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Category: space – Page 114

Youngest planet ever discovered challenges planet formation timelines

The planet, a very young gas giant, is about 521 light-years away from Earth. Its strange orbit also enables researchers to get exciting information as it transits in front of its parent star with little to no obstructions to Earth-based instruments, like NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which made the discovery.

IRAS 04125+2902 b is roughly the same age as its parent star, which is far too brief in cosmic terms under our current understanding of planet formation.

IRAS 04125+2902 b has a radius roughly 10.7 times larger than that of Earth, making it comparable in size to Jupiter. However, it is significantly less dense, possessing only 30% of Jupiter’s mass.

Oldest direct evidence of hot water activity on Mars found

New Curtin University-led research has uncovered what may be the oldest direct evidence of ancient hot water activity on Mars, revealing the planet may have been habitable at some point in its past.

The study analyzed a 4.45 billion-year-old grain from the famous Martian meteorite NWA7034, also known as Black Beauty, and found geochemical “fingerprints” of -rich fluids.

Study co-author Dr. Aaron Cavosie from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences said the discovery opened up new avenues for understanding ancient Martian hydrothermal systems associated with magmatism, as well as the planet’s past habitability.

2 Million Mph Galaxy Smash-Up Seen in Unprecedented Detail

A massive collision of galaxies sparked by one traveling at a scarcely-believable 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h) has been seen in unprecedented detail by one of Earth’s most powerful telescopes.

The dramatic impact was observed in Stephan’s Quintet, a nearby galaxy group made up of five galaxies first sighted almost 150 years ago.

It sparked an immensely powerful shock akin to a “sonic boom from a jet fighter”—the likes of which are among the most striking phenomena in the universe.

James Webb Space Telescope unveils surprising ‘Red Monsters’ in the early universe

Returning to those Red Monsters, the new JWST data showed that these galaxies produce stars at about two to three times more efficiently than galaxies in the later universe.

The stellar masses of these three galaxies are so large that they require a stellar-mass conversion efficiency of about 50%, higher than the typical efficiency observed in galaxies today. For example, most galaxies at later times convert only about 20% of their available gas into stars. These findings suggest that the early universe may have had a different set of conditions that allowed for much faster and more efficient galaxy growth.

“Our research is transforming our understanding of early galaxy formation,” Mengyuan Xiao, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the UNIGE Faculty of Science, said in the statement.

Huge sunspot will soon face Earth and spew flares towards us. Is that a danger?

The sun is once again extremely active. A massive sunspot is slowly turning towards Earth and is expected to spew out solar flares directly at us, leading to not just auroras but also radio blackouts. Named AR3901, the sunspot has already released some flares, with more expected in the coming days.

On Monday, the sun fired nine M-class solar flares, most of them originating from this active sunspot. Earth was not in the firing line of these flares, but when the spot turns towards the planet, things might go a little awry.

“Solar flare activity has remained at high levels with 10 M-Class, R1 (Minor) level flares over the period. Much of the activity has stemmed from Region 3,901 (S07E63, Dai/beta-gamma) which remains difficult to analyse due to foreshortening near the east limb,” NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) said in a forecast discussion.

Demis Hassabis, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry: ‘We will need a handful of breakthroughs before we reach artificial general intelligence’

However, Hassabis’ true breakthrough came just a month ago, when he and two colleagues from DeepMind won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of AlphaFold, an AI tool capable of predicting the structure of the 200 million known proteins. This achievement would have been nearly impossible without AI, and solidifies Hassabis’ belief that AI is set to become one of the main drivers of scientific progress in the coming years.

Hassabis — the son of a Greek-Cypriot father and a Singaporean mother — reflects on the early days of DeepMind, which he founded in 2010, when “nobody was working on AI.” Over time, machine learning techniques such as deep learning and reinforcement learning began to take shape, providing AI with a significant boost. In 2017, Google scientists introduced a new algorithmic architecture that enabled the development of AGI. “It took several years to figure out how to utilize that type of algorithm and then integrate it in hybrid systems like AlphaFold, which includes other components,” he explains.

“During our first years, we were working in a theoretical space. We focused on games and video games, which were never an end in themselves. It gave us a controlled environment in which to operate and ask questions. But my passion has always been to use AI to accelerate scientific understanding. We managed to scale up to solving a real-world problem, such as protein folding,” recalls the engineer and neuroscientist.

Mars may have been Habitable much more recently than thought

Evidence suggests Mars could very well have been teeming with life billions of years ago. Now cold, dry, and stripped of what was once a potentially protective magnetic field, the red planet is a kind of forensic scene for scientists investigating whether Mars was indeed once habitable, and if so, when.

The “when” question in particular has driven researchers in Harvard’s Paleomagnetics Lab in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. A new paper in Nature Communications makes their most compelling case to date that Mars’ life-enabling magnetic field could have survived until about 3.9 billion years ago, compared with previous estimates of 4.1 billion years—so hundreds of millions of years more recently.

The study was led by Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Sarah Steele, who has used simulation and computer modeling to estimate the age of the Martian “dynamo,” or global magnetic field produced by convection in the planet’s iron core, like on Earth. Together with senior author Roger Fu, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, the team has doubled down on a theory they first argued last year that the Martian dynamo, capable of deflecting harmful cosmic rays, was around longer than prevailing estimates claim.

Astronomers detect a distant young super-Jupiter exoplanet

An international team of astronomers has reported the detection of a new super-Jupiter exoplanet as part of the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS). The newfound alien world, located some 1,430 light years away, is nearly four times as massive as Jupiter and is estimated to be only millions of years old. The discovery was detailed in a paper published November 13 on the pre-print server arXiv.

NGTS is a wide-field photometric survey focused mainly on the search for Neptune-sized and smaller exoplanets transiting bright stars. The project uses an array of small, fully robotic telescopes at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, operating at red-optical wavelengths. It uses the transit photometry method to find new exoworlds, which precisely measures the dimming of a star to detect the presence of a planet crossing in front of it.

Now, a group of astronomers led by Douglas R. Alves has found another extrasolar world with NGTS photometry. The new planet was identified around NGTS-33—a fast-rotating massive hot star.

Charting the Cosmic Shoreline: Which Planets Have Atmospheres?

Which of the nearly 6,000 known exoplanets have atmospheres? With help from JWST, astronomers are inching closer to an answer, and new observations of a super-Earth planet around a low-mass star help to define the dividing line between planets with atmospheres and planets without.

How to Find an Atmosphere

With the number of known exoplanets growing steadily larger, a major challenge for astronomers is deciding how to allocate limited telescope time to study these planets further. Rocky planets with atmospheres make promising targets, but it’s not obvious which exoplanets should have atmospheres. Taking cues from the planets in our solar system and the subset of exoplanets that have been studied in detail, researchers have defined the concept of the cosmic shoreline, which separates planets with atmospheres from planets without on the basis of escape velocity — related to a planet’s mass and size — and the amount of starlight the planet receives.