Many Worlds

Author: Marc Kaufman (page 1 of 16)

A Southern Sky Extravaganza From TESS

November 7, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Candidate exoplanets as seen by TESS in a southern sky mosaic from 13 observing sectors. (NASA/MIT/TESS)

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has finished its one year full-sky observation of  Southern sky and has found hundreds of candidate exoplanets and 29 confirmed planets.  It is now maneuvering  its array of wide-field telescopes and cameras to focus on the northern sky to do the same kind of exploration.

At this turning point, NASA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — which played a major role in designing and now operating the mission — have put together mosaic images from the first year’s observations, and they are quite something.

Constructed from 208 TESS images taken during the mission’s first year of science operations, these images are a unique  space-based look at the entire Southern sky — including the Milky Way seen edgewise, the Large and Small Magellenic galaxies, and other large stars already known to have exoplanet.

“Analysis of TESS data focuses on individual stars and planets one at a time, but I wanted to step back and highlight everything at once, really emphasizing the spectacular view TESS gives us of the entire sky,” said Ethan Kruse, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow who assembled the mosaic at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Overlaying the figures of selected constellations helps clarify the scale of the TESS southern mosaic. TESS has discovered 29 exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system, and more than 1,000 candidate planets astronomers are now investigating. NASA/MIT/TESS

The mission is designed to vastly increase the number of known exoplanets, which are now theorized to orbit all — or most — stars in the sky.

TESS searches for  the nearest and brightest main sequence stars hosting transiting exoplanets, which are the most favorable targets for detailed investigations.

This animation shows how a dip in the observed brightness of a star may indicate the presence of a planet passing in front of it, an occurrence known as a transit. This is how TESS identified planet.
(NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

While previous sky surveys with ground-based telescopes have mainly detected giant exoplanets, TESS will find many small planets around the nearest stars in the sky.  The mission will also provide prime targets for further characterization by the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as other large ground-based and space-based telescopes of the future.

The TESS observatory uses an array of wide-field cameras to perform a survey of 85% of the sky.… Read more

A Telling Nobel Exoplanet Faux Pas

October 30, 2019 / / 0 Comments

This is the Doppler velocity curve displayed by the Nobel Committee to illustrate what Mayor and Queloz had accomplished in 1995. But actually, the graph shows the curve from the Lick Observatory in California that an American team had produced to confirm the initial finding. Such was the interweaving of the work of the Swiss and the American teams searching for the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star. (Image courtesy of Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler, San Francisco State University)

Given the complex history of the discovery and announcement in 1995 of the first exoplanet that orbits a sun-like star, it is perhaps no surprise that errors might sneak into the retelling.  Two main groups were racing to be first, and for a variety of reasons the discovery ended up being confirmed before it was formally announced.

A confusing situation prone to mistakes if all involved aren’t entirely conversant with the details.  But an error — tantamount to scientific plagiarism — by the Nobel Committee?   That is a surprise.

The faux pas occurred at the announcement on October 8 that Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva and Didier Queloz of the the University of Cambridge had won the Nobel for physics to honor their work in detecting that first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star.

As Nobel Committee member Ulf Danielsson described the achievement, a powerpoint display of important moments and scientific findings in their quest was displayed on a screen behind him.

When the ultimate image was on deck to be shown  — an image that presented the Doppler velocity curve that was described as the key to the discovery — the speaker appeared to hesitate after looking down to see what was coming next.

If he did hesitate, it was perhaps because to those in the know, the curve did not come from Mayor and Queloz.

Rather, it was the work of a team led by Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler — the San Francisco State University group that confirmed the existence of the hot Jupiter exoplanet 51 Pegasi b several days after the discovery was made public (to some considerable controversy) at a stellar systems conference in Florence.  So at a most significant juncture of the Nobel introduction of the great work of Mayor and Queloz, hard-won data by a different team was presented as part of the duo’s achievement.

