aerosol Author: Rubén Soussé Villa is pursuing a PhD in atmospheric chemistry at Barcelona Supercompting Center / Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya Mineral dust aerosols are microscopic rocky particles – for instance, sand – floating in the atmosphere. They are typically windblown from deserts, arid areas and agricultural lands, where they are produced from continued erosion […]
Biotechnology • Food processing • Microbiology • Planetary Science • Plant biology
Could we feed a city on Mars? This question is central to the future of space exploration and has serious repercussions on Earth too. To date, a lot of thought has gone into how astronauts eat; however, we are only beginning to produce food in space. Space launches are quite expensive. And with the growing […]
Astronomy • Biology • Evolution • Geosciences • Planetary Science
An Earth-like planet named GJ 1252b orbiting an M dwarf — the most common type of star in the universe — appears to have no atmosphere at all. This discovery could cause a major shift in the search for life on other planets. Because M-dwarfs are so ubiquitous, this discovery means a large number of […]
Somewhere between 250 million and 3 billion years ago, Venus’s temperate climate gave way to a runaway greenhouse state. New research reveals how such a scenario could well occur on Earth and possibly turn Earth into a Venus. Venus, Earth’s nearest neighbour and once-potential twin, is a hot mess. Surface temperatures average about 475 degrees […]
Pluto, the Solar System’s largest dwarf planet, just became even more interesting with a report that icy lava flows have recently covered substantial tracts of its surface. In this context, “recently” means probably no more than a billion years ago. That’s old, of course – and there is no suggestion that volcanoes are still active […]
The Mars 2020 rover mission is the next step in robotic exploration of the Red Planet. Unlike Curiosity, Mars 2020 will try to find answers to key questions about the potential for life on Mars, seeking signs of habitable conditions on Mars in the ancient past, but also searching for signs of past microbial life […]
Let’s admit it from the very beginning: Saturn is my favorite planet, I’m certainly biased when I speak of its wondrous atmospheric activity. In my defense I must ask for any rival to its giant periodic storms, polygon-shaped flows or seasonal changes. At the telescope, Jupiter may look funnier but, in the long-term, Saturn always […]
So, do you think you can tell heaven from hell? Well, David Gilmour does not believe you and, to be honest, neither do I. We use to think always about the Goldilock’s limits, within which the habitability of a system is determined strictly by its parent star distance and temperature. But, even if very useful […]
We love Mars. Nobody is sure about the exact reason, but we love it. Is it the red color that caught our attention long before the spacecrafts? Or is it the tall mountains and deep valleys they revealed? It is probably a mix of all of the above and much more. It is also the […]
The standard three-layer model for the interior of Jupiter and Saturn claims that an outer layer of molecular hydrogen surrounds an inner layer of liquid metallic hydrogen, with a probable rocky, molten core. The Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories has been used to explore the boundary between the insulator and metallic hydrogen layers. At […]