NASA’s Curiosity rover has gulped in Martian air but failed to find methane – a gas linked to living things. But it has turned up signs that Mars may have lost much of its original atmosphere. Since landing on the Red Planet’s surface Aug. 5, the Mars Science Laboratory rover has zapped rocks with its…
Analyzing grains of soil collected from three Apollo lunar missions, geochemists have figured out that the hydrogen in trace amounts of water on the moon’s surface probably came from solar wind, the outflow of positively-charged hydrogen from the sun. For decades, scientists didn’t find much hydrogen in the lunar samples that had been returned to…
At very low temperatures, close to absolute zero, chemical reactions may proceed at a much higher rate than classical chemistry says they should—because in this extreme chill, quantum effects enter the picture. A Weizmann Institute team has now confirmed this experimentally; their results would not only provide insight into processes in the intriguing quantum world…
A meteorite that fell in Morocco last year might contain the freshest evidence for water on Mars, according to a study published in Science. The meteorite, named Tissint after the town nearest its landing site, was identified as a Mars rock in January. Now, Hasnaa Chennaoui Aoudjehane and her colleagues report that Tissint contains evidence…
Orbiting a star that is visible to the naked eye, astronomers have discovered a planet twice the size of our own made largely out of diamond. The rocky planet, called ’55 Cancri e’, orbits a sun-like star in the constellation of Cancer and is moving so fast that a year there lasts a mere 18…
ESA’s Herschel space observatory has discovered enough water vapor to fill Earth’s oceans more than 2000 times over, in a gas and dust cloud that is on the verge of collapsing into a new Sun-like star. Stars form within cold, dark clouds of gas and dust – ‘pre-stellar cores’ – that contain all the ingredients…
NASA’s Curiosity rover is getting ready to take its first scoop of Martian soil. The analysis of the soil sample will be one of the rover’s most crucial tasks, helping establish whether Gale Crater ever offered favorable conditions for life. First, Curiosity started to prepare by using one of its wheels to scuff the soil…
A group of Japanese scientists announced that they have finally synthesized the elusive element 113, which has been called ununtrium. If confirmed, the feat would mark the first time Japanese researchers have been first to synthesize an element of the periodic table. It would also be the first time an Asian research team has had…
Researchers at the University of Washington have determined that “some” microbial life migrated from the Earth’s oceans to land some 2.75 billion years ago. However, a number of scientists continue to hypothesize that such land-based life was limited – at least initially – because the ozone layer that shields against ultraviolet radiation didn’t form until…
Our galaxy — and the nearby Large and Small Magellanic Clouds as well — appears to be surrounded by an enormous halo of hot gas, several hundred times hotter than the surface of the Sun and with an equivalent mass of up to 60 billion Suns, suggesting that other galaxies may be similarly encompassed and…