This is both awkward and embarrassing, but it also indirectly points to one of the realities that the Nobel Committee is forced, by the will of Alfred Nobel, to ignore:  That science is seldom the work now of but two or three people.… Read more

PIXL: A New NASA Instrument For Ferreting Out Clues of Ancient Life on Mars

October 23, 2019 / / 0 Comments

 

Extremely high definition images of the com ponents of rocks and mud as taken by PIXL, the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry .   On the Mars 2020 rover, PIXL  will have significantly greater capabilities than previous similar instruments sent to Mars.  Rather than reporting bulk compositions averaged over several square centimeters, it will identify precisely where in the rock each element resides. With spatial resolution of about 300 micrometers, PIXL will conduct the first ever petrology investigations on Mars, correlating elemental compositions with visible rock textures . (NASA)J

The search for life, or signs of past life beyond Earth is now a central issue in space science, is central to the mission of NASA, and is actually a potentially breakthrough discovery in the making  for humanity.    The scientific stakes could hardly be higher.

But identifying evidence of ancient microbial life – and refuting all reasonable non-biological explanations for that evidence — is stunningly difficult.

As recent wrangling over Earth’s oldest rocks in Greenland has shown, determining the provenance of a deep-time biosignature even here on Earth is extraordinarily difficult. In 2016, scientists reported discovery of 3,700 million yr-old stromatolites in the Isua geological area of Greenland.

Just three years later, a field workshop held at the Isua discovery site brought experts from around the world to examine the intriguing structures and see whether the evidence cleared the very high bar needed to accept a biological interpretation. While the scientists who published the initial discovery held their ground, not one of the other scientists felt convinced by the evidence before them.  Watching and listening as the different scientists presented their cases was a tutorial in the innumerable factors involved in coming to any conclusion.

Now think about trying to wrestle with similar or more complex issues on Mars, of how scientists can reach of level of confidence to report that a sign (or hint) of past life has apparently been found.

As it turns out, the woman who led the Greenland expedition — Abigail Allwood of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab — is also one of the key players in the upcoming effort to find biosignatures on Mars.  She is the principal investigator of the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) that will sit on the extendable arm of the rover, and it has capabilities to see in detail the composition of Mars samples as never before.

The instrument has, of course, been rigorously tested to understand what it can and cannot do. … Read more

The Remarkable Race to Find the First Exoplanet, And the Nobel Prize It Produced

October 10, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Rendering of the planet that started it all — 51 Pegasi b. It is a “hot Jupiter” that, when discovered, broke every astronomical rule regarding where types of planets should be in a solar system. (NASA)

Earlier this week, the two men who detected the first planet outside our solar system that circled a sun-like star won a Nobel Prize in physics.  The discovery heralded the beginning of the exoplanet era — replacing a centuries-old scientific supposition that planets orbited other stars with scientific fact.

The two men are Michel Mayor,  Professor Emeritus at the University of Geneva and Didier Queloz, now of Cambridge University.  There is no Nobel Prize in astronomy and the physics prize has seldom gone to advances in the general field of astronomy and planetary science.  So the selection is all the more impressive.

Mayor and Queloz worked largely unknown as they tried to make their breakthrough, in part because previous efforts to detect exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) orbiting sun-like stars had fallen short, and also because several claimed successes turned out to be unfounded.  Other efforts proved to be quite dangerous:  a Canadian duo used poisonous and corrosive hydrogen flouride vapor in the 1980s as part of their planet-hunting effort.

But since their 1995 discovery opened the floodgates, the field of exoplanet science has exploded.  More than 4,000 exoplanets have been identified and a week seldom goes by without more being announced.  The consensus scientific view is now that billions upon billions of exoplanets exist in our galaxy alone.

While Mayor and Queloz were pioneers for sure, they did not work in a vacuum.  Rather, they were in a race of sorts with an American team that had also been working in similar near anonymity for years to also find an exoplanet.

And so here is a human, rather than a purely scientific, narrative look — reported over the years — into the backdrop to the just announced Nobel Prize.  While Mayor and Queloz were definitely the first to find an exoplanet, they were quite close to being the second.

 

Swiss astronomers Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor are seen here in 2011 in front of the European Southern Observatory’s ’s 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. The telescope hosts the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), one of the world’s leading exoplanet hunters.  After the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, Mayor led the effort to build the HARPS planet-finding spectrometer.

