Ocean on Jupiter's Moon May Harbour Life

The Europa ocean on Jupiter's icy moon may have the Earth-like balance of chemical energy necessary for life even if the moon lacks volcanic hydrothermal activity, a new study says.

Europa is strongly believed to hide a deep ocean of salty liquid water beneath its icy shell. Whether the Jovian moon has the raw materials and chemical energy in the right proportions to support biology is a topic of intense scientific interest.

 

The answer may hinge on whether Europa has environments where chemicals are matched in the right proportions to power biological process. Life on Earth exploits such niches.

In a new study scientists compared Europa's potential for producing hydrogen and oxygen with that of Earth, through processes that do not directly involve volcanism.

The balance of these two elements is a key indicator of the energy available for life. The study found that the amounts would be comparable in scale; on both worlds, oxygen production is about 10 times higher than hydrogen production. 

The work draws attention to the ways that Europa's rocky interior may be much more complex and possibly Earth-like than people typically think, according to Steve Vance, a planetary scientist at JPL and lead author of the study.

"Mars is within Reach" says German Space Command

According to the German astronaut who has been tapped to become his country's first commander of the International Space Station, humans could set foot on Mars within decades if they wanted to.

Alexander Gerst said the space station offers a unique opportunity to test the technology needed to explore other planets, especially if if its lifetime is extended beyond 2020.

"It is very clear to me that those manned missions to the moon and Mars, human missions, will happen", he told the Associated Press in an interview at the European Space Agency's astronaut training center in Cologne, Germany. "But we need the decision as a society. And once we do the we are ready to go, basically"

According to Gerst, just like the movie The Martian, an astronaut fending for himself on the red planet, will be a realistic glimpse of the not too distant future.

"It shows us what we can possibly reach on a few year's time" he said. "I'm actually quite excited by the fact that us humans, we could fly to Mars and maybe you and I will live to see it."

NASA aims to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s. Astronauts have been living continuously aboard the 250 mile high International Space Station  since 2000. This month, the space station hit the milestone of 100,000 orbits around Earth - the equivalent of 10 round trips to Mars or almost one way to Neptune.

The European Space Agency saw its budget increase almost 20 percent this year to 5.25 billion euros and the agency is on course to active Europe's satellite navigation system Galileo_ a rival to the American GPS, Russia's Glonass and China's Beidou systems -this decade.

Earlier this year, ESA chief Jan Woerner suggested established a village on the mo=oon once the International Space Station reaches the end of its lifetime. There are no concrete plans for this yet, though and experts says the space station hasn't outlived  its usefulness_ over 100 experiments are conducted during each mission to the space station.

Black Holes banish matter into cosmic voids

We live in a universe dominated by unseen matter and on the largest scales, galaxies and everything they contain are concentrated into filaments that stretch around the edge of enormous voids. Thought to be almost empty until now, a group of astronomers now believe these dark holes could contain as much as 20% of the normal matter in the cosmos and that galaxies make up only 1/500th of the volume of of the universe.

 

 Source: Royal Astronomical Society

Can Sun create a Superflare?

It does create a super-flare but its magnetic field is simply so weak. However, Out of all the stars with super-flares that Christoffer Karoff and his team analyzed, around 20% had a magnetic field with a strength similar to or weaker than the Sun's magnetic field. Therefore, even though it is not very likely, it is not impossible that the Sun could produce a super-flare.

If a eruption is to strike Earth today, it would have devastating consequences. Not just for all electronic equipment on Earth, but also for our atmosphere and thus our planer's ability to support life.

Source: Nature Communication

Our Sun Could also be a Superflare Star

Every now and then large sun storms strike the Earth where they cause aurora and in rare cases power cuts. Theses events  are , however, nothing compared to the apocalyptic destruction we would experience if the Earth is struck by a super-flare. An international research team has now shown that this is a scenario we may have to consider a real possibility.

 

Source: Nature Communication

Pluto may harbour alien life, says UK Physicist

Pluto may contain a subsurface ocean warm enough to host life, according to a UK Physicist Brian Cox who also said that humans could be the only complex life in our galaxy. Cox believes the tell-tale ooze of glaciers on Pluto's surface hints at the possibility of a subterranean sea warm enough to host organic chemistry.

"The New Horizons probe showed you that there may well be a subsurface ocean on Pluto, which means - if our understanding of life on Earth is even standing of life on life on Earth is even slightly correct - that you could have living things there" Cox said. The New Horizons spacecraft performed a flyboy of Pluto in July. The spacecraft captured detailed images and other data of Pluto and also of its moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.

It is unlikely, however, that New Horizons would be able to tell for certain whether warm water exists beneath the dwarf planet. Cox said that the most immediate prospect for finding evidence of life was on the moons of other planets closer to home.

Two chaotically tumbling Pluto moons

If you lived on one of Pluto's moons Nix or Hydra, you'd have a hard time setting your alarm clock. That's because you could not know for sure when, or even in which direction, the sun would rise. Comprehensive analysis of data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows that two of Pluto's moons, Nix and Hydra, wobble unpredictably. 

