A UK-Canadian team of scientists has discovered ancient pockets of water on Earth, which have been isolated deep underground for billions of years and contain abundant chemicals known to support life. Water filtering out of the floor of a deep Ontario mine has been trapped underground for more than a billion years. It bubbles [continue reading]
TAU finds white dwarf stars may hold the key to detecting life on other planets Because it has no source of energy, a dead star — known as a white dwarf — will eventually cool down and fade away. But circumstantial evidence suggests that white dwarfs can still support habitable planets, says [continue reading]
NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-sized planets in the “habitable zone,” the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water. Relative sizes of Kepler habitable zone planets discovered as of April 18, 2013. Left to [continue reading]
April 16, 2013 Titan, Saturn’s largest moon Image Credit: NOAA/NASA/ESA Titan is, with a diameter of 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles), Saturn’s largest moon and the second largest moon in our Solar System (only Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is larger), roughly 50% larger than our own Moon and 80% more massive. Titan orbits Saturn at a distance [continue reading]
The surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa exposes material churned up from inside the moon and also material resulting from matter and energy coming from above. If you want to learn about the deep saltwater ocean beneath this unusual world’s icy shell — as many people do who are interested in possible extraterrestrial life — [continue reading]
March 19, 2013 Jupiter’s icy moon Europa Image Credit: NASA/JPL/DLR Jupiter’s moon Europa is, with just over 3,100 kilometers (1,900 mi) in diameter, slightly smaller than Earth’s Moon. It is the sixth-largest moon of Jupiter, and the smallest of its four Galilean satellites but nonetheless more massive than all known moons in the Solar System [continue reading]