Science & Medicine
Here we bring you the latest on all things science from physical science, evolution, astronomy, space, physics, chemistry, and medicine
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Earth-size planet found orbiting nearby star that will outlive the sun by 100 billion years
Sharmila Kuthunur / LIVESCI=NCE
Astronomers have discovered an Earth-size planet that is showered with so much radiation, its atmosphere eroded away long ago, leaving it bare. Life as we know it can’t exist on this blistering world, but astronomers are interested in it for another reason: For the first time, they may be able to study the geology of a planet outside our solar system.
The newfound exoplanet, named SPECULOOS-3 b, is a rocky planet roughly 55 light-years from Earth. It zips around its host star every 17 hours, but days and nights on the planet are endless. Astronomers suspect the planet is tidally locked to its star, like the moon is to Earth. A single dayside always faces the star, while the nightside is locked in eternal darkness.
Telescope observations show that frequent radiation from the exoplanet’s star, a 7 billion-year-old red dwarf about the size of Jupiter, roasts the planet to Venus-like temperatures. So any atmosphere the planet may have had easily escaped into space long ago and left behind an airless, sizzling ball of rock, astronomers reported in the new study, published May 15 in the journal Nature Astronomy. Read more here.
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Cosmic Geode: Hubble Captures the Birth of a Sun-like Star
By NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center – SciTechDaily
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a striking image of a trio of stars, including the variable star HP Tau, in a reflection nebula. These young T Tauri stars, not yet undergoing nuclear fusion, are still shrouded in the remnants of the dust and gas clouds from which they formed, highlighting the early stages of star formation and planetary disk development.
Resembling a glittering cosmic geode, a stunning trio of stars blaze from the hollowed-out cavity of a reflection nebula in this new image captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This triple-star system is composed of the variable star HP Tau, HP Tau G2, and HP Tau G3. HP Tau is known as a T Tauri star, a type of young variable star that hasn’t yet started nuclear fusion but is beginning to evolve into a hydrogen-fueled star similar to our Sun.
T Tauri stars are typically younger than 10 million years old. In comparison, our Sun is around 4.6 billion years old. They are often found still enveloped in the clouds of dust and gas from….Read more here.
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A new look at Ötzi the Iceman’s DNA reveals new ancestry and other surprises
Tina Hesman Sacy /Genetics / ScienceNews
A new look at the Iceman’s DNA reveals that his ancestors weren’t who scientists previously thought.
In 2012, scientists compiled a complete picture of Ötzi’s genome; it suggested that the frozen mummy found melting out of a glacier in the Tyrolean Alps had ancestors from the Caspian steppe (SN: 2/28/12). But something didn’t add up.
The Iceman is about 5,300 years old. Other people with steppe ancestry didn’t appear in the genetic record of central Europe until about 4,900 years ago. Ötzi “is too old to have that type of ancestry,” says archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The mummy “was always an outlier.”
Krause and colleagues put together a new genetic instruction book for the Iceman. The old genome was heavily contaminated with modern people’s DNA, the researchers report August 16 in Cell Genomics. The new analysis reveals that “the steppe ancestry is completely gone.” Read more here.
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Historic Boeing Starliner Launch Delayed Again Due to Helium Leak
By NASA – SciTechDaily
NASA, Boeing, and ULA are preparing for the Boeing Crew Flight Test to the International Space Station, targeting a launch date of May 21. ULA successfully replaced a valve on the Atlas V rocket, while Starliner teams are addressing a helium leak in the service module.
In preparation for NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test to the International Space Station (ISS), teams from NASA, Boeing, and ULA (United Launch Alliance) continue working on the remaining open tasks. To complete additional testing, the teams are now targeting a launch date of no earlier than 4:43 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, May 21.
On May 11, the ULA team successfully replaced a pressure regulation valve on the liquid oxygen tank on the Atlas V rocket’s Centaur upper stage. The team also performed re-pressurization and system purges, and tested the new valve, which performed normally.
Resolving the Starliner Helium Leak... Starliner teams are working to resolve a small helium leak detected in the spacecraft’s service module traced to a flange on a single reaction control system…Read more here.
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