A comprehensive analysis of all available Hubble Space Telescope data shows that two of Pluto's moons, Nix and Hydra, are wobbling unpredictably. Scientists believe the other two small moons, Kerberos and Styx, are likely in a similar situation, pending further study.
"Hubble has provided a new view of Pluto and its moons revealing a cosmic dance with a chaotic rhythm," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. "When the New Horizons spacecraft flies through the Pluto system in July we'll get a chance to see what these moons look like up close and personal."
Why the chaos? Because the moons are embedded inside a dynamically shifting gravitational field caused by the system's two central bodies, Pluto and Charon, whirling about each other. The variable gravitational field induces torques that send the smaller moons tumbling in unpredictable ways. This torque is strengthened by the fact the moons are football shaped rather than spherical.
The surprising results of the Hubble research, conducted by Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and Doug Hamilton of the University of Maryland at College Park, are appearing in the June 4 issue of the British science journal Nature.
"Prior to the Hubble observations nobody appreciated the intricate dynamics of the Pluto system," Showalter said. "Our report provides important new constraints on the sequence of events that led to the formation of the system."
Hubble's monitoring of Pluto's four outer moons has also revealed that three of them, Nix, Styx, and Hydra, are presently locked together in resonance where there is a precise ratio among their orbital periods. "This ties together their motion in a way similar to that of three of Jupiter's large moons," noted Hamilton. "If you were sitting on Nix you would see that Styx orbits Pluto twice for every three orbits made by Hydra."
Hubble provides observational evidence that the satellites are also orbiting chaotically. "However, that does not necessarily mean that the system is on the brink of flying apart," Showalter added. "We need to know a lot more about the system before we can determine its long-term fate."
To the surprise of astronomers, Hubble also found that the moon Kerberos is as dark as a charcoal briquette, while the other satellites are as bright as white sand. It was predicted that pollution by dust blasted off the satellites by meteorite impacts should overcoat all the moons, giving their surfaces a homogeneous look. "This is a very provocative result," Showalter said.
NASA's New Horizons probe, which will fly by the Pluto-Charon system in July 2015, may help settle the question of the asphalt-black moon as well as the other oddities uncovered by Hubble. These new discoveries are being used in the science planning for the New Horizons observations.
The chaos in the Pluto-Charon system offers insights into how planets orbiting a double-star might behave. "We are learning that chaos may be a common trait of binary systems," Hamilton said. "It might even have consequences for life on planets in such systems." NASA's Kepler space observatory has found several planetary systems orbiting double stars.
Clues to the Pluto chaos first came when astronomers measured variations in the light reflected off of the two moons Nix and Hydra. Their brightness changed unpredictably. "The data were confusing; they made no sense at all. We had an inkling something was fishy," Showalter said. His team analyzed Hubble images of Pluto taken during 2005-2012. They compared the unpredictable changes in the moons' reflectivity to dynamical models of spinning bodies in complex gravitational fields.
Virtually all large moons, as well as small moons in close-in orbits, keep one hemisphere facing their parent planet. This means that the satellite's rotation is perfectly matched to the orbital period. This is not coincidental, but the consequence of gravitational tides between moon and planet. (Hyperion, which orbits Saturn, is the only other solar-system example of chaotic rotation; it is due to the combined gravitational tugs of the planet and it largest moon, Titan).
Pluto's moons are hypothesized to have formed by a collision between the dwarf planet and another similar-sized body early in the history of the solar system. The smashup flung material that coalesced into the family of satellites observed around Pluto today. Its large binary companion, Charon, was discovered in 1978. The object is almost half the size of Pluto. Hubble discovered Nix and Hydra in 2005, Kerberos in 2011, and Styx in 2012. These little moons, measuring just tens of miles across, were found as part of a Hubble search for potential hazards to the New Horizons spacecraft flyby.
Pluto and Charon are called a double planet because they orbit about a common center of gravity that is located in the space between the bodies. Some regard the Earth-moon system as a double planet, too, although the center of gravity falls beneath Earth's surface. (Our moon has 1/80th of Earth's mass, whereas Charon has 1/8th of Pluto's mass.)
Researchers say that a combination of monitoring data from Hubble, New Horizons's brief close-up look, and eventually, observations with the James Webb Space Telescope will help settle many mysteries of the Pluto-Charon system. No ground-based telescopes have yet been able to detect the smallest moons.
"Pluto will continue to surprise us when New Horizons flies past it in July," Showalter said. "Our work with the Hubble telescope just gives us a foretaste of what's in store."

This story is taken from Science Daily

Exiled stars explode far from home

Astronomers usually discover supernovae within large galaxies, where a star explodes perhaps once a century. Now a team of astronomers has used the sharp imaging capability of the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm that three exploding stars found in the empty regions between galaxies in a cluster were in fact lonely supernovae unattached to any galaxy at all. They were probably ripped from their host galaxies eons ago and exploded far from home. 

Most supernovae are found inside galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars, one of which might explode per century per galaxy.
These lonely supernovae, however, were found between galaxies in three large clusters of several thousand galaxies each. The stars' nearest neighbors were probably 300 light years away, nearly 100 times farther than our sun's nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light years distant.
Such rare solitary supernovae provide an important clue to what exists in the vast empty spaces between galaxies, and can help astronomers understand how galaxy clusters formed and evolved throughout the history of the universe.
The solitary worlds reminded study leader Melissa Graham, a University of California, Berkeley, postdoctoral fellow and avid sci-fi fan, of the fictional star Thrial, which, in the Iain Banks novel Against a Dark Background, lies a million light years from any other star. One of its inhabited planets, Golter, has a nearly starless night sky.
Any planets around these intracluster stars -- all old and compact stars that exploded in what are called Type Ia supernovae -- were no doubt obliterated by the explosions, but they, like Golter, would have had a night sky depleted of bright stars, Graham said. The density of intracluster stars is about one-millionth what we see from Earth.
"It would have been a fairly dark background indeed," she said, "populated only by the occasional faint and fuzzy blobs of the nearest and brightest cluster galaxies."
Graham and her colleagues -- David Sand of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Dennis Zaritsky of the University of Arizona in Tucson and Chris Pritchet of the University of Victoria in British Columbia -- will report their analysis of the three stars in a paper to be presented June 5, at a conference on supernovae at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Their paper has also been accepted by the Astrophysical Journal, and is available here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.03407.pdf.
Clusters of thousands of galaxies
The new study confirms the discovery between 2008 and 2010 of three apparently hostless supernovae by the Multi-Epoch Nearby Cluster Survey using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The CFHT was unable to rule out a faint galaxy hosting these supernovae. But the sensitivity and resolution of images from the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys are 10 times better and clearly show that the supernovae exploded in empty space, far from any galaxy. They thus belong to a population of solitary stars that exist in most if not all clusters of galaxies, Graham said
While stars and supernovae typically reside in galaxies, galaxies situated in massive clusters experience gravitational forces that wrench away about 15 percent of the stars, according to a recent survey. The clusters have so much mass, though, that the displaced stars remain gravitationally bound within the sparsely populated intracluster regions.
Once dispersed, these lonely stars are too faint to be seen individually unless they explode as supernovae. Graham and her colleagues are searching for bright supernovae in intracluster space as tracers to determine the population of unseen stars. Such information provides clues about the formation and evolution of large scale structures in the universe.
"We have provided the best evidence yet that intracluster stars truly do explode as Type Ia supernovae," Graham said, "and confirmed that hostless supernovae can be used to trace the population of intracluster stars, which is important for extending this technique to more distant clusters."
Graham and her colleagues also found that a fourth exploding star discovered by CFHT appears to be inside a red, round region that could be a small galaxy or a globular cluster. If the supernova is in fact part of a globular cluster, it marks the first time a supernova has been confirmed to explode inside these small, dense clusters of fewer than a million stars. All four supernovae were in galaxy clusters sitting about a billion light years from Earth.
"Since there are far fewer stars in globular clusters, only a small fraction of the supernovae are expected to occur in globular clusters," Graham said. "This might be the first confirmed case, and may indicate that the fraction of stars that explode as supernovae is higher in either low-mass galaxies or globular clusters."
Graham said that most theoretical models for Type Ia supernovae involve a binary star system, so the exploding stars would have had a companion throughout their lifetimes.
"This is no love story, though," she added. "The companion was either a lower-mass white dwarf that eventually got too close and was tragically fragmented into a ring that was cannibalized by the primary star, or a regular star from which the primary white dwarf star stole sips of gas from its outer layers. Either way, this transfer of material caused the primary to become unstably massive and explode as a Type Ia supernova."

