Everyday Science

WATER WORLDS  The TRAPPIST-1 system, with seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a dwarf star, has captured the attention of scientists hunting for life outside the solar system. New estimates of the planets’ composition indicates that several are enveloped in water and ice. There’s so much water on some of TRAPPIST-1’s seven Earth-sized planets that any life lurking there might be difficult to detect. New estimates of the makeup of these potentially habitable worlds suggests that two of them are more than half water, by mass, researchers report March 19 in Nature Astronomy. Earth, by comparison, is less than 0.1 percent water. TRAPPIST-1’s planets are so wet that most of the water probably isn’t even liquid, but ice formed under high pressure, says Cayman Unterborn, an exogeologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. That would change the chemistry happening on the planet in a way that could make any signs of life tricky to distinguish from geochemical processes. TRAPPIST...

TOO BIG, TOO SOON  Supermassive black holes that are actively feeding on gas and dust, like the one shown in this artist’s rendition, have been spotted in the early universe — before they should have had time to grow. The existence of supermassive black holes in the early universe has never made much sense to astronomers. Sightings since 2006 have shown that gargantuan monsters with masses of at least a billion suns were already in place when the universe was less than a billion years old – far too early for them to have formed by conventional means. One or two of these old massive objects could be dismissed as freaks, says theoretical astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University. But to date, astronomers have spotted more than 100 supermassive black holes that existed before the universe was 950 million years old. “They’re too numerous to be freaks now,” she says. “You have to have a natural explanation for how these things came to be.” The usual hypotheses are ...

Can anyone claim the red planet or natural resources on asteroids? Business leaders and legal experts say the question has become more than philosophical as a growing number of firms, often backed by capital and technology from Silicon Valley, have set their sights on the resources of outer space asteroids and Mars. In order to avoid conflicts between competing companies and countries over outer space resources, more work needs to be done on Earth to determine who owns commodities taken from celestial bodies, analysts said. “There is a huge debate on whether companies can simply travel to space and extract its resources,” said Barry Kellman, a law professor who studies space governance at DePaul University in Chicago. “There is no way to answer the question until someone does it,” Kellman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. ASTEROID WATER FOR SALE U.S.-based Planetary Resources, a firm backed by Google founder Larry Page and Virgin Group’s Richard Branson, expects to ...

An artist`s rendition of the huge planet NGTS-1b, left, with its neighbouring sun -- a discovery that challenges existing theories on how planets are created. Photo: Yahoo. A "monster" planet, which should in theory not exist, has been discovered orbiting a faint dwarf star far, far away, surprised astronomers said Tuesday. The existence of the gassy giant challenges long-standing theories that such a big planet -- about the size of Jupiter -- cannot be formed around a star so small. The star has a radius and mass about half that of the sun. Theory had predicted that small stars can form rocky planets, "but do not gather enough material together to form Jupiter-sized planets," Britain's Royal Astronomical Society said in a statement. Planets are thought to form as gas and dust left over from massive galactic explosions, and swirling in disks around newborn stars, clump together to form bodies. The planet was discovered by the Next-Generation...

Ross 128b A new extrasolar system planet can be added to a handful of fellow exoplanets which could theoretically support life, the European Southern Observatory said Wednesday. The ESO said it had discovered the planet, Ross 128b, orbiting a star within the constellation of Virgo and it is comparatively ‘close’ at just 11 light years outside the Solar System. One light year is equivalent to 9.46 trillion kilometres (5.85 trillion miles). But in inter-galactic terms that is not so far, says Xavier Bonfils, an astronomer for the French CNRS research centre at the Grenoble Observatory for Sciences of the Universe. “Ross 128b is very close, which will allow us to see it with a telescope such as E-ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope) in construction for 2025,” Bonfils told AFP. Researchers say Ross 128b could potentially harbour life, as it has a similar mass to that of Earth—a multiple of 1.35 -- and “its surface temperature could equally be close to that of Earth”. ...