Space News & Blog Articles

It’s been over two years since the samples from Bennu gathered by OSIRIS-REx were returned to Earth. But there’s still plenty of novel science coming out of that 121.6 g of material. Three new papers were released recently that describe different aspects of that sample. One in particular, from Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan and their co-authors, has already attracted plenty of attention, including from US Senator (and former astronaut) Mark Kelly. It shows that all of the building blocks for early life were available on the asteroid - raising the chances that planets throughout the galaxy could be seeded with the abiotic precursors for life.

What can mapped drainage systems on Mars teach scientists about the Red Planet’s watery past? This is what a recent study published in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* hopes to address as a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) conducted a first-time mapping study involving Martian river basins. This study has the potential to not only gain insight into ancient Mars and how much water existed there long ago but also develop new methods for mapping ancient river basins on Mars and potentially other worlds.

Your sunscreen sits in the bathroom cabinet, slowly changing. The mayonnaise in your fridge gradually separates. That prescription cream loses effectiveness over time. All these materials share something fundamental, they're soft matter, substances like gels, foams, and colloids whose internal structure reorganises slowly and mysteriously over months or years.

On a summer day in 709 BCE, scribes at the Lu Duchy Court in ancient China looked up to witness something extraordinary. The Sun vanished completely from the sky, and in its place hung a ghostly halo. They recorded the event carefully, noting that during totality the eclipsed Sun appeared "completely yellow above and below." Nearly three millennia later, that ancient observation has helped modern scientists measure how fast Earth was spinning and understand what our Sun was doing at a time when Homer was composing poetry.

Plate tectonics is a fundamental aspect of Earth's geological activity and history. In addition to constantly rearranging the placement of continents, they also play a major role in maintaining the conditions that ensure Earth's continued habitability. However, Earth is the only terrestrial (rocky) planet in the Solar System with active plate tectonics. While this is understandable for Mercury and Mars, which are single-plate planets that are largely geologically inactive, due to rapid cooling in their interiors billions of years ago. But Venus, Earth's "Sister Planet," has remained something of a mystery.

Stars form in massive clouds of gas called molecular clouds. As they form, they accrete gas from these clouds, and as the stars rotate, gas and dust accumulates in a rotating disk around the star called a protoplanetary disk. As the name makes clear, this is where planets form by accreting material from the disk.

In the fields of science and science communication, there are few things more controversial than claims regarding the discovery of extraterrestrial life. This includes claims ranging from the discovery of the most basic lifeforms (lichens, single-celled organisms, etc.) to evidence of advanced civilizations. Such claims are incredibly common, thanks to the sensationalism surrounding the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and the search for life beyond Earth (astrobiology). Even when scientists have avoided issuing declarative judgments, it is very easy for statements to be twisted and misrepresented.