What Can Viruses Reveal About the Search for Life in the Universe?

Today’s stories include: Strange structures found inside Mars' moon Phobos and It may have been snowing on Mars 400,000 years ago, and more.

Alien civilizations could send us messages by 2029--NASA sends powerful radio transmissions into space. Who's listening, and when will they respond? explorers Briley Lewis for Popular Science. "The research team created a list of stars that will encounter Earth’s signals within the next century and found that alien civilizations (if they’re out there) could send a return message as soon as 2029. Their results were published on March 20 in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific."

What can viruses tell us about the search for life in the Universe? --"Are viruses alive? And what can they tell us about the search for life in the Universe? asks Dr. Gareth Trubl, a microbiologist and research staff scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Biosciences and Biotechnology Division.

It may have been snowing on Mars 400,000 years ago--Xiaoguang Qin at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues have found cracks, crusts and clumps of particles on top of sand dunes in the Martian plain of Utopia Planitia that can only be explained by liquid water from between 400,000 and 1.4 million years ago, reports Alex Wilkins for New Scientist. 

Second ‘Impossible’ Ring Found Around Distant Dwarf Planet,  reports Kenneth Chang for The New York Times. "Earlier this year, astronomers announced that a tiny world beyond Neptune with a diameter about one-third that of Earth’s moon possessed a Saturn-like ring that should not be there. It now turns out that there are two such 'impossible' rings.

James Webb Space Telescope spots huge galactic protocluster in the early universe, reports Robert Lea for Space.com. The developing cluster existed just 650 million years after the Big Bang and could help answer fundamental questions about the evolution of the universe.

A Fresh View of an Increasingly Familiar Black Hole--Radio astronomers have captured a wide-angle image of one of the most violent locales in the cosmos, 50 million light-years from Earth at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87, reports Dennis Overbye for The New York Times Science. Kazunori Akiyama, an astrophysicist at the Haystack Observatory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said, “We will be able to film how the matter falls into a black hole and eventually manages to escape.”

Mars moon mystery: Strange structures found inside 'fearful' Phobos, reports Keith Cooper for Space.com. Understanding the interior structure of Phobos could be key in solving the mystery of its origin.