Earth & Space
New clues are emerging about the mysterious streaks that appear on Mars’ surface during warm weather, though scientists still can’t say for sure that they’re caused by flowing water. The marks, known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), snake down some crater walls and other inclines when the mercury rises on the Red Planet. New research finds seasonal changes in iron minerals at RSL sites, suggesting that brines containing an iron antifreeze may flow there from time to time — but direct evidence of water remains elusive.
Conventional thinking has it that the universe and all the matter within it exploded out from a single point, the so-called Big Bang Singularity. But a German theoretical physicists says this never happened. Instead, the universe started empty and cold, slowly emerging from a deep freeze.
NewsyScience: An astrobiologist says the jelly donut-shaped Martian rock appears to be a kind of fungus that grew into the shot rather than being physically moved there.
What if the universe itself is math? That’s what cosmologist Max Tegmark believes. In Tegmark’s view, everything in the universe — humans included — is part of a mathematical structure. All matter is made up of particles, which have properties such as charge and spin, but these properties are purely mathematical, he says. And space itself has properties such as dimensions, but is still ultimately a mathematical structure.
China’s first lunar rover successfully landed on the moon in December, but a malfunction is already jeopardizing its mission. China’s Jade Rabbit moon rover experienced a “mechanical control abnormality” according to state media said on Saturday, in what appears to be a setback for a landmark mission in the country’s ambitious space program
Renowned British scientist Stephen Hawking has stunned physicists by declaring there are no black holes. In a paper published online, Professor Hawking says instead of black holes there are grey holes. The fresh theory tries to address what is known as the black-hole firewall paradox, which has puzzled scientists for almost two years. The professor’s new grey hole theory would allow matter and energy to be held for a period of time before being released back into space. The theory offers a solution to the paradox.
A strange rock that looks like a doughnut has appeared on Mars, and scientists are closer to figuring out how it got there, a top NASA expert says. The small, round rock suddenly popped up in pictures taken 12 days apart by NASA’s decade-old Opportunity rover. On December 26, 2013, it was not there. On January 8, it was. But what is it?
Water ice is the most abundant solid material in the Universe. Much of it was created as the byproduct of star formation, but not all of it. John Bradley of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and his team may have discovered a new source of water in our solar system. His lab experiments reveal that the solar wind may be creating water on interplanetary dust.
Yesterday, the Daily Mail reported that a “mystery object was spotted on Google Moon” that appears to be “wedge-shaped craft” on the lunar surface. Today, Astronomy Live posted a logical explanation for the “mystery object” (see the video above) by analyzing the raw, full-resolution Kaguya data The conclusion: “What’s happening is that the background is leaking through. Those pixels are just corrupted; there’s nothing there. They are literally invisible. So whatever is behind it is bleeding through – whether it’s the sunlit surface of the moon (sort of a neutral gray color). If I go to the height map it turns blue – blue colors leaking through. It’s just like pinholes a piece of paper. That’s all it is. It’s not an actual UFO or anything else. It’s just holes in the terrain map. But, that’s not what it actually looks like in the actual picture.”
The hidden tendrils of dark matter that underlie the visible Universe may have been traced out for the first time. Cosmology theory predicts that galaxies are embedded in a cosmic web of “stuff”, most of which is dark matter. Astronomers obtained the first direct images of a part of this network, by exploiting the fact that a luminous object called a quasar can act as a natural “cosmic flashlight”. The quasar illuminates a nearby gas cloud measuring two million light-years across.
A mysterious rock which appeared in front of the Opportunity rover is “like nothing we’ve ever seen before”, according to Mars exploration scientists at NASA. Experts said they were “completely confused” by both the origins and makeup of the object, which is currently being investigated by Opportunity’s various measuring instruments.