This story is ta ken from Science Daily

Hubble revisits tangled NGC 6240

NGC 6240 lies 400 million light-years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent Holder). This galaxy has an elongated shape with branching wisps, loops and tails. This mess of gas, dust and stars bears more than a passing resemblance to a butterfly and a lobster. New research is untangling the reasons for its odd shape. 

NGC 6240 lies 400 million light-years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent Holder). This galaxy has an elongated shape with branching wisps, loops and tails. This mess of gas, dust and stars bears more than a passing resemblance to a butterfly and a lobster.

This bizarrely-shaped galaxy did not begin its life looking like this; its distorted appearance is a result of a galactic merger that occurred when two galaxies drifted too close to one another. This merger sparked bursts of new star formation and triggered many hot young stars to explode as supernovae. A new supernova, not visible in this image was discovered in this galaxy in 2013, named SN 2013dc.

At the center of NGC 6240 an even more interesting phenomenon is taking place. When the two galaxies came together, their central black holes did so, too. There are two supermassive black holes within this jumble, spiraling closer and closer to one another. They are currently only some 3,000 light-years apart, incredibly close given that the galaxy itself spans 300,000 light-years. This proximity secures their fate as they are now too close to escape each other and will soon form a single immense black hole.

This story is taken from Science Daily

Auroras on Mars

One day, when humans go to Mars, they might find that, occasionally, the Red Planet has green skies. NASA's MAVEN spacecraft has detected evidence of widespread auroras in Mars's northern hemisphere. Unlike Earth, Mars does not have a global magnetic field that envelops the entire planet. Instead, Mars has umbrella-shaped magnetic fields that sprout out of the ground like mushrooms, here and there, but mainly in the southern hemisphere. These umbrellas are remnants of an ancient global field that decayed billions of years ago. 

In late Dec. 2014, NASA's MAVEN spacecraft detected evidence of widespread auroras in Mars's northern hemisphere. The "Christmas Lights," as researchers called them, circled the globe and descended so close to the Martian equator that, if the lights had occurred on Earth, they would have been over places like Florida and Texas.
"It really is amazing," says Nick Schneider who leads MAVEN's Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) instrument team at the University of Colorado. "Auroras on Mars appear to be more wide ranging than we ever imagined."
This isn't the first time a spacecraft has detected auroras on Mars. Ten years ago, the European Space Agency's Mars Express found an ultraviolet glow coming from "magnetic umbrellas" in the southern hemisphere.
Unlike Earth, Mars does not have a global magnetic field that envelops the entire planet. Instead, Mars has umbrella-shaped magnetic fields that sprout out of the ground like mushrooms, here and there, but mainly in the southern hemisphere. These umbrellas are remnants of an ancient global field that decayed billions of years ago.
"The canopies of the patchwork umbrellas are where we expect to find Martian auroras," says Schneider. "But MAVEN is seeing them outside these umbrellas, so this is something new."
Auroras occur, both on Earth and Mars, when energetic particles from space rain down on the upper atmosphere. On Earth, these particles are guided toward the poles by our planet's global magnetic field. That's why auroras are seen most often around the Arctic and Antarctic. On Mars, there is no organized planetary magnetic field to guide the particles north and south -- so they can go anywhere.
"The particles seem to precipitate into the atmosphere anywhere they want," says Schneider. "Magnetic fields in the solar wind drape across Mars, even into the atmosphere, and the charged particles just follow those field lines down into the atmosphere."
According to the MAVEN data, solar particles that caused the "Christmas lights" penetrated deeply into the Martian atmosphere -- sparking auroras less than 100 km from the surface. That's lower than auroras on Earth, which range from 100 km to 500 km high.
Like Mars Express 10 years ago, MAVEN has an ultraviolet camera, so it is not seeing the same thing as human eyes. What would a human see?
Schneider isn't certain. "We're still doing the physics," he says, "but we have some educated guesses."
Although the Martian atmosphere is primarily CO₂, it does contain some oxygen--and that is key to the color of the auroras. Excited oxygen atoms in the Martian atmosphere would likely produce green light.
"A diffuse green glow seems quite possible in the Mars sky, at least when the Sun is throwing off energetic particles," says Schneider.
MAVEN arrived at Mars in Sept. 2014 on a mission to investigate a planetary mystery: Billions of years ago, Mars was blanketed by layer of air massive enough to warm the planet and allow liquid water to flow on its surface. Life could have thrived in such an environment. Today, however, only a tiny fraction of that ancient air remains, leaving Mars a desiccated wasteland.
Where did the Martian atmosphere go? A favorite theory is solar wind erosion. Because Mars no longer has a global magnetic field to protect it, solar wind might strip away material from the upper layers of the atmosphere. Watching the auroras could help MAVEN mission scientists learn more about this process.
"Plus," says Schneider, who is looking forward to future data, "I just love auroras."