… Read more

On the Ground in Greenland, at the Disputed Ancient Stromatolite Site

September 10, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Enlarge to full screen on lower right. A pioneering three-dimensional, virtual reality look at a Greenland outcrop earlier described as containing 3.7-billion- year-old stromatolite fossils, which would be the oldest remnant of life on Earth. The video capture, including the drone-assisted overview of the site, is part of a much larger virtual reality effort to document the setting undertaken late in August. As the video focuses in on the scientifically controversial outcrop, cuts are visible in the smooth surfaces that were made by two teams studying the rocks in great detail to determine whether the reported stromatolite fossils are actually present. (Parker Abercrombie, NASA/JPL and Ian Burch, Queensland University of Technology.)

 

Seldom does one rock outcrop get so many visitors in a day, especially when that outcrop is located in rugged, frigid terrain abutting the Greenland Ice Sheet and can be reached only by helicopter.

But this has been a specimen of great importance and notoriety since it appeared from beneath the snow pack some eight years ago. That’s when it was first identified by two startled geologists as something very different from what they had seen in four decades of scouring the geologically revelatory region – the gnarled Isua supercrustal belt – for fossil signs of very early life.

Since that discovery the rock outcrop has been featured in a top journal and later throughout the world as potentially containing the earliest signature of life on Earth – the outlines of half inch to almost two inch-high stromatolite structures between 3.7 and 3.8 billion years old.

The Isua greenstone, or supracrustal belt, which contains some of the oldest known rocks and outcrops in the world, is about 100 miles northeast of the capital, Nuuk.

If Earth could support the life needed to form primitive but hardly uncomplicated stromatolites that close to the initial cooling of the planet, then the emergence of life might not be so excruciatingly complex after all. Maybe if the conditions are at all conducive for life on a planet (early Mars comes quickly to mind) then life will probably appear.

Extraordinary claims in science, however, require extraordinary proof, and inevitably other scientists will want to test the claims.

Within two years of that initial ancient stromatolite splash in a Nature paper (led by veteran geologist Allen Nutman of the University of Wollongong in Australia), the same journal published a study that disputed many of the key observations and conclusions of the once-hailed ancient stromatolite discovery. … Read more

Exploring Early Earth by Using DNA As A Fossil

September 3, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Betül Kaçar is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, and a pioneer in the field of paleogenomics — using genetic material to dive back deep into the ancestry of important compounds. (University of Arizona)

Paleontology has for centuries worked to understand the distant past by digging up fossilized remains and analyzing how and why they fit into the evolutionary picture.  The results have been impressive.

But they have been limited.  The evolutionary picture painted relies largely on the discovery of once hard-bodied organisms, with a smattering of iconic finds of soft-bodied creatures.

In recent years, however, a new approach to understanding the biological evolution of life has evolved under the umbrella discipline of paleogenomics.  The emerging field explores ancient life and ancient Earth by focusing on genetic material from ancient organisms preserved in today’s organisms.

These genes can be studied on their own or can be synthetically placed into today’s living organisms to see if, and how, they change behavior.

The goals are ambitious:  To help understand both the early evolution and even the origins of life, as well as to provide a base of knowledge about likely characteristics of potential life on other planets or moons.

“What we do is treat DNA as a fossil, a vehicle to travel back in time,” said Betül Kaçar, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona with more than a decade of experience in the field, often sponsored by the NASA Astrobiology Program and the John Templeton Foundation.  “We build on modern biology, the existing genes, and use what we know from them to construct a molecular tree of life and come up with the ancestral genes of currently existing proteins.”

And then they ask the question of whether and how the expression of those genes — all important biomolecules generally involved in allowing a cell to operate smoothly — has changed over the eons.  It’s a variation on one the basic questions of evolution:  If the film of life were replayed from very early days, would it come out the same?

Cyanobacteria, which was responsible for the build-up of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere and the subsequent Great Oxidation Event about 2.5 billion years ago.  Kaçar studies and replaces key enzymes in the cyanobacteria in her effort to learn how those ancestral proteins may have behaved when compared to the same molecules today.

The possibility of such research — of taking what is existing today and reconstructing ancient sequences from it — was first proposed by Emile Zuckerkandl, a biologist known for his work in the 1960s with Linus Pauling on the hypothesis of the “molecular clock.” The molecular clock is figurative term for a technique that uses the mutation rate of biomolecules to deduce the time in prehistory when two or more life forms diverged.… Read more

A Unique Science Expedition to Greenland

August 25, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Greenland from above, where the ice sheet is melting to form lakes and to expose rocks not visible for millennia. @Susan Oliver

It is my very good fortune to report that I have just arrived in Greenland for quite a scientific adventure.
 
