Earth & Space
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.
