Astronomy and Planetary Science Thread

Strange Seeds Appear to Be Growing Into Massive Black Holes

In a new paper published in the journal Nature this week, Max Planck Institute astrophysicist Sunmyon Chon and his colleagues delve into this possibility by simulating the earliest stages of the universe. They found that the rapidly-forming black holes could be emitting light while accreting material, appearing as the mysterious red dots, or “seeds,” picked up by the James Webb.
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Dark energy may be changing, and 3,000 exploding stars are adding to the mystery

Dark energy is the name for whatever pushes the universe apart faster and faster, and the standard picture treats its strength as fixed.

At the University of Queensland, astronomers have now rebuilt three decades of exploding stars into one catalog, the largest of its kind.

Set against an unchanging dark energy, the catalog fits worse than before.

The standard model isn’t in trouble yet. But the best record of these explosions anyone has built no longer matches a fixed dark energy comfortably.

Ryan Camilleri, a PhD candidate at UQ’s School of Mathematics and Physics, led the work.

“We’ve rebuilt 3 decades of astronomical observations into a single, consistent framework,” Camilleri said.
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Self-consistent 1D Modelling Of Jupiter’s Upper Atmosphere As An Exoplanet Analogue

Jupiter’s upper atmosphere provides a real-world laboratory for validating first-principles models of giant gaseous exoplanets and for constraining the key physical processes that govern them.

We extended the 1D first-principles thermo-chemical planetary upper atmosphere model Kompot to simulate hydrogen-rich atmospheres of giant exoplanets and benchmarked it against the archetype giant planet Jupiter.
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Complex Water Systems Revealed On Early Mars

A new study reveals that Jezero Crater’s enigmatic ‘Margin Unit’ was shaped by a complex sequence of ancient lakes, groundwater systems, and hydrothermal fluids.

When NASA’s Perseverance rover reached the inner edge of Mars’ Jezero Crater in September 2023, mission scientists were surprised by what they found. Called the “Margin Unit,” the geologic area stretches along the shoreline of an ancient Martian lake, so they expected sedimentary rocks, which would have formed as layers of sand piled on top of each other over millennia.

Composed of clay and silt, sedimentary rocks on Earth are good at preserving past microbial life. The scientists were especially intrigued by strong signals of carbonate minerals detected by Mars orbiters. On Earth, carbonates frequently form in shallow ocean and lake environments capable of supporting life.

Instead, the rover team found igneous rock, which can form deep underground from magma or from volcanic activity at the surface. Igneous rocks are excellent record-keepers, particularly because mineral crystals within them preserve details about the precise moment they formed.

In this case, they preserved an astonishingly complex record of water activity on early Mars. In fact, these rocks showed signs of having interacted with water on at least three separate occasions, with each encounter further altering their chemistry and appearance. The findings were published Monday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
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