Over the next days, a group of scientists (along with me and NASA videographer Mike Toillion) will be traveling to the site of the stromatolite that might, or might not, be the oldest remains of life on Earth.  In a 2016 Nature paper, it was described as having been fossilized about 3.7 billion years ago.
 
Another Nature paper two years later challenged the biological origins of the “fossil,” and the debate has been pretty vigorous since.

Vigorously debated putative stromatolite from the Isua Peninsula, Greenland.

We’ll be helicoptering about 100 miles northeast of the capital Nuuk to get to the Isua peninsula, where the oldest (or almost the oldest, depending on who you choose to follow) rock formations on Earth can be found. Three days and two nights on the ice, or what we hope is still ice. And then a day or more of scientific debate.

I will be writing about this and more (some folks involved the Mars 2020 mission will also be testing instruments at the site) for Many Worlds in the days and weeks ahead.

To me this is an important story not only because of the possible age of the stromatolite find.  If confirmed, it would move back the presence of identified life on Earth by 200 million years.

It is also important because of the fact that scientists with different views on this important issue have traveled thousands of miles to go to the site together and try to reach a consensus—or at least to vigorously argue their cases.  Doesn’t often happen in such high profile science.

Greenstone Belt formations on the Isua Peninsula where our team will be headed.

 
Greenland has, of course, been in the news of late for reasons ranging  worrisome purchase offers to far more worrisome warming.  Remarkable are the “moulin” — which drain the water running on the ice sheet and send it down thousands of feet to the water or land below. 
Kind of a ice black hole.

A “moulin” in Greenland that acts as a very deep drain for water melting on the ice sheet.

Now it’s in my news because, well, I’m here in Greenland, to learn, to report back, and to take in everything this spectacular place has to offer.
… Read more

“Agnostic Biosignatures,” And the Path to Life as We Don’t Know It

August 12, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Most research into signs of life in our solar system or on distant planets uses life on Earth as a starting point. But now NASA has begun a major project to explore the potential signs of life very different from what we have on Earth.  For example, groups of molecules, like those above, can be analyzed for complexity, regardless of their specific chemical constituents.  ( Brittany Klein/Goddard Space Flight Center)

Biosignatures – evidence that says or suggests that life has been present – are often very hard to find and interpret.

Scientists examining fossilized life on Earth can generally reach some sort of agreement about what is before them, but what about the soft-bodied or even single-celled organisms that were the sum total of life on Earth for much of the planet’s history as a living domain? Scientific disagreements are common.

Now think of trying to determine whether a particular outline on an ancient Martian rock, or a geochemical or surface anomaly on that rock, is a sign of life. Or perhaps an unexpected abundance of a particular compound in one of the water vapor plumes coming out of the moons Europa or Enceladus. Or a peculiar chemical imbalance in the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet as measured in the spectral signature collected via telescope.

These are long-standing issues and challenges, but they have taken on a greater urgency of late as NASA missions  (and those of other space agencies around the world) are being designed to actively look for signs of extraterrestrial life – most likely very simple life – past or present.

And that combination of increased urgency and great difficulty has given rise to at least one new way of thinking about those potential signs of life. Scientists call them “agnostic biosignatures” and they do not presuppose any particular biochemistry.

“The more we explore the solar system and distant exoplanets, the more we find worlds that are really foreign,”  said Sarah Stewart Johnson, at an assistant professor at Georgetown University and principal investigator of the newly-formed Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures (LAB).  The LAB team won a five-year, $7 million grant last year from NASA’s Astrobiology Program.

“So our goal is to go beyond our current understandings and find ways to explore the world of life as we don’t know it,” she told me.  “That might mean thinking about a spectrum of how ‘alive’ something might be… And we’re embracing uncertainty, looking as much for biohints as biosignatures.”

Johnson first visited the acid salt lakes of the Yilgarn Craton of Western Australia as a graduate student at MIT, and has returned multiple with colleagues to understand mineral biosignatures as well as biomarker preservation in this analog environment for early Mars.