This story is taken from Science Daily

Supernovas help 'clean' galaxies

Astronomers have found that the black holes located at the cores of galaxies launch fountains of charged particles, which can stir up gas throughout the galaxy and temporarily interrupt star formation. But unless something intervenes, the gas will eventually cool and start forming stars again.

Recent research, led by Michigan State University astronomers, finds that the black holes located at the cores of galaxies launch fountains of charged particles, which can stir up gas throughout the galaxy and temporarily interrupt star formation.
But unless something intervenes, the gas will eventually cool and start forming stars again.
One mega-outburst from the black hole, though, could heat the gas surrounding the galaxy enough to let supernovas take over and mop up the mess. A celestial cleaning partnership might help astronomers understand why some massive galaxies stopped forming stars billions of years ago.
"Our previous research had shown that black-hole outbursts can limit star formation in massive galaxies, but they can't completely shut it off," said team leader Mark Voit, MSU professor of physics and astronomy in the College of Natural Science. "Something else needs to keep sweeping out the gas that dying stars continually dump into a galaxy, and supernova sweeping appears to work perfectly for that."
Other members of the research team are Megan Donahue, MSU professor of physics and astronomy; Brian O'Shea, MSU associate professor of physics and astronomy; Greg Bryan, Columbia University professor of astronomy; Ming Sun, University of Alabama in Huntsville assistant professor of physics; and Norbert Werner, Stanford University research associate.

This story is taken from Science Daily

Most luminous galaxy in universe discovered

A remote galaxy shining brightly with infrared light equal to more than 300 trillion suns has been discovered using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The galaxy, which belongs to a new class of objects recently discovered by WISE -- nicknamed extremely luminous infrared galaxies, or ELIRGs -- is the most luminous galaxy found to date.

"We are looking at a very intense phase of galaxy evolution," said Chao-Wei Tsai of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, lead author of a new report appearing in the 22 May issue of The Astrophysical Journal. "This dazzling light may be from the main growth spurt in the size of the galaxy's black hole"
Professor Andrew Blain, from the University of Leicester's Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been involved with WISE since its inception in 2001, and has been responsible for examining and validating the data from the WISE telescope. He is a co-author of the new report into this discovery.
The galaxy, known as WISE J224607.57-052635.0, may have a behemoth black hole at its belly, gorging itself on gas.
Supermassive black holes grow by drawing gas and matter into a disk around them. The disk heats up to beyond-sizzling temperatures of millions of degrees, blasting out high-energy, visible, ultraviolet, and X-ray light. The light is blocked by surrounding cocoons of dust. As the dust heats up, it radiates infrared light.
Immense black holes are common at the cores of galaxies, but finding one this big so far back in the cosmos is rare. Because light from the galaxy hosting the black hole has traveled 12.5 billion years to reach us, astronomers are seeing the object as it was in the past. The black hole was already billions of times the mass of our sun when our universe was only a tenth of its present age of 13.8 billion years.
"The massive black holes in ELIRGs could be gorging themselves on more matter for a longer period of time," said Professor Blain. "It's like winning a hot-dog-eating contest lasting hundreds of millions of years."
More research is needed to solve this puzzle of these dazzlingly luminous galaxies. The team has plans to better determine the masses of the central black holes. Knowing these objects' true hefts will help reveal their history, as well as that of other galaxies in this very crucial and frenzied chapter of our cosmos.
WISE has been finding hundreds of other, similar oddball galaxies from infrared images of the entire sky it took in 2010. By viewing the whole sky with more sensitivity than ever before, WISE has been able to catch rare cosmic specimens that might have been missed otherwise.
The new study reports a total of 20 new ELIRGs, including the most luminous galaxy found to date. These galaxies, which are even more luminous than the ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) reported before, were not found earlier because of their distance, and because dust converts their powerful visible light into an incredible outpouring of infrared light.
"We found in a related study with WISE that as many as half of the most luminous galaxies only show up well in infrared light," said Tsai.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages, and operates, WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The spacecraft was put into hibernation mode in 2011 after it scanned the entire sky twice, completing its main objectives. In September 2013, WISE was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission to assist NASA's efforts to identify potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.

This story is taken from Science Daily

What our solar system looked like as a ‘toddler’

Astronomers have identified a young planetary system which may aid in understanding how our own solar system formed and developed billions of years ago.  

Using the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) at the Gemini South telescope in Chile, the researchers identified a disc-shaped bright ring of dust around a star only slightly more massive than the sun, located 360 light years away in the Centaurus constellation. The disc is located between about 37 and 55 Astronomical Units (3.4 -- 5.1 billion miles) from its host star, which is almost the same distance as the solar system's Kuiper Belt is from the sun. The brightness of the disc, which is due to the starlight reflected by it, is also consistent with a wide range of dust compositions including the silicates and ice present in the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt lies just beyond Neptune, and contains thousands of small icy bodies left over from the formation of the solar system more than four billion years ago. These objects range in size from specks of debris dust, all the way up to moon-sized objects like Pluto -- which used to be classified as a planet, but has now been reclassified as a dwarf planet.

The star observed in this new study is a member of the massive 10-20 million year-old Scorpius-Centaurus OB association, a region similar to that in which the sun was formed. The disc is not perfectly centred on the star, which is strong indication that it was likely sculpted by one or more unseen planets. By using models of how planets shape a debris disc, the team found that 'eccentric' versions of the giant planets in the outer solar system could explain the observed properties of the ring.

"It's almost like looking at the outer solar system when it was a toddler," said principal investigator Thayne Currie, an astronomer at the Subaru Observatory in Hawaii.

The current theory on the formation of the solar system holds that it originated within a giant molecular cloud of hydrogen, in which clumps of denser material formed. One of these clumps, rotating and collapsing under its own gravitation, formed a flattened spinning disc known as the solar nebula. The sun formed at the hot and dense centre of this disc, while the planets grew by accretion in the cooler outer regions. The Kuiper Belt is believed to be made up of the remnants of this process, so there is a possibility that once the new system develops, it may look remarkably similar to our solar system.

