Lifeboat Foundation

Blue straggler stars are the weird grandparents of the galaxy: They should be old, but they act young. Finding and studying these strange stars helps us understand the complicated life cycles of normal, more well-behaved stars.

All stars follow a particular path in life, known as the main sequence. The moment they begin fusing hydrogen in their cores, they maintain a strict relationship between their brightness and temperature. Different stars will have different combinations of brightness and temperature, but they all obey the same relationship. For example, smaller stars, like red dwarfs, will be relatively dim but also cool, with their surfaces turning a characteristic shade of red. Medium stars, like the sun, will be both hotter and brighter, turning white. The largest stars will be both incredibly bright and extremely hot, making them appear blue.

A book entitled “Dinner on Mars” describes how to turn the dry, cold Martian world into a place to grow food for future inhabitants.

Gaseous planets close to their star could see their hydrogen atmospheres evaporate, leaving behind helium that could be detected by the James Webb Space Telescope.

A ring looping around the icy dwarf planet Quaoar is located much farther from its parent body than scientists thought was possible.

The first signs of life emerged on Earth in the form of microbes about four billion years ago. While scientists are still determining exactly when and how these microbes appeared, it’s clear that the emergence of life is intricately intertwined with the chemical and physical characteristics of early Earth.

“It is reasonable to suspect that life could have started differently—or not at all—if the early chemical characteristics of our planet were different,” says Dustin Trail, an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester.

But what was Earth like billions of years ago, and what characteristics may have helped life to form? In a paper published in Science, Trail and Thomas McCollom, a research associate at the University of Colorado Boulder, reveal key information in the quest to find out. The research has important implications not only for discovering the origins of life but also in the search for life on other planets.

To make long-term presence on the Moon viable, we need abundant electrical power. We can make power systems on the Moon directly from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without special substances brought from Earth. We have pioneered the technology and demonstrated all the steps. Our approach, Blue Alchemist, can scale indefinitely, eliminating power as a constraint anywhere on the Moon.

We start by making regolith simulants that are chemically and mineralogically equivalent to lunar regolith, accounting for representative lunar variability in grain size and bulk chemistry. This ensures our starting material is as realistic as possible, and not just a mixture of lunar-relevant oxides. We have developed and qualified an efficient, scalable, and contactless process for melting and moving molten regolith that is robust to natural variations in regolith properties on the Moon.

Using regolith simulants, our reactor produces iron, silicon, and aluminum through molten regolith electrolysis, in which an electrical current separates those elements from the oxygen to which they are bound. Oxygen for propulsion and life support is a byproduct.

The light from the distant Sparkler galaxy was spotted in the James Webb Telescope’s First Deep Field and could teach us how our own Milky Way devoured other galaxies to grow.

The European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft captured a stunning new view of the Red Planet’s complex surface geology.

The new image, taken using the orbiter’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), focuses on the flanks of a vast volcanic plateau called Thaumasia Planum. Deep surface fractures and water-carved valleys stream down the side of this volcanic region, offering clues about Mars’ ancient past.

Some of the hottest spots in the Sun’s atmosphere appear in the telescope’s X-ray view.