Tag: astronomy

Amino acids found on meteorite that crashed in the Sudan

12:09 am

Dead alien life arrives on Earth! Not really but still exciting anyway: Scientists have found the remains of space-born amino acids — essential to life — in the meteorite that crashed in the Sudan in 2008. Key quote:

“This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided,” said Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit [1,093 degrees Celsius], hot enough that all complex organic molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed, but we found them anyway.”

The discovery is further evidence that the basic elements of life can form in even the most hostile of environments.

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Cassini Spots Potential Ice Volcano on Saturn Moon

3:57 pm

Scientists have used data from Cassini to identify what they think are ice volcanoes on Titan. The two volcanoes, each about 3000 feet high, are located near the equator and appear to resemble the volcanoes on Earth, with a central crater on top of cone-like peak and finger-like flows coming down the sides from the crater. The lava here, however, is not molten rock, but water.

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The last remant of a supernova

9:30 am

Time for some astronomical sightseeing! This image, produced from data taken by both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, shows what astronomers call a supernova remnant. The bubble, located in the Large Magellanic Cloud 160 thousand light years away, is thought to be 23 light years across and expanding about 11 million miles per hour. It is thought that the supernova itself took place around 1600. That we have no record of it is probably because it was only visible in the southern hemisphere, where few records of such events were being kept at that time. More here, including the image using only Hubble data as well as a video animation that is quite stunning.

Supernova remnant

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