"To be able to directly image planetary birth environments around other stars at orbital distances comparable to the solar system is a major advancement," said Dr Nikku Madhusudhan of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, one of the paper's co-authors. "Our discovery of a near-twin of the Kuiper Belt provides direct evidence that the planetary birth environment of the solar system may not be uncommon."

This is the first discovery with the new cutting-edge Gemini instrument. "In just one of our many 50-second exposures we could see what previous instruments failed to see in more than 50 minutes," said Currie.

The star, going by the designation HD 115600, was the first object the research team looked at. "Over the next few years, I'm optimistic that GPI will reveal many more debris discs and young planets. Who knows what strange, new worlds we will find," Currie added

This story is taken from Science Daily

One-of-a-kind star discovered, nicknamed 'Nasty'

Astronomers have spent decades trying to determine the oddball behavior of an aging star nicknamed "Nasty 1" residing in our Milky Way galaxy. Looking at the star using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers had expected to see a bipolar outflow of twin lobes of gas from the star. The astronomers were surprised, however, to find a pancake-shaped disk of gas encircling the star. The vast disk is nearly 1,000 times the diameter of our solar system.

First discovered several decades ago, Nasty 1 was identified as a Wolf-Rayet star, a rapidly evolving star that is much more massive than our sun. The star loses its hydrogen-filled outer layers quickly, exposing its super-hot and extremely bright helium-burning core.
But Nasty 1 doesn't look like a typical Wolf-Rayet star. The astronomers using Hubble had expected to see twin lobes of gas flowing from opposite sides of the star, perhaps similar to those emanating from the massive star Eta Carinae, which is a Wolf-Rayet candidate. Instead, Hubble revealed a pancake-shaped disk of gas encircling the star. The vast disk is nearly 2 trillion miles wide, and may have formed from an unseen companion star that snacked on the outer envelope of the newly formed Wolf-Rayet. Based on current estimates, the nebula surrounding the stars is just a few thousand years old, and as close as 3,000 light-years from Earth.
"We were excited to see this disk-like structure because it may be evidence for a Wolf-Rayet star forming from a binary interaction," said study leader Jon Mauerhan of the University of California, Berkeley. "There are very few examples in the galaxy of this process in action because this phase is short-lived, perhaps lasting only a hundred thousand years, while the timescale over which a resulting disk is visible could be only ten thousand years or less."
According to the team's scenario, a massive star evolves very quickly, and as it begins to run out of hydrogen, it swells up. Its outer hydrogen envelope becomes more loosely bound and vulnerable to gravitational stripping, or a type of stellar cannibalism, by the nearby companion star. In that process, the more compact star winds up gaining mass, and the original massive star loses its hydrogen envelope, exposing its helium core to become a Wolf-Rayet star.
Another way Wolf-Rayet stars are said to form is when a massive star ejects its own hydrogen envelope in a strong stellar wind streaming with charged particles. The binary interaction model where a companion star is present is gaining traction because astronomers realize that at least 70 percent of massive stars are members of double-star systems. Direct mass loss alone also cannot account for the number of Wolf-Rayet stars relative to other less-evolved massive stars in the galaxy.
"We're finding that it is hard to form all the Wolf-Rayet stars we observe by the traditional wind mechanism, because mass loss isn't as strong as we used to think," said Nathan Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who is a co-author on the new NaSt1 paper. "Mass exchange in binary systems seems to be vital to account for Wolf-Rayet stars and the supernovae they make, and catching binary stars in this short-lived phase will help us understand this process."
But the mass-transfer process in mammoth binary systems isn't always efficient. Some of the stripped matter can spill out during the dynamical gravitational tussle between the stars, creating a disk around the binary.
"That's what we think is happening in Nasty 1," Mauerhan said. "We think there is a Wolf-Rayet star buried inside the nebula, and we think the nebula is being created by this mass-transfer process. So this type of sloppy stellar cannibalism actually makes Nasty 1 a rather fitting nickname."
The star's catalog name, NaSt1, is derived from the first two letters of each of the two astronomers who discovered it in 1963, Jason Nassau and Charles Stephenson.
Viewing the Nasty 1 system hasn't been easy. The system is so heavily cloaked in gas and dust, it blocks even Hubble's view of the stars. So Mauerhan's team cannot measure the mass of each star, the distance between them, or the amount of material spilling onto the companion star.
Previous observations of Nasty 1 have provided some information on the gas in the disk. The material, for example, is travelling about 22,000 miles per hour in the outer nebula, slower than similar stars. The comparatively slow speed indicates that the star expelled its material through a less violent event than Eta Carinae's explosive outbursts, where the gas is travelling hundreds of thousands of miles per hour.
Nasty 1 may also be shedding the material sporadically. Past studies in infrared light have shown evidence for a compact pocket of hot dust very close to the central stars. Recent observations by Mauerhan and colleagues at the University of Arizona, using the Magellan telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, have resolved a larger pocket of cooler dust that may be indirectly scattering the light from the central stars. The presence of warm dust implies that it formed very recently, perhaps in spurts, as chemically enriched material from the two stellar winds collides at different points, mixes, flows away, and cools. Sporadic changes in the wind strength or the rate the companion star strips the main star's hydrogen envelope might also explain the clumpy structure and gaps seen farther out in the disk.
To measure the hypersonic winds from each star, the astronomers turned to NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The observations revealed scorching hot plasma, indicating that the winds from both stars are indeed colliding, creating high-energy shocks that glow in X-rays. These results are consistent with what astronomers have observed from other Wolf-Rayet systems.
The chaotic mass-transfer activity will end when the Wolf-Rayet star runs out of material. Eventually, the gas in the disk will dissipate, providing a clear view of the binary system.
"What evolutionary path the star will take is uncertain, but it will definitely not be boring," said Mauerhan. "Nasty 1 could evolve into another Eta Carinae-type system. To make that transformation, the mass-gaining companion star could experience a giant eruption because of some instability related to the acquiring of matter from the newly formed Wolf-Rayet. Or, the Wolf-Rayet could explode as a supernova. A stellar merger is another potential outcome, depending on the orbital evolution of the system. The future could be full of all kinds of exotic possibilities depending on whether it blows up or how long the mass transfer occurs, and how long it lives after the mass transfer ceases."
The team's results will appear May 21 in the online edition of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

This story is taken from Science Daily

Is there life out there? Distant moons may provide the answer

Researchers who have modeled planetary systems far beyond our own solar system have found that massive moons larger than Mars might be the best bet in the search for life beyond Earth.

