Scientists have discovered an anomalous blob of heat on the far side of the moon.

This mysterious hotspot has a strange origin: It’s likely caused by the natural radiation emanating from a huge buried mass of granite, which is rarely found in large quantities outside of Earth, according to new research. On the moon, a dead volcano that hasn’t erupted for 3.5 billion years is likely the source of this unusual hunk of granite.

"This is more Earth-like than we had imagined can be produced on the Moon, which lacks the water and plate tectonics that help granites form on Earth," lead study author Matt Siegler of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said in a statement.

Siegler and his colleague Rita Economos of Southern Methodist University discovered the heat with a new method using microwaves to measure subsurface temperatures via the Chinese lunar orbiters Chang’E 1 and 2. They also used data from NASA’s Lunar Prospector and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiters.

What they found was an area about 31 miles (50 kilometers) across where the temperature is about 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) warmer than the surroundings. This region was below a 12.4 mile (20 km) diameter spot on the surface that is rich in silicon and that is thought to be a collapsed volcanic crater. The dead volcano last erupted 3.5 billion years ago, but magma from its plumbing system is likely still sitting below the surface, giving off radiation.

"This find is a 50 km-wide batholith; a batholith is a type of volcanic rock that forms when lava rises into the Earth’s crust but does not erupt onto the surface," Economos said in the statement. "El Capitan and Half Dome, in Yosemite in California are examples of similar granite rocks which have risen to the surface."

The researchers reported their initial findings in the journal Nature on July 5 and presented additional details July 12 at the Goldschmidt Conference on geochemistry in Lyon, France.

The findings are "incredibly interesting," Stephen M. Elardo, a geochemist at the University of Florida who was not involved in the study, said in the statement. Granite is extremely common on Earth, but not elsewhere in the solar system, added Elardo.

"People don’t think twice about having a granite countertop in their kitchen," he said. "But geologically-speaking, it’s quite hard to make granite without water and plate tectonics, which is why we really don’t see that type of rock on other planets. So if this finding by Siegler and colleagues holds up, it’s going to be massively important for how we think about the internal workings of other rocky bodies in the Solar System."

Source: https://www.livescience.com/space/the-moon/scientists-discover-huge-heat-emitting-blob-on-the-far-side-of-the-moon

Astronomers have directly detected and imaged a gas giant orbiting another star by combining different techniques for hunting exoplanets.

Researchers first looked at a catalog of star-mapping data combined from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia and older Hipparcos missions to identify stars that, based on their apparent movements or wobbles, are likely to be orbited by giant — and thus potentially visible — planets.

The international team of scientists then used the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Observations using the telescope’s coronagraphic adaptive optics and spectrograph instruments in July and September 2020 and May and October 2021 led to the discovery of the exoplanet HIP 99770B, a new study reports.

HIP 99770B is a gas giant planet about 15 times the mass of Jupiter orbiting the star HIP 99770, which is around twice as massive as our sun.

Direct imaging provides information such as the composition of atmospheres around planets and their temperatures. But actually finding planets in this fashion is very difficult, accounting for only a handful of exoplanet discoveries.

However, using star-mapping data means astronomers know exactly where to look with follow-up telescope observations. This approach could bring further discoveries of exoplanets by direct imaging, potentially including Earth-like planets, scientists said.

"This is sort of a test run for the kind of strategy we need to be able to image an Earth," study lead author Thayne Currie, who’s based at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Hilo, Hawaii and the University of Texas-San Antonio, said in an ESA statement.

"It demonstrates that an indirect method sensitive to a planet’s gravitational pull can tell you where to look and exactly when to look for direct imaging," Currie said. "So I think that’s really exciting."

The paper was published in the journal Science on April 13.

Source: https://www.space.com/giant-exoplanet-discovered-gaia-star-mapping-data?utm_term=AF536F6D-055D-443A-91F7-FD448D0CCA73&utm_campaign=58E4DE65-C57F-4CD3-

A stealthy asteroid the size of a 20-story building hid in the sun’s glare before zooming uncomfortably close to Earth on July 13. Scientists didn’t notice until July 15.

An asteroid as large as a 20-story building sailed uncomfortably close to Earth last week, zooming by our planet at roughly a quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon — and astronomers didn’t notice it until two days later.

