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Category: space – Page 181

China’s Zhurong rover was equipped with a ground-penetrating radar system, allowing it to peer beneath Mars’s surface. Researchers have announced new results from the scans of Zhurong’s landing site in Utopia Planitia, saying they identified irregular polygonal wedges located at a depth of about 35 meters all along the robot’s journey.

The objects measure from centimeters to tens of meters across. The scientists believe the buried polygons resulted from on Mars billions of years ago, but they could also be volcanic, from cooling lava flows.

The Zhurong rover landed on Mars on May 15, 2021, making China the second country ever to successfully land a rover on Mars. The cute rover, named after a Chinese god of fire, explored its , sent back pictures—including a selfie with its lander, taken by a remote camera—studied the topography of Mars, and conducted measurements with its ground penetrating radar (GPR) instrument.

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Astronomers have discovered a new stellar system in the outskirts of the Milky Way as part of the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS). The newfound system, named Sextans II, is most likely an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy. The finding is reported in a paper published November 10 on the pre-print server arXiv.

KiDS is an extensive multi-band photometric survey utilizing the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Since 2011, the survey has been mapping 1,350 square degrees of the night sky in four broad-band filters (u, g, r, i). Although KiDS is focused on the assembly of large-scale structures in the universe, it may also detect low-surface brightness extragalactic stellar systems.

That is why a team of astronomers led by Massimiliano Gatto of the Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte in Naples, Italy, decided to conduct a large-scale search for unknown faint stellar systems with KiDS. For this purpose, they looked for low-luminosity stellar overdensities in the KiDS latest data release (DR4), which brought promising results.

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The universe is expanding. How fast it does so is described by the so-called Hubble-Lemaitre constant. But there is a dispute about how big this constant actually is: Different measurement methods provide contradictory values.

This so-called “Hubble tension” poses a puzzle for cosmologists. Researchers from the Universities of Bonn and St. Andrews are now proposing a new solution: Using an alternative theory of gravity, the discrepancy in the measured values can be easily explained—the Hubble tension disappears. The study has now been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

The causes the galaxies to move away from each other. The speed at which they do this is proportional to the distance between them. For instance, if galaxy A is twice as far away from Earth as galaxy B, its distance from us also grows twice as fast. The US astronomer Edwin Hubble was one of the first to recognize this connection.

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Micrometeorites originating from icy celestial bodies in the outer solar system may be responsible for transporting nitrogen to the near-Earth region in the early days of our solar system. That discovery was published in Nature Astronomy by an international team of researchers, including University of Hawai’i at Mānoa scientists, led by Kyoto University.

Nitrogen compounds, such as ammonium salts, are abundant in material born in regions far from the sun, but evidence of their transport to Earth’s orbital region had been poorly understood.

“Our recent findings suggest the possibility that a greater amount of than previously recognized was transported near Earth, potentially serving as for life on our planet,” says Hope Ishii, study co-author and affiliate faculty at the Hawai’i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST).

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If humans intend to conquer the stars and spread civilization beyond Earth, we really need to figure out sex: can humans conceive and have babies in places such as Mars, where factors like high amounts of radiation and lower gravity could wreck the adult body, nevermind potentially hindering natural conception and deforming growing fetuses?

A growing number of researchers and entrepreneurs want to tackle those questions. Take this startup called Spaceborn United, which we’ve blogged about previously.

The company is still hard at work, according to new reporting from AFP, with the aim of having a baby naturally conceived and born on Mars in the future.

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