McMaster researchers who have modelled planetary systems far beyond our own solar system have found that massive moons larger than Mars might be the best bet.
Using data from our solar system and observations of huge planets far beyond the visual range of any telescope, astrophysicists René Heller and Ralph Pudritz have shown that some moons of those planets could be habitable.
Their findings, presented in two papers in the journals Astronomy and Astrophysics and The Astrophysical Journal, suggest that some moons of exoplanets -- planets beyond our solar system -- are the right size, in the right position and have sufficient water to support life.
"We could be just a few decades from proving if there is life elsewhere," says Heller, a post-doctoral fellow at McMaster's Origins Institute who worked with Pudritz, a professor of physics and astronomy and director of the Origins Institute. "For all this time, we have been looking on other planets, when the answer could be on a moon."
Exoplanets are being counted in the thousands since the development of new, non-visual methods that allow scientists to prove their existence by measuring light patterns from sun-like stars that dim slightly as the planets pass in front of them in orbit.
Many planets outside the solar system are even more massive than Jupiter, and they orbit their Sun-like stars at an Earth-like distance, but these faraway super-Jupiters are effectively giant gas balls that cannot support life because they lack solid surfaces. Their moons, though, might have the right conditions for liquid surface water and therefore for life to emerge and evolve.
While recent research has focused on exoplanets, the McMaster authors are eager to study the moons of those giant Jupiter-like planets, which they believe to have migrated into more temperate ranges of distant stars, towing watery moons in their orbits.
Closer to home, Heller and Pudritz modelled the early life of Jupiter, revealing a pattern of ice distribution on Jupiter's moons that led them to predict the formation of moons around the super-Jupiters of other solar systems. Those moons could be twice as massive as Mars.
No moon around an exoplanet, a so-called exomoon, has been discovered as of today, but they are certainly there, Heller says. With about 4,000 exoplanets known to exist so far, and with increasing technological capabilities, an exomoon discovery is now looming on the horizon.
If these giant moons around giant planets exist, they might already be present in the available data of NASA's Kepler space telescope, or they could be detectable with the European Space Agency's upcoming PLATO space mission and European Southern Observatory's ground-based European Extremely Large Telescope.

This story is taken from Science Daily

Galaxy’s snacking habits revealed

Astronomers have caught a greedy galaxy gobbling on its neighbors and leaving crumbs of evidence about its dietary past.

Galaxies grow by churning loose gas from their surroundings into new stars, or by swallowing neighbouring galaxies whole. However, they normally leave very few traces of their cannibalistic habits.
A study published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society not only reveals a spiral galaxy devouring a nearby compact dwarf galaxy, but shows evidence of its past galactic snacks in unprecedented detail.
Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) and Macquarie University astrophysicist, Ángel R. López-Sánchez, and his collaborators have been studying the galaxy NGC 1512 to see if its chemical story matches its physical appearance.
The team of researchers used the unique capabilities of the 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT), near Coonabarabran, New South Wales, to measure the level of chemical enrichment in the gas across the entire face of NGC 1512.
Chemical enrichment occurs when stars churn the hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang into heavier elements through nuclear reactions at their cores.
These new elements are released back into space when the stars die, enriching the surrounding gas with chemicals like oxygen, which the team measured.
"We were expecting to find fresh gas or gas enriched at the same level as that of the galaxy being consumed, but were surprised to find the gases were actually the remnants of galaxies swallowed earlier," Dr López-Sánchez said.
"The diffuse gas in the outer regions of NGC 1512 is not the pristine gas created in the Big Bang but is gas that has already been processed by previous generations of stars."
CSIRO's Australia Telescope Compact Array, a powerful 6-km diameter radio interferometer located in eastern Australia, was used to detect large amounts of cold hydrogen gas that extends way beyond the stellar disk of the spiral galaxy NGC 1512.
"The dense pockets of hydrogen gas in the outer disk of NGC 1512 accurately pin-point regions of active star formation," said CSIRO's Dr Baerbel Koribalski, a member of the research collaboration.
When this finding was examined in combination with radio and ultraviolet observations the scientists concluded that the rich gas being processed into new stars did not come from the inner regions of the galaxy either. Instead, the gas was likely absorbed by the galaxy over its lifetime as NGC 1512 accreted other, smaller galaxies around it.
Dr Tobias Westmeir, from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Perth, said that while galaxy cannibalism has been known for many years, this is the first time that it has been observed in such fine detail.
"By using observations from both ground and space based telescopes we were able to piece together a detailed history for this galaxy and better understand how interactions and mergers with other galaxies have affected its evolution and the rate at which it formed stars," he said.
The team's successful and novel approach to investigating how galaxies grow is being used in a new program to further refine the best models of galaxy evolution.
For this work the astronomers used spectroscopic data from the AAT at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia to measure the chemical distribution around the galaxies. They identified the diffuse gas around the dual galaxy system using Australian Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) radio observations. In addition, they identified regions of new star formation with data from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) orbiting space telescope.
"The unique combination of these data provide a very powerful tool to disentangle the nature and evolution of galaxies," said Dr López-Sánchez.
"We will observe several more galaxies using the same proven techniques to improve our understanding of the past behaviour of galaxies in the local Universe."

This story is taken from Science Daily

Shock Collision Inside Black Hole Jet

Astronomers have discovered for the first time a rear-end collision between two high-speed knots of ejected matter from a supermassive black hole. This discovery was made while piecing together a time-lapse movie of a plasma jet blasted from a supermassive black hole inside galaxy 3C 264, located 260 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo. 

