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SPACE: Neptune’s Moons Locked in a Strange Dance

Neptune - pixabay

Astronomers have discovered an unusual pattern around Neptune. The gas giant’s innermost moons are doing everything in their power to steer clear from one another in a weird, zigzagging pattern that astronomers are calling a “dance of avoidance.” Thalassa and Naiad’s orbital paths sit no farther apart than Chicago and Miami, about 1,150 miles (1,850 kilometers). But their zigzagging path around each other as they orbit Neptune ensures that the moons themselves never get that close. Naiad moves faster than Thalassa, circling Neptune in 7 hours versus its twin’s orbital time of 7.5 hours. Every time Naiad passes the slower … Read more

RNA in Spaaaaace… ?

meteor - pixabay

A new study suggests that when some ancient meteorites crash-land on Earth, they bring a dash of extraterrestrial sugar with them. To be clear, this is not table sugar (sadly, scientists still have no insight into whether aliens prefer their coffee black or sweetened). Rather, in the powdered samples of two ancient, carbon-filled meteorites, astronomers have found traces of several sugars that are key to life — including ribose, the sugary base of RNA (ribonucleic acid). According to lead study author Yoshihiro Furukawa, this is the first time that these bioessential sugars have been detected in meteorites. The find gives … Read more

SPACE: Meet Arrokoth, the Most Distant Object Ever Explored

Arrokoth - Live Science

Hopefully you weren’t too attached to “2014 MU69,” because the most distant object ever explored has a new name. The 21-mile-wide (34 kilometers) body visited by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on Jan. 1 is now officially known as Arrokoth, a term that means “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language, mission team members announced today (Nov. 12). “The name ‘Arrokoth’ reflects the inspiration of looking to the skies and wondering about the stars and worlds beyond our own,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. “That desire to learn is … Read more

SPACE: Jupiter for Trans Rights?

What’s that up in the sky? Is it a bird? A plane? It’s Jupiter saying, at the top of its gas-filled lungs, “trans rights!” The fifth planet from the sun has made the groundbreaking decision to come out in favour of trans rights. Jupiter was snapped in UV light by the Hubble Telescope late last year, but has gone viral again in a tweet from a trans activist who tagged a photo of the planet with: “Jupiter says trans rights.” Full Story From Pink News

SPACE: Could “Water Bear” DNA Help Us Survive on mars?

tardigrade - deposit photos

Will we one day combine tardigrade DNA with our cells to go to Mars? Chris Mason, a geneticist and associate professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell University in New York, has investigated the genetic effects of spaceflight and how humans might overcome these challenges to expand our species farther into the solar system. One of the (strangest) ways that we might protect future astronauts on missions to places like Mars, Mason said, might involve the DNA of tardigrades, tiny micro-animals that can survive the most extreme conditions, even the vacuum of space! Mason led one of the 10 … Read more

NASA Spacecraft Poised to Find Thousands of Alien Worlds

alien planet - live science

Within just 50 light-years from Earth, there are about 1,560 stars, likely orbited by several thousand planets. About a thousand of these extrasolar planets — known as exoplanets — may be rocky and have a composition similar to Earth’s. Some may even harbor life. Over 99% of these alien worlds remain undiscovered — but this is about to change. With NASA’s new exoplanet-hunter space telescope TESS, the all-sky search is on for possibly habitable planets close to our solar system. TESS — orbiting Earth every 13.7 days — and ground-based telescopes are poised to find hundreds of planets over the … Read more

Curiosity Rover Posts Emo Photo of Mars

curiosity rover Mars photo - NASA

Mars is the only known planet in the universe inhabited solely by robots. There’s InSight, the sturdy robo-stethoscope listening for the Red Planet’s heartbeat; there’s Odyssey and the gang, a cadre of droids surveilling the planet from orbit. And then, climbing a lonely crater hundreds of miles away from its companions, there’s Curiosity, the last surviving rover on Mars. About the size of an SUV and capable of traveling 100 feet (30 meters) per hour, Curiosity has been exploring the 3.5-billion-year-old pit called Gale Crater since landing there in 2012. Now, Curiosity is climbing the mountain, known as Mount Sharp … Read more

Is the Universe a Loop?

andromeda - pixabay

Everything we think we know about the shape of the universe could be wrong. Instead of being flat like a bedsheet, our universe may be curved, like a massive, inflated balloon, according to a new study. That’s the upshot of a new paper published today (Nov. 4) in the journal Nature Astronomy, which looks at data from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the faint echo of the Big Bang. But not everyone is convinced; the new findings, based on data released in 2018, contradict both years of conventional wisdom and another recent study based on that same CMB data set. … Read more

SPACE: Are We Being Watched By An Alien Satellite? Probably Not. But…

Black Knight - NASA

Sometimes the introduction of a news report will stop you in your tracks, forcing you to reread in fear you didn’t quite grasp its point the first time. That was certainly the case when Mail Online published a story on Mar. 21, 2017: “An alien satellite set up more than 12,000 years ago to spy on humans has been shot down by elite soldiers from the illuminati, UFO hunters claim.”  And with that, the conspiracy surrounding the so-called “Black Knight” satellite appeared to be very much alive. It’s been 120 years since conspiracists believed the existence of the Black Knight was recorded. … Read more

Will the First Human on Mars Be a Woman?

mars - pixabay

When NASA sends humans to the moon for the first time in more than half a century, one lucky astronaut will go down in history for becoming the first woman on the moon. Then it won’t be long before we see the first woman on Mars, and she just might beat the first man there, according to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “We could very well see the first person on Mars be a woman,” Bridenstine told reporters on Friday (Oct. 18) during a news conference about the first all-woman spacewalk. “I think that could very well be a milestone,” he … Read more