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Astrochemistry In Action: JWST View Of The Carina Nebula
[ESA] This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month takes us to a fantastical realm within our home galaxy, where piercing starlight and billowing winds sculpt dust clouds into inventive shapes. This scene is from the Carina Nebula, which lies just 7500 light-years away in the constellation Carina (the Keel). Spanning roughly 260…
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Reconstructing Ancient Protein Alphabets: What Can We Truly Infer?
[Trends in Genetics] The canonical amino acid alphabet has remained remarkably stable since life’s early…
Inventories of Rich Carbon-Chain Chemistry in Prestellar and Starless Cores in the Perseus Molecular Cloud
[astro-ph.GA] Carbon-chain molecules serve as an important reservoir of reactive organic matter that will eventually…
Variations in the 3.3 µm Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Feature Across Nearby Galaxies Driven by Metallicity and Radiation Field Spectrum
[astro-ph.GA] We use JWST NIRCam imaging to investigate the 3.3 μm polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH)…
Formation Of Nitriles And Isonitriles By The Heavy-ion Irradiation Of Propionitrile In N2-rich Astrophysical Ices
[astro-ph.EP] Context. Nitriles are key nitrogen-bearing organic molecules in dense clouds, star-forming regions, and nitrogen-rich…
Investigation Of Calcium Dust In The Interstellar Medium
[astro-ph.GA] Calcium is a highly depleted element in the interstellar medium (ISM), however its composition…
Earth As A Potential Source Of Llife For Europa’s Subsurface Ocean
The paper discusses the possibility of dust particles containing living bacteria ejected from Earth reaching Europa and landing on its surface. It is shown that, taking certain factors into account, over a period of 30 − 80 Myr (the estimated age of Europa’s ocean), Jupiter’s moon would have been impacted…
Keep readingDust To Dust: Prospects For Passive Technosignatures As Relics Of ETI
Technological societies are separated in time, not just space — that is the lesson of the Drake equation. Might the best way to seek them be to find technosignatures that persist long after their creators? I present work I and my collaborators have done on the idea of passive technosignatures,…
Keep readingExoplanets, -moons, -comets
Astronomy & Telescopes
Atmospheres, Climate, Weather
Simultaneous Mars-orbit Observations Reveal Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability-driven Bulk Atmospheric Ion Escape
[physics.space-ph] Atmospheric ion escape driven by the solar wind is a key process controlling the long-term loss of the Martian atmosphere. Localized plasma clouds can carry substantial fluxes of planetary ions away from Mars, representing episodes of bulk escape. However, their origin has remained unclear due to the absence of simultaneous upstream measurements. Using joint…
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Hindsight: Similarity-Based Analytics For Mars Rover Drive Retrieval
[cs.HC] While Mars rover operators plan drives across hazardous Martian terrain and diagnose unexpected faults, the necessary information is distributed across separate systems and often…
Segment-level Thermal Sensitivity Analysis For Exo-Earth Coronagraphy With Segmented Space Telescopes
[astro-ph.IM] Direct imaging and characterization of Earth-like planets require ultra-stable wavefronts to achieve a starlight suppression level of 100 parts per trillion (ppt) in the…
IMPRESS: A Planetary Penetrator Network for Astrobiology, Prospecting, and Exploration of Mars
[Astrobiology (Journal)] The International Mars Prospecting Ride-Share System (IMPRESS) is presented here as a scalable, democratized, and low-cost mission architecture for distributed measurements on the…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
New Horizons Finds Evidence Of Recent Liquid On Pluto’s Surface
[NASA] “Pluto never stops surprising us,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator of New Horizons and lead study author from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder,…
SMDET-1: A Nearby Y Dwarf Candidate
[astro-ph.SR] We present the discovery of SMDET-1, a red, fast-moving object (μ≈1.3″/yr) identified in time-resolved unWISE coadds using a pixel-level deep learning methodology called SMDET.…
CHEOPS Photometry From 2024 Reveals A Reversal In The Transit-timing Variations Of AU Mic c
[astro-ph.EP]. We present new CHEOPS transit observations of AU Mic b and AU Mic c obtained between June and September 2024, extending the baseline of…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
Two Origins Of Life
[Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf] How and where did the first forms of life arise? These are the main questions driving research at the Institute of Molecular…
Life Detection In The Martian Subsurface: Advancements In Microbial Metabolic Research Under Mars Laboratory And Field-Analog Conditions Since Viking
[Astrobiology (Journal)] Following the Viking experiments in 1976, many of the original inferences of biological metabolism have been replicated via abiotic mechanisms we now know…
High Solubility Of Water In Post-perovskite And Bridgmanite In The Earth’s Deep Lower Mantle
[physics.geo-ph] Water in the Earth’s mantle induces melting, giving rise to strong chemical heterogeneity, and alters its rheological and transport properties, which are keys to…