The finding offers new insights into the behavior of "light-saber-like" jets that are so energized that they appear to zoom out of black holes at speeds several times the speed of light. This "superluminal" motion is an optical illusion due to the very fast real speed of the plasma, which is close to the universal maximum of the speed of light.
Such extragalactic jets are not well understood. They appear to transport energetic plasma in a confined beam from the active nucleus of the host galaxy. The new analysis suggests that shocks produced by collisions within the jet further accelerate particles and brighten the regions of colliding material.
The video of the jet was assembled with two decades' worth of NASA Hubble Space Telescope images of the elliptical galaxy NGC 3862, the sixth brightest galaxy and one of only a few active galaxies with jets seen in visible light. The jet was discovered in optical light by Hubble in 1992. NGC 3862 is in a rich cluster of galaxies known as Abell 1367, in the constellation Leo.
The jet from NGC 3862 has a string-of-pearls structure of glowing knots of material. Taking advantage of Hubble's sharp resolution and long-term optical stability, Eileen Meyer of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, matched archival Hubble images with a new, deep image taken in 2014, to better understand jet motions. Meyer was surprised to see a fast knot with an apparent speed of seven times the speed of light catch up with the end of a slower moving, but still superluminal, knot along the string.
The resulting "shock collision" caused the merging blobs to brighten significantly.
"Something like this has never been seen before in an extragalactic jet," said Meyer. As the knots continue merging they will brighten further in the coming decades. "This will allow us a very rare opportunity to see how the kinetic energy of the collision is dissipated into radiation."
It's not uncommon to see knots of material in jets ejected from gravitationally compact objects, but it is rare that motions have been observed with optical telescopes, and so far out from the black hole, thousands of light-years away. In addition to black holes, newly forming stars eject narrowly collimated streamers of gas that have a knotty structure. One theory is that material falling onto the central object is superheated and ejected along the object's spin axis. Powerful magnetic fields constrain the material into a narrow jet. If the flow of the infalling material is not smooth, blobs are ejected like a string of cannon balls rather than a steady hose-like flow.
Whatever the mechanism, the fast-moving knot will burrow its way out into intergalactic space. A knot launched later, behind the first one, may have less drag from the shoveled-out interstellar medium and catch up to the earlier knot, rear-ending it in a shock collision.
Beyond the collision, which will play out over the next few decades, this discovery marks only the second case of superluminal motion measured at hundreds to thousands of light-years from the black hole where the jet was launched. This indicates that the jets are still very, very close to the speed of light even on distances that start to rival the scale of the host galaxy. These measurements can give insights into how much energy jets carry out into their host galaxy and beyond, which is important for understanding how galaxies evolve as the universe ages.
Meyer is currently making a Hubble-image video of two more jets in the nearby universe, to look for similar fast motions. She notes that these kinds of studies are only possible because of the long operating lifetime of Hubble, which has now been looking at some of these jets for over 20 years.
Extragalactic jets have been detected at X-ray and radio wavelengths in many active galaxies powered by central black holes, but only a few have been seen in optical light. Astronomers do not yet understand why some jets are seen in visible light and others are not.
Meyer's results are being reported in the May 28 issue of the journal Nature.

This story is taken from Science Daily

Astronomy: Link between mergers and supermassive black holes with relativistic jets

In the most extensive survey of its kind ever conducted, a team of scientists have found an unambiguous link between the presence of supermassive black holes that power high-speed, radio-signal-emitting jets and the merger history of their host galaxies. The results lend significant weight to the case for jets being the result of merging black holes.

A team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) have conducted a large survey to investigate the relationship between galaxies that have undergone mergers and the activity of the supermassive black holes at their cores.
The team studied a large selection of galaxies with extremely luminous centres -- known as active galactic nuclei (AGNs) -- thought to be the result of large quantities of heated matter circling around and being consumed by a supermassive black hole. Whilst most galaxies are thought to host a supermassive black hole, only a small percentage of them are this luminous and fewer still go one step further and form what are known as relativistic jets [1]. The two high-speed jets of plasma move almost with the speed of light and stream out in opposite directions at right angles to the disc of matter surrounding the black hole, extending thousands of light-years into space. The hot material within the jets is also the origin of radio waves.
It is these jets that Marco Chiaberge from the Space Telescope Science Institute, USA (also affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, USA and INAF-IRA, Italy) and his team hoped to confirm were the result of galactic mergers [2].
The team inspected five categories of galaxies for visible signs of recent or ongoing mergers -- two types of galaxies with jets, two types of galaxies that had luminous cores but no jets, and a set of regular inactive galaxies [3].
"The galaxies that host these relativistic jets give out large amounts of radiation at radio wavelengths," explains Marco. "By using Hubble's WFC3 camera we found that almost all of the galaxies with large amounts of radio emission, implying the presence of jets, were associated with mergers. However, it was not only the galaxies containing jets that showed evidence of mergers!" [4].
"We found that most merger events in themselves do not actually result in the creation of AGNs with powerful radio emission," added co-author Roberto Gilli from Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna, Italy. "About 40% of the other galaxies we looked at had also experienced a merger and yet had failed to produce the spectacular radio emissions and jets of their counterparts."
Although it is now clear that a galactic merger is almost certainly necessary for a galaxy to host a supermassive black hole with relativistic jets, the team deduce that there must be additional conditions which need to be met. They speculate that the collision of one galaxy with another produces a supermassive black hole with jets when the central black hole is spinning faster -- possibly as a result of meeting another black hole of a similar mass -- as the excess energy extracted from the black hole's rotation would power the jets.
"There are two ways in which mergers are likely to affect the central black hole. The first would be an increase in the amount of gas being driven towards the galaxy's centre, adding mass to both the black hole and the disc of matter around it," explains Colin Norman, co-author of the paper. "But this process should affect black holes in all merging galaxies, and yet not all merging galaxies with black holes end up with jets, so it is not enough to explain how these jets come about. The other possibility is that a merger between two massive galaxies causes two black holes of a similar mass to also merge. It could be that a particular breed of merger between two black holes produces a single spinning supermassive black hole, accounting for the production of jets."
Future observations using both Hubble and ESO's Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) are needed to expand the survey set even further and continue to shed light on these complex and powerful processes.
Notes
[1] Relativistic jets travel at close to the speed of light, making them one of the fastest astronomical objects known.
[2] The new observations used in this research were taken in collaboration with the 3CR-HST team. This international team of astronomers is currently led by Marco Chiaberge and has conducted a series of surveys of radio galaxies and quasars from the 3CR catalogue using the Hubble Space Telescope.
[3] The team compared their observations with the swathes of archival data from Hubble. They directly surveyed twelve very distant radio galaxies and compared the results with data from a large number of galaxies observed during other observing programmes.
[4] Other studies had shown a strong relationship between the merger history of a galaxy and the high levels of radiation at radio wavelengths that suggests the presence of relativistic jets lurking at the galaxy's centre. However, this survey is much more extensive, and the results very clear, meaning it can now be said with almost certainty that radio-loud AGNs, that is, galaxies with relativistic jets, are the result of galactic mergers.

