Life on Venus?

The news via Jazz Shaw at Hot Air, Did We Just Find Life On Venus? but let's let the scientists explain in their own words:

In this leaked video, astrobiologist Janusz Petkowski from MIT explains how they seem fairly convinced we’re on to something and they don’t have an explanation (yet) aside from life. 

 

 And some rampant, if amusing, speculation from Jazz, 

At some point, the planet may have been habitable, but it spiraled into an out-of-control greenhouse effect that changed it utterly. (We don’t know why that happened, but for now, I’ll just assume that the Venusian fracking program was insufficiently regulated by their global government.) Could some microbes have found a way to survive in the more pleasant conditions found in the upper atmosphere for all of this time? Perhaps.

But there is one other possible explanation to consider. Remember those Soviet probes I mentioned above? Couldn’t it be possible that some Earth microbes hitched a ride on one or more of them, peeled off as the probe entered the atmosphere, and basically seeded the clouds with a starter kit for life? In order to find out, I’m guessing that we’d have to have a probe capable of collecting and returning some samples and examine them. If they have the same DNA as the microbial beasties found on the Earth, we might have our answer. But if they are something almost entirely different, then the case could be made for a true Venusian Genesis, and wouldn’t that spur some interesting conversations? Of course, if you happen to believe in the panspermia hypothesis (as I do) then the galaxy is probably lousy with life and it all shares some common ancestor, modified through evolution to fit the environment where it lands.

My guess is that it will turn out to be an abiotic signiture somehow. Remember, we're still trying to puzzle out and explain the results of chemical experiments from the Viking mission on Mars. 

Is Somebody Farting on Mars?

It must be Dejah Thoris and her crowd! Curiosity Detects Unusually High Methane Levels

This week, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover found a surprising result: the largest amount of methane ever measured during the mission — about 21 parts per billion units by volume (ppbv). One ppbv means that if you take a volume of air on Mars, one billionth of the volume of air is methane.

The finding came from the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) tunable laser spectrometer. It’s exciting because microbial life is an important source of methane on Earth, but methane can also be created through interactions between rocks and water.

Curiosity doesn’t have instruments that can definitively say what the source of the methane is, or even if it’s coming from a local source within Gale Crater or elsewhere on the planet.

“With our current measurements, we have no way of telling if the methane source is biology or geology, or even ancient or modern,” said SAM Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The Curiosity team has detected methane many times over the course of the mission. Previous papers have documented how background levels of the gas seem to rise and fall seasonally. They’ve also noted sudden spikes of methane, but the science team knows very little about how long these transient plumes last or why they’re different from the seasonal patterns.
The SAM team organized a different experiment for this weekend to gather more information on what might be a transient plume. Whatever they find — even if it’s an absence of methane — will add context to the recent measurement.

Curiosity’s scientists need time to analyze these clues and conduct many more methane observations. They also need time to collaborate with other science teams, including those with the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter, which has been in its science orbit for a little over a year without detecting any methane. Combining observations from the surface and from orbit could help scientists locate sources of the gas on the planet and understand how long it lasts in the Martian atmosphere. That might explain why the Trace Gas Orbiter’s and Curiosity’s methane observations have been so different.

For more information about Curiosity, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html
https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/

Personally, I suspect that all planets have deep reserves of methane from when the planetismals and asteroids that they coalesced from, and from more recent comet impacts. But I keep hoping for life on Mars, with a distinctive non-DNA form of genetics.

Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Cheryl Ann Tweedy working toward your amusement and education.

So What Are the New Neighbors Like?

Proxima Centauri b confirmed! Potentially habitable planet orbits the star next door

Scientists say the star that’s closest to our solar system has a planet that could be at the right temperature for liquid water and life.

The star is called Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf that’s part of the Alpha Centauri system, 4.2 light-years away. The planet is called Proxima Centauri b, and it’s a terrestrial world whose existence has now been confirmed after 16 years of study.

