Philip Plait's Blog, page 2

Perseverance rover reveals Martian lakebed is surprisingly volcanic

Since it landed on Mars in February 2021, the rover Perseverance has been exploring Jezero Crater, a 50-kilometer-wide impact feature. The mission’s purpose is to look for evidence that Mars once had or maybe still has areas that can support life. 

A new way to find old impact craters: Look at the burned plants

This is maybe just a tiny bit morbid but also cool science: A team of geologists and Earth scientists have figured out a new way to identify ancient impact craters: By the way they burned everything around them*.

Two super-Earths found around a tiny red dwarf star — with one in the habitable zone

Very cool exoplanet news, literally: Two super-Earth planets have been found around a red dwarf star, and one of them is at the right distance from its star to — possibly —be reasonably temperate. 

The infrared heart of the Tarantula

New JWST images just dropped, and seriously, these may be the most beautiful we’ve seen yet.

A nearby super-Earth may be a water world

A newly discovered nearby exoplanet has turned out to be an interesting one indeed: Not only is it a relatively rare kind of super-Earth, it may also be a water world, covered in a deep ocean!

Maybe. But further observations, including with JWST, could answer a lot of questions.

What reionized the Universe, and when?

When did the Universe first become transparent? 

It’s a weird question, but an important one. The Universe started off opaque, but became transparent some time after, and remains that way even today. It’s literally why we can see distant objects in the sky, and in a more existential sense that moment of cosmic transparency affected how galaxies behaved, how stars formed, and more. We’re here because of it, and it has profound implications for objects we like to study, so answering the question ...

JWST takes its first direct image of an exoplanet

JWST has observed its first exoplanet, getting direct images of a super-Jupiter across multiple wavelengths, and showing the promise the huge space observatory has for exoplanet science.

The future history of the Sun

Imagine you knew nothing of the human species. I hand you a photo of a child, say 8 years old. What can you say about that child’s future, biologically? 

Not much. You can maybe measure their height, look at their skin and hair color and shape, the lengths of fingers and arms and such… basically make physical measurements and observations but there’s not much of a conclusion you can draw about their future. You lack knowledge of their past and importantly their context; you’ve only seen this on...

Mars InSight finds no ice to a depth of 300 meters below the surface

We talk a lot about Mars being dry, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have water: It means there’s no liquid water to be found. Instead, it’s in the form of ice. 

Black hole delivery pipeline may feed a nearby galaxy

Astronomers have found what looks like a delivery system for a beefy black hole pointing straight at the center of a galaxy, and in a couple of hundred million years there could be quite the encounter when it gets there.