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Category: space – Page 107

POTSDAM, Germany — One of the most lifeless places on Earth is actually hiding an underground biosphere teeming with microscopic life! Researchers have unearthed this amazing oasis under Chile’s Atacama Desert. The findings not only change our view of life on Earth, but they might prove that there is still life under the soil of dead alien worlds like Mars!

Despite being renowned as the driest desert on Earth, with some regions going decades or even centuries without a drop of rain, researchers from Germany discovered hardy communities of microorganisms that have managed to carve out habitats deep below the desert floor. Down here, totally isolated from the surface world, microscopic life finds a way to eke out an existence against all odds.

Study author Dirk Wagner and the team from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences explain that they detected signs of potentially viable microbial ecosystems as far as 13 feet underground. This remarkable discovery is upending our understanding of desert biodiversity, demonstrating that life can persist in even the most extreme subterranean environments on Earth.

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More than 97% of the stars in our Galaxy will end their lives with a whimper—slowly cooling as stellar remnants known as white dwarfs. The cooling of white dwarfs follows a pattern that was thought to be so predictable that the temperatures of white dwarfs are used to determine the age of surrounding stars. New findings, however, indicate this pattern may need revision [1]. Predictions made by Antoine Bédard of the University of Warwick, UK, and his colleagues now indicate that some white dwarfs may undergo a process that “reinvigorates” the stars, significantly slowing down the cooling process. That change could alter the calculated ages of white dwarfs by billions of years.

When a small star (one with a mass 8 times or less that of the Sun) runs out of nuclear fuel, it sheds its outer layers to form a planetary nebula. The core of the star then collapses into a white dwarf. Producing no heat, white dwarfs spend their existences radiating their remaining energy into space, cooling and solidifying from the inside out. Or so astrophysicists thought.

In 2019, this model was disrupted by astronomers analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. The researchers identified a previously unknown population of white dwarfs within the Milky Way with anomalous properties [2]. As stars age, their velocities increase with respect to nearby stars because of repeated gravitational interactions with those stars. The newly identified white dwarfs, dubbed the Q branch, have much higher average velocities than models indicate they should have based on their temperatures, a finding that suggests that the Q-branch white dwarfs are older than previously thought. Some process is slowing down the cooling.

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“Io is simply littered with volcanoes, and we caught a few of them in action,” said Dr. Scott Bolton, who is the principal investigator of Juno. “We also got some great close-ups and other data on a 200-kilometer-long (127-mile-long) lava lake called Loki Patera. There is amazing detail showing these crazy islands embedded in the middle of a potentially magma lake rimmed with hot lava. The specular reflection our instruments recorded of the lake suggests parts of Io’s surface are as smooth as glass, reminiscent of volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.”

Loki Patera was first imaged by NASA’s Voyager 1 in 1979, revealing a very active surface and the most active of the four Galilean moons. The reason for Io’s immense volcanic activity is due to tidal heating, which occurs from Io’s somewhat elliptical orbit around the much larger Jupiter, which causes Io to orbit closer and farther away to Jupiter throughout its small orbit. This results in Jupiter’s massive gravity stretching and expanding the small moon, leading to friction within Io’s core, and eventually to heat. Since this process is ongoing, this means Io has been volcanically active for eons and could be volcanically active eons from now, as well.

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A team of astronomers believes the near-Earth asteroid Kamo’oalewa, a space rock between 130 and 328 feet in diameter, was once part of the Moon.

More specifically, a research team led by Tsinghua University astronomer Yifei Jiao suggests the rock was gouged from a geological feature on the far side of the Moon called the Giordano Bruno crater, named after a 16th-century Italian cosmological theorist.

“We have explored the processes for impact-induced lunar fragments migrating into Earth co-orbital space and presented support for Kamo’oalewa’s possible origin from the formation of the Giordano Bruno crater a few million years ago,” the researchers write in their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy last week.

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An Ongoing Meta-analysis of Gravitational Wave Signals may soon Prove that Space Remembers: permanent memory imprints in spacetime may soon be detected, which will be a validation of Nassim Haramein and our research team’s prediction that space has the property of memory, in which we described how the informational imprint of memory in space is what holographically generates time—that is to say that 4D spacetime is a hologram of a 3D voxel information network—as well as ordering properties underlying dynamics of organized matter. The gravitational wave memory effect is a prediction of general relativity, and physicists have devised a test of this interesting spacememory effect via a meta-analysis of gravitational wave detector data. The presence of memory effects in gravitational wave signals not only provides the chance to test an important aspect of general relativity, but also represents a potentially non-negligible contribution to the waveform for certain gravitational wave events. As well, memory properties of space will have far-reaching implications, from probing theories of quantum gravity and unified physics to potential applications in telecommunications technologies.

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