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Lighter-toned bedrock that surrounds cracks and fissures in the surface suggests the red planet had liquid longer much longer than previously thought - because it left behind halo-like rings of silica. The new finding is reported in a paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. Jens Frydenvang, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the paper, said: "The concentration of silica is very high at the centrelines of these halos. Mars was covered in water far longer than previously thought, say scientists "What we're seeing is that silica appears to have migrated between very old sedimentary bedrock and into younger overlying rocks. "The goal of NASA's Curiosity rover mission has been to find out if Mars was ever habitable, and it has been very successful in showing that Gale crater once held a lake with water that we would even have been able to drink, b

Yesterday on  Twitter , NASA publicized that on Wednesday, May 31, it will announce more details about a historic mission. The mission is to send a spacecraft seven times closer to the Sun than any spacecraft has gone before.  They are calling it ‘ Solar Probe Plus ’. According to the probe’s website it will be launched between July 31 and August 19, 2018. According to NASA it will cost about $1.5bn and it could fundamentally change our understanding of the sun, while proposing vital insights into space weather - phenomena comprising coronal mass discharges that activate geomagnetic storms that not only harm satellite systems but can knock out power grids on Earth. According to NASA a massive surprising solar event could knock out satellites and cost the U.S. alone up to $2 trillion in destruction — possibly even causing long-term electricity shortages worldwide. Today in a news conference, NASA will provide more information about this hotly anticipated mission to the sun. You can wa

This mysterious force is known as “The great Attractor”. The Great Attractor is neither a black hole nor a super-cluster of galaxies, but we are travelling towards it inescapably. The most massive imaginable black hole would be nowhere near massive enough to source this effect, nor is there any super-super cluster of galaxies to account for it. We are left with the possibility of some yet unknown force. Learn more about it in the video below:

See that small dot just to left of the bluish orb? That’s a real planet. It’s one of the best direct pictures of an exoplanet we’ve ever observed, and it’s made all the more extraordinary given that it’s a whopping 1,200 light-years away. Even though you can’t see it, there are in fact two planets in this remote star system, dubbed CVSO 30. Four years ago, astronomers used the transit method (where an orbiting planet causes a dip in the host star’s brightness) to detect the first planet, which is parked quite close to its host star. Image: ESO/Schmidt et al. This inner planet requires just 11 hours to make a complete orbit and is located a mere 0.008 au (744,000 miles) from its T-Tauri star (a young, bright star that hasn’t quite entered into its main sequence). Astronomers  have now detected a second planet  (the one shown in the photo), and they did so using direct imaging. To do it, they combined data from the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, the W. M. Keck Observatory in

NASA is going to make a big announcement about the astounding mission “Touch the Sun” on this Wednesday. NASA planned to disclose the solar mysteries.  Last February, the mission to send a probe within the 4 million miles of the sun’s atmosphere was disclosed, but NASA remained quiet and didn’t reveal its attempt to divulge the mysteries of the sun and its environment. NASA will release a Solar Probe Plus to the sun which will have to persist the temperatures and radiations of the sun and the data it will collect will help the astronomers to forecast the storms and provide indications on some of the deepest ambiguities surrounding our nearest star. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Today we are more dependent on technology then we ever were. Not only our modern technology but we human also need safety from the severe winds of charged particles and the radiations. Because these charged particles and radiations can make us suffer from the massive damage from the da

Construction began in Chile on Friday on the European Extremely Large Telescope, which when completed will be the world's largest optical telescope, some five times larger than the top observing instruments in use today. The size of the ELT has the potential to transform our understanding of the universe, say its backers, with its main mirror that will measure some 39 meters (43 yards) across. Located on a 3,000 meter-high mountain in the middle of the Atacama desert, it is due to begin operating in 2024. Among other capabilities, it will add to and refine astronomers' burgeoning discoveries of planets orbiting other stars, with the ability to find smaller planets, image larger ones, and possibly characterize their atmospheres, a key step in understanding if life is present. "What is being raised here is more than a telescope. Here we see one of the greatest examples of the possibilities of science," said Chilean President Michelle Bachelet in a speech to mark the beg

Yes you heard it, there is a force in the universe which can both pull and push objects. A team of physicists announced its discovery couple of years ago also suggesting that it could potentially be stronger than gravity. As the force is applied by things known as blackbodies, blackbody force seem like a fitting name for it. Now, physicists from the  Ceará State University  and the  Federal University of Ceará, Brazil , have exposed new insights about the strange phenomenon. Blackbodies are ideally perfect opaque objects  that absorb all inbound light without reflecting or releasing any. One best example is a neutron star. A black body is said to release a kind of thermal radiation that can both repel and pull close by objects like atoms and molecules. For objects that aren’t so immense and are hot enough, this blackbody radiation could even be stronger than their gravitational pull. Both the blackbody radiation (push) and the blackbody force (pull) yield an interplay of forces that’s

