Astronomy

NASA and other space agencies spend a lot of time and money considering the cleanliness of their missions. Billions of dollars are spent in and on cleanrooms every year, with the express effort of ensuring both that the equipment operates without interference, but also that we don’t accidentally contaminate our exploration target with life from Earth itself. So far, we have primarily focused on bacteria in our efforts to stop this contamination, but according to a new paper by Atul M. Chander of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his co-authors, we might be missing an entirely different threat - fungi. Typical cleanroom protocols, which include “bunny suits” for engineers and 50+ hour baths in 110℃ temperatures (known as Dry-Heat Microbial Reduction, DHMR), are designed to kill ba...

An artist’s impression of a planet so close it to its star that it completes an orbit in 10.5 hours. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Schaller (for STScI). An artificial intelligence tool developed at the University of Warwick has uncovered a rich haul of previously hidden exoplanets in data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), validating more than 100 worlds and identifying thousands more candidates. The new system, called RAVEN (RAnking and Validation of ExoplaNets), was applied to observations of more than 2.2 million stars collected during the first four years of the TESS mission. By combining automated detection, machine learning and statistical validation into a single pipeline, the team has produced one of the most comprehensive catalogues of close orbiting planets to...

Astronomers have identified a planet composed of molten lava, suggesting the existence of an entirely new category of liquid planet.The distant world, known as L98-59d, is about 1.6 times the size of Earth and orbits a small red star 35 light years away. Astronomers initially thought the planet might harbour a deep ocean of liquid water, but the latest analysis suggests that it could be fundamentally different to anything seen before.“The whole thing really is in a mushy, molten state,” said Dr Harrison Nicholls, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. “It’s like molasses. It’s likely that this planet’s core would also be molten.”Surface temperatures would reach a blazing 1,900C (3,500F), large waves are likely to roll over the magma ocean caused by the tidal forces of neighbouring ...

The spiral galaxy ESO 137-001, seen here in an image from Hubble, is an example of a “jellyfish” galaxy, because blue tendrils of star formation stream away from it like jellyfish tentacles. Credit: NASA, ESA A newly discovered jellyfish galaxy, seen as it existed 8.5 billion years ago, is challenging assumptions about conditions in the early universe. Astrophysicists at the University of Waterloo have identified a newly discovered jellyfish galaxy that is now the most distant example of its kind ever observed. Jellyfish galaxies get their name from the long, tentacle-like streams of gas and stars that extend behind them. These galaxies race through the hot, crowded environment of a galaxy cluster. As they move, the surrounding gas behaves like a powerful headwind, pushing gas ...