Star as Small as the Moon to Alien Life –“Clues May Lie Buried in Kepler Mission Data”
Another “science-fiction” week delivered by the Universe, from the mystery of a huge arc of galaxies to possible non-biological origins of life to the enigma of anti-matter.
Astronomers discover record-breaking star as small as the moon but with more mass than the sun, reports CBS --"According to a new study published Thursday in the journal Nature, the "very special" star has a mass greater than that of our sun, all packed into a relatively small body, similar in size to our moon. It formed when two less massive white dwarf stars, which spent their lives as a pair orbiting around each other, collided and merged together."
Huge arc of galaxies is surprising and puzzling cosmologists --If real, this 3-billion-light-year-long discovery would be a 'big deal'. A long string of galaxies appears to form an arc stretching more than 3 billion light-years across the distant universe. If the arc turns out to be real, it would challenge a basic idea about how the cosmos is structured. It’s known as the “cosmological principle.” And it holds that no matter where you look in the universe, on large scales matter will be distributed fairly evenly."
Alien Life –“Clues May Lie Buried in Kepler Mission Data”, reports The Daily Galaxy. "The search for planets is the search for life,” said Natalie Batalha, a Kepler mission scientist from NASA’s Ames Research Center. “These results will form the basis for future searches for life.”
The hunt for extraterrestrial life is about to enter a new era, reports New Scientist--"Fortunately, new telescopes will soon allow us to discover if we share our universe. Exoplanets – planets outside our solar system – are too far away to visit, so we must rely on studying their atmospheres to find signs of life. Currently, we can only probe the atmospheres of gas giants. But in the coming months and years, astronomers and engineers will have the giant optics needed to look more closely."
“Unexplainable” –Cassini Mission’s Amazing Discovery in the Plumes of Enceladus, reports The Daily Galaxy. "Saturn’s moon Enceladus is unique in our Solar System — with plumes of water vapor and ice perpetually erupting, shooting jets hundreds of miles into space from its global subsurface ocean through cracks —parallel, evenly spaced “stripes” that are some 130 kilometers long and 35 kilometers apart–on Enceladus’s ice-encased surface providing an intriguing glimpse into what the moon’s subsurface ocean might contain, possibly providing conditions favorable to life. The answer, a new study has found, may lie in the plumes."
Darwin’s Dice –“Origin of Life was Non-Biological”, reports The Daily Galaxy --"Modern metabolism has a precursor, a template, that was non-biological,” says biochemist Greg Springsteen at Furman University.
Mysterious X-ray flares on Jupiter come from magnetic field vibrations, reports New Scientist. --"Jupiter regularly blasts out powerful flares of X-rays as part of its auroras, but how it does so has been a mystery since these bursts were discovered. Now, researchers have finally figured out how they are generated."
“Why is There One-Billion Times More Matter than Antimatter in the Universe?”–New Clues Found, reports The Daily Galaxy.--"We know empirically that there is about one-billion times more matter than antimatter in the Universe and with the current physics we know, the Standard Model, this imbalance can’t be explained,” wrote MIT physicist Silviu-Marian Udrescu in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “To explain it,” he continues, “a violation of certain fundamental symmetries is required, but we have not observed the required violations yet. We don’t know the sources of this violation. We just know that these violations are required to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe."
The Planets with the Giant Diamonds Inside --Mining the mysteries of Uranus and Neptune, reports Nautilus."The cloudy surfaces of Uranus and Neptune are marked with raging storms and the fastest winds recorded on any planet."
Beyond Einstein –“Quantum Gravity Casts Doubt On Fate of Black Holes”, reports The Daily Galaxy. "“The fate of black holes in a quantum theory of gravity is, in my view, the most important problem in theoretical physics,” said Jorge Pullin, the Horace Hearne professor of theoretical physics at LSU."