Now dubbed 2023 NT1, the roughly 200-foot-wide (60 meters) space rock sailed past our planet on July 13, traveling at an estimated 53,000 mph (86,000 km/h), according to NASA. However, because the rock flew toward Earth from the direction of the sun, our star’s glare blinded telescopes to the asteroid’s approach until long after it had passed.

Astronomers didn’t catch wind of the building-size rock until July 15, when a telescope in South Africa — part of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), an array of telescopes designed to spot asteroids several days to weeks before any potential impact — caught the rock making its exit from our neighborhood. More than a dozen other telescopes also spotted the rock shortly afterward, according to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.

A diagram of Earth with a gray ring around it showing the moon’s orbit. A green line, representing an asteroid, cuts through the gray circle and approaches Earth

Despite this surprise approach, asteroid 2023 NT1 isn’t large enough to be considered a potentially hazardous object; after calculating the asteroid’s trajectory for the next decade, astronomers say there’s no imminent risk of an impact. In fact, recent research suggests that Earth is safe from asteroids — at least from large, extinction-inducing ones — for the next 1,000 years.

Still, the sun remains a well-known blind spot in the search for near-Earth asteroids — and 2023 NT1 is hardly the first stealthy space rock to slip past our detection. In 2013, a roughly 59-foot-long (18 m) asteroid followed a similar path through the sun’s glare and went undetected before exploding in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The explosion released a shock wave that damaged buildings and shattered glass for miles around, ultimately injuring nearly 1,500 people (but killing none).

While scientists closely monitor more than 31,000 known near-Earth asteroids, they are well aware of the dangers posed by the solar blind spot. To address this threat, the European Space Agency is hard at work on the NEOMIR mission. The satellite, scheduled to launch around 2030, will orbit between Earth and the sun in an effort to detect large asteroids hidden in our star’s shine.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/space/asteroids/a-skyscraper-size-asteroid-flew-closer-to-earth-than-the-moon-and-scientists-didnt-notice-until-2-days-later

[It is fascinating about the weird past of the earth that scientists have uncovered. When I was younger, scientists used to believe, for a long time, that the earth changed GRADUALLY. But as their knowledge and tools have improved massively, they have instead discovered that lots of weird, nasty events took place in the Earth's history that were unexpected and weird. It turns out that disasters and nasty bizarre, weird things happened a LOT. The Earth is actually a dangerous planet and we are actually a fragile species. This is our only home, but our only home could kill us easily. I will return to this topic. Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vntVVcazJD4&t=1261s

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJUVd8SguDw

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmW-tctT6Y4

The first stars in the cosmos may have topped out at over 10,000 times the mass of the sun, roughly 1,000 times bigger than the biggest stars alive today, a new study has found.

Nowadays, the biggest stars are 100 solar masses. But the early universe was a far more exotic place, filled with mega-giant stars that lived fast and died very, very young, the researchers found.

And once these doomed giants died out, conditions were never right for them to form again.

The cosmic Dark Ages

More than 13 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang, the universe had no stars. There was nothing more than a warm soup of neutral gas, almost entirely made up of hydrogen and helium. Over hundreds of millions of years, however, that neutral gas began to pile up into increasingly dense balls of matter. This period is known as the cosmic Dark Ages.

In the modern day universe, dense balls of matter quickly collapse to form stars. But that’s because the modern universe has something that the early universe lacked: a lot of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. These elements are very efficient at radiating energy away. This allows the dense clumps to shrink very rapidly, collapsing to high enough densities to trigger nuclear fusion – the process that powers stars by combining lighter elements into heavier ones.

But the only way to get heavier elements in the first place is through that same nuclear fusion process. Multiple generations of stars forming, fusing, and dying enriched the cosmos to its present state.

Without the ability to rapidly release heat, the first generation of stars had to form under much different, and much more difficult, conditions.

Cold fronts

To understand the puzzle of these first stars, a team of astrophysicists turned to sophisticated computer simulations of the dark ages to understand what was going on back then. They reported their findings in January in a paper published to the preprint database arXiv and submitted for peer review to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The new work features all the usual cosmological ingredients: dark matter to help grow galaxies, the evolution and clumping of neutral gas, and radiation that can cool and sometimes reheat the gas. But their work includes something that others have lacked: cold fronts – fast-moving streams of chilled matter – that slam into already formed structures.

The researchers found that a complex web of interactions preceded the first star formation. Neutral gas began to collect and clump together. Hydrogen and helium released a little bit of heat, which allowed clumps of the neutral gas to slowly reach higher densities.