… Read more

Exoplanets Discoveries Flood in From TESS

August 1, 2019 / / 0 Comments

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has hundreds of “objects of interest” waiting to be confirmed as planets in the data from the space telescope’s four cameras.  These three were the first confirmed TESS discoveries, identified last year during its first three months of observing. By the time the mission is done, TESS’s wide-field cameras will have covered the whole sky in search of transiting exoplanets around 200,000 of the nearest (and brightest) stars. (NASA / MIT / TESS)

The newest space telescope in the sky — NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS — has been searching for exoplanets for less than a year, but already it has quite a collection to its name.

The TESS mission is to find relatively nearby planets orbiting bright and stable suns, and so expectations were high from the onset about the discovery of important new planets and solar systems.  At a meeting this week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devoted to TESS  results,  principal investigator George Ricker pronounced the early verdict.

The space telescope, he said,  “has far exceeded our most optimistic hopes.”  The count is up to 21 new planets and 850 additional  candidate worlds waiting to be confirmed.

Equally or perhaps more important is that the planets and solar systems being discovered promise important results.  They have not yet included any Earth-sized rocky planet in a sun’s habitable zone — what is generally considered the most likely, though hardly the only, kind of planet to harbor life — but they did include planets that offer a great deal when it comes to atmospheres and how they can be investigated.

This infographic illustrates key features of the TOI 270 system, located about 73 light-years away in the southern constellation Pictor. The three known planets were discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite through periodic dips in starlight caused by each orbiting world. Insets show information about the planets, including their relative sizes, and how they compare to Earth. Temperatures given for TOI 270’s planets are equilibrium temperatures, (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger)

One of the newest three-planet system is called TOI-270, and it’s about 75 light years from Earth. The star at the center of the system is a red dwarf, a bit less than half the size of the sun.

Despite its small size, it’s brighter than most of the nearby stars we know host planets. And it’s stable, making its solar system especially valuable.

… Read more

If Bacteria Could Talk

July 29, 2019 / / 0 Comments

 

Hawaiian lava cave microbial mats appear to have the highest levels and diversity of genes related to quorum sensing so far.  (Stuart Donachie, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa)

Did you know that many bacteria — some of the oldest lifeforms on Earth — can talk?  Really.

And not only between the same kind of single-cell bacteria, but  back and forth with members of other species, too.

Okay, they don’t talk in words or with sounds at all.  But they definitely communicate in a meaningful and essential way, especially in the microbial mats and biofilms (microbes attached to surfaces surrounded by mucus) that constitute their microbial “cities.”

Their “words” are conveyed via chemical signaling molecules — a chemical language — going from one organism to another,  and are a means to control when genes in the bacterial DNA are turned “on” or “off.”  The messages can then be translated into behaviors to protect or enhance the larger (as in often much, much larger) group.

Called “quorum sensing,” this microbial communication was first identified several decades ago.  While the field remains more characterized by questions than definitive answers, is it clearly growing and has attracted attention in medicine, in microbiology and in more abstract computational and robotics work.

Most recently,  it has been put forward as chemically-induced behavior that can help scientists understand how bacteria living in extreme environments on Earth — and potential on Mars —  survive and even prosper.  And the key finding is that bacteria are most successful when they form communities of microbial mats and biofilms, often with different species of bacteria specializing in particular survival capabilities.

Speaking at the recent Astrobiology Science Conference in Seattle,  Rebecca Prescott, a National Science Foundation  Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biology said this community activity may make populations of bacteria much more hardy than otherwise might be predicted.

 

Quorum sensing requires a community. Isolated Bacteria (and Archaea) have nobody to communicate with and so genes that are activated by quorum sensing are not turned “on.”

“To help us understand where microbial life may occur on Mars or other planets, past or present, we must understand how microbial communities evolve and function in extreme environments as a group, rather than single species,” said Prescott,

“Quorum sensing gives us a peek into the interactive world of bacteria and how cooperation may be key to survival in harsh environments,” she said.

Rebecca Prescott  is a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Biology (1711856) and is working with principal investigator Alan Decho of the University of South Carolina on a NASA Exobiology Program grant.

… Read more
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