This story is taken from Science Daily

Big Bang aftermath: Ancient stars from birth of the universe

Astronomers have discovered three "cosmic Methusalems" from the earliest years of the universe. These unusual stars are about 13 billion years old and experts assign them to the first generations of stars after the "dark ages." The chemical qualities of these extremely rare stellar bodies enable new insights into the events that must have led to the origins of the stars. The first stars have been assumed to be high-mass and to shine especially brightly. However, the latest observations point to hitherto unknown phenomena in the young universe, allowing for the emergence of much smaller stars. 

The universe emerged approximately 13.8 billion years ago through the big bang. The initially extremely hot gas of the "explosion cloud" expanded and grew colder and colder. As the cosmic expanses were completely empty of stars at the time, scientists talk of the "dark ages" of the universe. About 400 million years after the big bang, the first stars formed out of the gases created by the explosion. Due to the chemical composition of the initial gases -- mainly hydrogen, helium and traces of lithium -- the stars' mass must have been 10 to 100 times greater than that of the sun, and therefore they must have emitted an extremely brilliant light. They rapidly exhausted their nuclear fuel and so these stars only shone for a few million years. They disintegrated in gigantic explosions, during which heavy chemical elements were released and "recovered" by subsequent stellar generations. An exact chemical investigation of this second generation of stars can enable conclusions to be drawn regarding the properties of the very first stars.
The three original stars were discovered thanks to observations at the Paris observatory by a team of astronomers led by Dr. Piercarlo Bonifacio. Apart from hydrogen and helium they contain only extremely small quantities of other chemical elements, these include a striking amount of carbon. Astronomer Dr. Paolo Molaro from the Trieste observatory therefore suspects that they belong to a special -- completely new -- class of original stars. The programme at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile to observe such objects was initiated by Dr. Elisabetta Caffau during her time as Gliese Fellow of Heidelberg University at the Königstuhl Observatory. In order to be able to determine the extremely slight element frequencies with great accuracy, scientists use computer simulations of star atmospheres. These models are developed by Dr. Hans-Günter Ludwig, a researcher at the Königstuhl Observatory.
Events contributing to the formation of the first stars in the universe are being explored at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics by the Star Formation Group led by Prof. Dr. Ralf Klessen. He reports that carbon played a major role in the young universe as a "coolant" contributing to the contraction of interstellar gas into a star. The better the cooling, the smaller the stars that can form. Yet even with carbon the first stars should still have had at least ten times more mass than the newly discovered candidates. "Probably interstellar dust was the coolant contributing to the formation of these low-mass stars. We are now going to examine that in detail," says Prof. Klessen.
The current discoveries allow a fascinating new insight into the events surrounding the emergence of the first stars. Accordingly, these stars must not have arisen in isolation but in groups, Prof. Klessen underlines. The high-mass stars exploded after only a few million years, but far less violently than had been assumed. The Heidelberg scientist explains: "Only then could the lighter elements such as carbon or oxygen be projected far enough into the cosmos to be of use to the new stars, which have a lower mass but a longer life." However, there is another puzzling question. The three newly discovered stars display no trace of lithium, although this chemical element is also contained in the original gas. For Dr. Marco Limongi from the Rome observatory, which is also part of the international research team, this is another mystery waiting to be elucidated.

This story is taken from Science Daily

Supernova ignition surprises scientists

Scientists have captured the early death throes of supernovae for the first time and found that the universe's benchmark explosions are much more varied than expected.The scientists used the Kepler space telescope to photograph three type 1a supernovae in the earliest stages of ignition. They then tracked the explosions in detail to full brightness around three weeks later, and the subsequent decline over the next few months. 

The scientists used the Kepler space telescope to photograph three type 1a supernovae in the earliest stages of ignition. They then tracked the explosions in detail to full brightness around three weeks later, and the subsequent decline over the next few months.
They found the initial stages of a supernova explosion did not fit with the existing theories.
"The stars all blow up uniquely. It doesn't make sense," said Dr Brad Tucker from The Australian National University (ANU).
"It's particularly weird for these supernovae because even though their initial shockwaves are very different, they end up doing the same thing."
Before this study, the earliest type 1a supernovae had been glimpsed was more than 2.5 hours after ignition, after which the explosions all followed an identical pattern.
This led astronomers to theorise that supernovae, the brilliant explosions of dying stars, all occurred through an identical process.
Astronomers had thought supernovae all happened when a dense star steadily sucked in material from a large nearby neighbour until it became so dense that carbon in the star's core ignited.
"Somewhat to our surprise the results suggest an alternative hypothesis, that a violent collision between two smallish white dwarf stars sets off the explosion," said lead researcher Dr Robert Olling, from the University of Maryland in the United States.
At the peak of their brightness, supernovae are brighter than the billions of stars in their galaxy. Because of their brightness, astronomers have been able to use them to calculate distances to distant galaxies.
Measurements of distant supernovae led to the discovery that some unknown force, now called dark energy, is causing the accelerated expansion of the universe. Brian Schmidt from the ANU, Saul Perlmutter (Berkeley) and Adam Reiss (Johns Hopkins) were awarded the Nobel prize in 2011 for this discovery.
Dr Tucker said the new results did not undermine the discovery of dark energy.
"The accelerating universe will not now go away -- they will not have to give back their Nobel prizes," he said.
"The new results will actually help us to better understand the physics of supernovae, and figure out what is this dark energy that is dominating the universe."

This story is taken from Science daily