In a galaxy 22 million light-years distant, a black hole was born. For the first time in recorded history, humans were watching the astronomical phenomenon, reports a team from NASA, Ohio State, and Caltech. The “Fireworks Galaxy” is known for its frequent supernovae. But starting in 2009, one of its stars named N6946-BH1 brightened just a bit – but then had disappeared from the most advanced telescopes by 2015. The team used the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the Large Binocular Telescope, and a variety of other methods to try and get a glimpse of the vanished star, as they describe in the  Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . But there wasn’t even any infrared radiation that marked the spot where the star had been, proving it wasn’t hidden behind a dust cloud or blocked by another object out in space, they said. By process of elimination, they have determined that the star is just no longer there. Although it was 25 times more massive than our sun, it didn’t expl

NASA’s Juno mission, which was started in 2011 and initiated its first orbit last year, allows researchers to view Jupiter in new ways thanks to the probe's extremely elliptical orbit, which travels over the planet's poles and plunges within 5,000km (3,100 miles) of its cloud tops. Now the NASA probe has taken new images of the gas giant's hectic cyclones, which are up to 1,400km (870 miles) across, approximately the length of Japan. A statement by NASA described the planet as 'a complex, gigantic, turbulent world' that is far not the same as researchers previously thought. This image shows Jupiter's South Pole [Jupiter from bottom], as seen by NASA's Juno spacecraft from an altitude of 32,000 miles (52,000 kilometers). Two research papers in the journal Science and 44 research papers in Geophysical Research Letters explain a trove of findings made since Juno started orbiting Jupiter last year. Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest R

A new research has pinpointed a nursery of young stars some 2.4 billion light years away as the cause of strange fast radio bursts detected on Earth.  These fast radio bursts - which each lived just a few milliseconds - come from thick neutron stars just 20 kilometers (12 miles) in size in the constellation Auriga. Originally researchers were puzzled where these bizarre bursts of energy were originating from with some guessing it could be a sign of alien life trying to make contact. Scientists now consider the young stars are 6,200 light years from the center of the small galaxy called FRB 121102. Scientists from the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy in Dwingeloo have used the Hubble Space Telescope to sobserve the small galaxy in detail never seen before. Astronomer Shriharsh Tendulkar of McGill University in Montreal told New Scientist . 'The Hubble observations allow us to get a very sharp image. There is a very bright spot of star formation, and this FRB [fast radio bur

While exploring the lunar surface, China’s Chang’e 3 lander discovered a new type of moon rock, and managed to snap THOUSANDS of high-resolution images of the moon. For the first time ever, you can take a peek at the lunar surface like never before thanks to the sophisticated cameras located onboard the Chang’e 3, one of China’s most advanced lunar landers. The Lunar Mission touched down on the moon in 2013, on the region known as Mare Imbrium –where researchers believe in the distant past, actual water could have existed—making China the third country in the history of mankind to achieve a soft landing on the lunar surface, after the Soviet Union and United States of America. While the mission took place in 2013, China’s National Space Administration released thousands of the high definition images during 2015. The images however, weren’t displayed by western media due to the fact that China is used to release images in a period of one to one and a half years after received them. No

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is planned to be launched next year and astronomers consider that this telescope is their best hope of finding life beyond Earth. The JWST is the successor to the Hubble Telescope and is way much more powerful. The successor will help us to see further into space, as well as more precisely measure the content of water, carbon dioxide and other essential components in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. It will tell researchers more about the size and distance these planets from their host stars, which is very important aspect of searching for earth like planets. As a result, the giant telescope which contains an enormous mirror to gather light, is being considered as the best chance of finding alien life. With a launch planned for next year, astronomers think that it is only a matter of time before alien life is finally discovered. Matt Mountain, director and Webb telescope scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said : ”What w

Here we go again. That misbehaving, mysterious star – the one people want to believe is surrounded by an  alien megastructure  – is dimming again, and the sci-curious on the Twittersphere and  Reddit  has gone veritably crazy. Those with telescopes have trained them on the star, code-named KIC 8462852, hoping to catch a record of its weird, fluctuating spectra. Here’s a little recap for the uninitiated. Back in 2015, astronomers having a gander at this particular star noticed that it was going through enormous dips in its brightness.  This means one of two things, essentially – either something in front of it is blocking the light heading towards Earth, or a bizarre process within the star itself is causing it to temporarily get dimmer, like a small breeze interfering with the light of a candle. Known as  Tabby’s star  – after Dr Tabetha Boyajian, the first author of the original study describing this phenomenon – scientists and plenty of the public have come up with a wide range of hy

Humans have accidentally generated a fence around Earth, and although it might not be an ultramodern force field, it is still damn cool. NASA scientists have revealed that certain radio communications, called VLF (very low frequency), are capable of interrelating with particles in space, stirring them in certain directions. We know we can disturb the space weather around Earth, but this discovery might direct to techniques that we could essentially control it. The study has been issued in Space Science Reviews . Artist's impression of the bubble with the Van Allen Belt. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Genna Duberstein Co-author of the study, Phil Erickson, assistant director at the MIT Haystack Observatory, said in a statement “A number of experiments and observations have figured out that, under the right conditions, radio communications signals in the VLF frequency range can in fact affect the properties of the high-energy radiation environment around the Earth,” This par