But high-density clumps became very warm, producing radiation that broke apart the neutral gas and prevented it from fragmenting into many smaller clumps. That means stars made from these clumps can become incredibly large.

Supermassive stars

These back-and-forth interactions between radiation and neutral gas led to massive pools of neutral gas– the beginnings of the first galaxies. The gas deep within these proto-galaxies formed rapidly spinning accretion disks – fast-flowing rings of matter that form around massive objects, including black holes in the modern universe.

Meanwhile, on the outer edges of the proto-galaxies, cold fronts of gas rained down. The coldest, most massive fronts penetrated the proto-galaxies all the way to the accretion disk.

These cold fronts slammed into the disks, rapidly increasing both their mass and density to a critical threshold, thereby allowing the first stars to appear.

Those first stars weren’t just any normal fusion factories. They were gigantic clumps of neutral gas igniting their fusion cores all at once, skipping the stage where they fragment into small pieces. The resulting stellar mass was huge.

Those first stars would have been incredibly bright and would have lived extremely short lives, less than a million years. (Stars in the modern universe can live billions of years). After that, they would have died in furious bursts of supernova explosions.

Those explosions would have carried the products of the internal fusion reactions – elements heavier than hydrogen and helium – that then seeded the next round of star formation. But now contaminated by heavier elements, the process couldn’t repeat itself, and those monsters would never again appear on the cosmic scene.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/the-early-universe-was-crammed-with-stars-10000-times-the-size-of-our-sun-new-study-suggests

NASA’s Perseverance rover has found a diverse menagerie of organic molecules in a Martian crater, a new study reports.

Organic compounds are molecules composed of carbon, and often include other elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur. Previously, scientists had detected several types of organic molecules of Martian origin — in meteorites blasted off Mars by cosmic impacts that landed on Earth, and in Gale Crater on the Red Planet, which NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring since 2012.

"They are an exciting clue for astrobiologists, since they are often thought of as building blocks of life," study lead author Sunanda Sharma, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, told Space.com.

However, "importantly, they can be created by processes not related to life," Sharma emphasized. As such, investigating what organic molecules exist on the Red Planet and how they were created is key to understanding what may or may not be linked to life on Mars.

Related: ‘Anomalous’ metal spheres unlikely to be alien technology, despite Harvard scientist’s claim

"As planetary scientists and astrobiologists, we are very careful with laying out claims — claiming that life is the source of organics or possible biosignatures is a last-resort hypothesis, meaning we would need to rule out any non-biological source of origin," Sharma said.

In the new study, Sharma and her colleagues analyzed data from Perseverance. In February 2021, the rover landed within Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake basin that prior work suggested displayed high potential for past habitability. The crater floor also possesses clays and other minerals that may preserve organic materials.

Specifically, the scientists examined data from the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument onboard Perseverance. SHERLOC is the first tool on Mars capable of conducting fine-scale mapping and analysis of organic molecules.

The researchers focused on SHERLOC data from Máaz and Séítah, two rock formations on the Jezero Crater floor. When ultraviolet light from SHERLOC illuminates organic compounds, they can glow much like material beneath a blacklight. The fingerprint of wavelengths in the glow from a molecule can help identify it.

Sharma and her colleagues found signs of organic molecules in all 10 targets that Perseverance drilled into at Máaz and Séítah, covering a span of time from at least about 2.3 billion to 2.6 billion years ago. These "point to the possibility that building blocks of life could have been present for a long time on the surface of Mars, in more than one place," Sharma said.

Close-up image of a mars rock with green and blue dots superimposed over it to represent chemical composition in different areas.

This annotated image shows a rock target called "Garde," as analyzed by the Mars rover Perseverance’s SHERLOC instrument. This data was taken on Sept. 18, 2021, the 207th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/LANL/PhotonSys)

The scientists discovered evidence of many different classes of organic molecules. These occurred in a variety of patterns in space within Máaz and Séítah, suggesting they might have originated from a number of different minerals and mechanisms of formation. These organic compounds mostly appeared connected to minerals linked to water.

"Seeing that the possible organic signals differ in terms of type, number of detections and distribution between the two units of the crater floor was surprising and exciting," Sharma said. "That opens the possibility of different formation, preservation or transportation mechanisms across the crater and, more broadly, the surface of Mars."

