Space News & Blog Articles

Astronomers using the ALMA Observatory have discovered an unusual, massive star near the center of our galaxy, a star that has two spiral arms. The arms are part of an accretion disk, a broad disk of dust and gas surrounding the protostar. While this is not the first star to be seen with such rare arm-like features, researchers say they believe they can track the formation of the spiral arms to a close encounter the star had with another object.

Accretions disks, also known as protostellar disks, usually form quickly around young stars, and over time the disks can stretch out to distances hundreds of times bigger than the nascent star. Astronomers say the disks are essential to star formation because they continuously feed gas from the surrounding environment to the growing stars.   

Because of newer observatories with submillimeter observing capabilities like ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in the Atacama Desert in Chile, astronomers have been able to study distant protostars in the last few years. This has led to a wealth of observational and theoretical advances.  However, much of the previous observations of these objects have been for lower mass, Sun-like stars.  

The star observed in this study is near the galactic center and is an early O-type star that is extremely hot (over 30,000 Kelvin) and massive, at 32 solar masses. The disk is gigantic, with a diameter of about 4,000 astronomical units.

Since so few stars of this type have been observed so far, the researchers say it is still unclear whether accretion disks play a role in their formation, and if so, how. These massive stars are far more luminous than the Sun — several hundreds of thousands of times greater — which strongly impact the environment of the entire galaxy. Therefore, say the researchers, understanding the formation of massive stars is of great importance.

We are carbon-based life forms. That means the basis for the chemical compounds that forms our life is the element carbon. It’s crucial because it bonds with other elements such as hydrogen and oxygen to create the complex molecules that are part of life. So, when we look for evidence of life elsewhere in the solar system, we look for carbon. That includes Mars.

A few years ago, the Mars Curiosity rover measured the abundance of total organic carbon in rock samples it took in Gale Crater. The amounts it found are higher than in rocks from some of the driest areas on Earth. The question now is whether Curiosity’s measurement indicates the presence of life-creating compounds. Or, could the carbon have come from other non-organic sources? Either way, its presence unveils an interesting chapter in Mars’s past.

The Mars Curiosity Rover’s mission is, in large part, to find evidence of life and habitability on Mars. It does that by studying the chemical and geological environment on the surface. In particular, it helps unveil what role water has played in the past. Its measurement of total organic carbon is part of that mission.

Knowing the carbon species on Mars helps scientists understand how they may have formed. Total organic carbon is special because it’s a crucial part of life’s recipe. Scientists studied Mars rocks dug up in 2014 to see if they could figure out what the abundance of this element means for the existence of life on ancient Mars.

The Key to Life

What’s so important about organic carbon? According to scientist Jennifer Stern, Curiosity’s finding helps scientists understand important factors about Mars and its life-bearing capability. “Total organic carbon is one of several measurements [or indices] that help us understand how much material is available as feedstock for prebiotic chemistry and potentially biology,” Stern said in a press release statement.

A microwave oven–sized cubesat launched to space today from New Zealand by commercial company Rocket Lab and their Electron rocket. The small satellite will conduct tests to make sure the unique lunar orbit for NASA’s future Lunar Gateway is actually stable.  

The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, or CAPSTONE, mission launched at 5:55 a.m. EDT (09:55 UTC) on Tuesday June 28 from the Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula of New Zealand. The Electron has now flown 27 times with 24 successes and 3 failures.

The Gateway is a lunar space station that will support NASA’s Artemis program to return to the Moon and enable future missions to Mars. The unusual orbit, called a near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO), is an elongated polar orbit that brings a spacecraft within 1600 km (1,000 miles) of one lunar pole on its near pass and 70,000 km (43,500 miles) from the other pole every seven days. Since the orbit uses a balance point in the gravities of Earth and the Moon, it is theorized that spacecraft in this type of  orbit require less propulsion capability for spacecraft flying to and from the Moon’s surface than other circular orbits and requires minimal energy to maintain.

CAPSTONE’s mission is to attempt to establish that this location in space provides a stable and ideal location for a space station, as well as a staging area for missions to the Moon and beyond.

The spacecraft is currently in low Earth orbit, and is attached to Rocket Lab’s Lunar Photon, an interplanetary third stage that will send CAPSTONE on its way to deep space. It will take about four months for it to reach the targeted lunar orbit.

Earth’s oceans are one huge, uniform electrolyte solution. They contain salt (sodium chloride) and other nutrients like magnesium, sulphate, and calcium. We can’t survive without electrolytes, and life on Earth might look very different without the oceans’ electrolyte content. It might even be non-existent.

On Earth, electrolytes are released into the oceans from rock by different processes like volcanism and hydrothermal activity.

Are these life-enabling nutrients available on water worlds?

Water worlds are exoplanets with enough water to form a hydrosphere. Many of the exoplanets we’ve discovered are super-Earths and/or mini-Neptunes, and scientists expect some of them to be water worlds. On those planets, electrolytes probably play a similar role in habitability that they do on Earth’s oceans.

But the problem is that super-Earths and mini-Neptunes are more massive than Earth, and their interiors are under more pressure than Earth. These planets can form deep planetary ice mantles between the rocky cores and the surface oceans. These ice barriers aren’t regular ice. Instead, they’re high-pressure ices like ice VII, and that dense ice could be a barrier that prevents essential mineral electrolytes from moving from the cores to the oceans, where they’d be available for life.