiting Barnard’s Star, a red dwarf star just 6 light-years away from Earth. No, really, this time it’s for real! We have to emphasize this because astronomers have been “discovering” exoplanets orbiting Barnard’s Star—and then discovering they were wrong—for a century. “Exoplanet” is the technical term for planet-like bodies beyond our solar system, but some scholars use “planet” for simplicity. Now, however, an international research team has conf
Keywords: barnard earth exoplanets star study
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-21 03:35:44
Dwarf planet Pluto and our Earth are the only two worlds in our solar system with very large moons. These may have come about by a "kiss and capture" process, which preserves a moon's large size. One of the mysteries in our solar system is why our moon is so large compared to our planet. At 3,476 kilometres in diameter, our moon is about one quarter the width of the Earth. Most of the other moons in our solar system are a tiny fraction the size of their parent planets. Most of the these relati
Keywords: charon large moon planet pluto
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-24 10:45:01
Research published late last year indicated “seismic discontinuities in the Martian crust” that scientists believe could be an indicator of liquid water under the Martian surface, raising the possibility of microbial life persisting on the Red Planet. With an ancient past not dissimilar from Earth’s, and its relative proximity to our own world, Mars has been a compelling venue for astrobiology for decades. The team’s work indicates that liquid water—necessary for life as we know it—may persist
Keywords: mars martian planet surface water
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-25 02:00:35
Aaron Paul and Eiza González co-star in the new sci-fi film from artist Flying Lotus, opening March 21. If you’re going to set a sci-fi movie on an alien planet, it’s a nice bonus if that planet actually exists. Or, at least, is inspired by one that actually exists. In the new film Ash, director Flying Lotus weaves a big sci-fi mystery as an astronaut (Eiza González) wakes up on an alien world with her whole crew dead. A fellow astronaut who claims to know her (Aaron Paul) then arrives but it’s
Keywords: ash film flying lotus planet
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-25 16:45:00
The latest evidence suggests that Mars used to be a wet world covered in oceans, with astronomers uncovering not just icy remnants of this period, but signs of entire reservoirs of liquid water still lurking beneath the planet's arid surface. But we're still far from having a complete picture of what the Martian climate looked like billions of years ago, before these oceans dried up. Now, however, the chance discovery of pale yet unremarkable looking rocks by NASA's Perseverance rover suggest
Keywords: mars minerals planet rocks wiens
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-25 19:00:03
The "death knell" of an entire world. Since they were first detected over four decades ago, unusually powerful x-ray emissions originating from the site of a dying star called the Helix Nebula have proved an enigma to astronomers. Now, we may finally have an explanation for what they are — and it's pretty grisly. As detailed in a new study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of researchers make the case that the emissions are the last gasp of a pl
Keywords: dwarf planet ray star white
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