The scientists could not identify specific organic molecules. "To confirm the presence of organics and their specific types, we would need the samples to be returned to Earth," Sharma said. "That’s our goal."

The scientists detailed their findings online today (July 12) in the journal Nature.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/space/mars/building-blocks-of-life-discovered-on-mars-in-10-different-rock-samples

[Our type of solar system and our planet is not normal in the universe. It is very special, and more and more evidence of this is emerging. I will discuss this in more detail later. But be aware of what the science is revealing. Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tju7EaSfmM

The first-ever near-complete sauropod skull found in Australia is remarkably similar to fossils from South America, which suggests that dinosaurs roamed across ice-free Antarctica.

A nearly 100 million-year-old, exceptionally well-preserved sauropod skull discovered in Australia may show that dinosaurs trudged across Antarctica from South America to Australia, researchers have revealed.

The near-complete sauropod skull belongs to a species called Diamantinasaurus matildae. Sauropods are known for their extremely long necks, with one dinosaur’s neck stretching farther than a school bus. D. matildae was also a titanosaur, the only group of sauropod dinosaurs to live right until the end of the Cretaceous (145 million to 66 million years ago) before the nonavian dinosaurs went extinct.

Paleontologists excavated the specimen in 2018 from a sheep ranch northwest of Winton, in Queensland, Australia, and nicknamed it "Ann." D. matildae was as long as a tennis court (78 feet or 23.77 meters) and weighed around 27.5 tons (25 metric tons), three times more than Tyrannosaurus rex. The fossils look strikingly similar to bones unearthed in Argentina, which prompted researchers to think that sauropods journeyed between South America and Australia, via Antarctica.

"In analyzing the remains, we found similarities between the Ann skull and the skull of a titanosaur called Sarmientosaurus musacchioi, which lived in South America at about the same time as Diamantinasaurus lived in Queensland," Stephen Poropat, a paleontologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and lead author of a new study into the fossils, said in a statement. "We suggest that sauropods were traveling between Australia and South America, via Antarctica, during the mid Cretaceous."

In the hothouse world of the Cretaceous, Antarctica was blanketed with lush forests and vegetation. Scientists already knew that sauropods roamed the now-frigid landmass, after the first long-necked-dinosaur fossil in Antarctica was discovered in 2011. Some scientists had already theorized that these behemoths used Antarctica to bridge continents. At the time, Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica and South America were joined and formed the last remnant of the supercontinent Gondwana, according to the Australian Museum.

Now, in a study published Wednesday (April 12) in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers compared the best-preserved sauropod skull found to date in Australia with others from across the world.

A photo of the site where paleontologists unearthed the skull shows several cars and a tent set up near a dig site on a vast plain
Paleontologists unearthed the 98 million to 95 million-year-old sauropod skull during a dig organized by the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum near Winton, Queensland. (Image credit: Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum)

Using detailed scans of Ann’s remains, the team detected remarkable similarities with a Sarmientosaurus skull that was discovered in the Chubut province in southern Argentina and described in a 2016 study in the journal PLOS One. "These similarities include details of the braincase, the bones forming the back end of the skull near the jaw joint and the shape of the teeth," Poropat said.

Researchers already suspected that these two dinosaurs were closely related, but until now, they lacked the evidence to back it up. "The new skull shores up the idea in a big way," Poropat wrote in The Conversation. "Bone for bone, the skulls of Diamantinasaurus and Sarmientosaurus are extremely similar."

A photo of scientists arranging the sauropod skull remains on a table set to slide into a CT scanner

Dinosaur skulls are an extremely rare find, according to the study. Aside from a few teeth, Ann’s skull is only the second sauropod skull found in Australia, following the discovery in 2016 of a partial cranium belonging to D. matildae. That’s because the heads of sauropods were small relative to their body size and were made up of tiny, delicate bones and decomposed more rapidly than sturdy limbs, Poropat wrote.

“This is a remarkably detailed and information-packed paper," Matthew Lamanna, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and co-author of the 2016 study, told Live Science in an email. "The resemblances between the skulls of Diamantinasaurus and the similarly aged Sarmientosaurus from southern South America are pretty striking, and add further support for the hypothesis that titanosaurs moved between Australia and South America during the mid-Cretaceous, presumably via Antarctica."

Source: https://www.livescience.com/animals/dinosaurs/95-million-year-old-land-bridge-across-antarctica-carried-dinosaurs-between-continents