It’s not yet known whether Proxima b has an atmosphere, or liquid water. But the computer models don’t rule out the possibility. That would make it the closest known exoplanet – and the closest known exoplanet with the potential for life.

So what do you think, "Aliens" style aliens?

“We expect either to characterize it, if we get lucky, or maybe visit it in a couple of centuries,” Guillem Anglada-Escude, an astronomer at Queen Mary University of London, told reporters.

Word about Proxima b started leaking out earlier this month, sparked by a report in the German magazine Der Spiegel. Anglada-Escude and his colleagues held off on confirming Der Spiegel’s claims, but today the details came out in the journal Nature.

 Star Trek style bosomy green girls?

The planet is at least 30 percent more massive than Earth, and makes one circuit around Proxima Centauri every 11.2 Earth days. Those figures imply that the planet comes as close as 4.6 million miles to its parent star.

If Proxima Centauri were like our sun, the planet would be blazingly hot. But because red dwarfs are much dimmer, scientists say Proxima b should have an Earthlike range of temperatures, from 22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-30 degrees Celsius) on its dark side to 86 degrees F (30 degrees C) on its light side.

What if they're Sith?

Winter time in Siberia in the dark, and summertime in the tropics in the light. I know where I would live.

That would make it possible for water to exist in liquid form, which astrobiologists regard as a key requirement for life.

The scientists’ calculations assume that the planet has an Earthlike, heat-trapping atmosphere, and that the planet’s rotation is tidally locked so that one side is constantly facing the star.

OK, here's an issue. If the dark side is permanently -22 F, wouldn't any water transported from the the light side to the dark side precipitate out as snow, making the bright side a total desert, and with a glacial dark side (assuming there is ample water)?  Such weather would clearly exist, because the the main driver for weather moving heat from the hot areas (in this case the bright side) to the cool regions. It would be very odd weather, however.

Maybe the terminator (region between the light and dark) would be cool and wet, from glacial melt from the glaciers that would move out of the dark side into the light? Those areas could support life as we know it. Another problem:

Reiners acknowledged that Proxima b receives much more high-energy radiation than Earth does. That comes with the territory for red dwarfs, also known as M-dwarfs, which are the most common stars in our Milky Way galaxy.

The radiation question led Artie Hatzes of the Thuringian State Observatory to lay out some caveats in a commentary also published by Nature today. It’s not yet known whether Proxima b has a protective magnetic field, for example. The X-ray flux from Proxima Centauri may have eroded the planet’s atmosphere, or hindered the development of life, Hatzes said.
. . .
Anglada-Escude said he and his colleagues think Hatzes’ assessment is too pessimistic. “For sure the difference between Earth and this planet is that this is receiving much more high-energy radiation, but we don’t think it’s a showstopper here,” he said.

But life could start underground in most soil, and evolve to tolerate higher radiation fields.

Wombat-socho snuck in late with "Rule 5 Sunday: Viva Los Lobos!" and "FMJRA 2.0: Day Late & A Dollar Short."

NASA Finds "Tattoine"

Or at least an exoplanet that might have Tattoine as a moon: NASA confirms discovery of ‘Tatooine’ planet

 Lehigh University astronomer assistant professor of physics Joshua Pepper is using crowdsourcing to gather observations worldwide–and the information is being used to verify the discovery of new planets. His network– known as the “KELT Follow-Up Network”–is made up of nearly 40 members in 10 countries across 4 continents. The group–the largest, most coordinated network of its kind–contributed key observations to confirm the existence of the recently-identified planet, Kepler-1647 b.

So, if I understand this, the amateur astronomers are used to monitor the star nearly full time, so they can catch the relatively rare and irregular passages of the planet in front of one of the stars. That's cool!

The new planet was discovered by a team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and San Diego State University used the Kepler Space Telescope. The discovery was announced today in San Diego, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The research has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal with Veselin Kostov, a NASA Goddard postdoctoral fellow, as lead author.

Planets that orbit two stars are known as circumbinary planets, or sometimes “Tatooine” planets, after Luke Skywalker’s homeland in “Star Wars.” Using NASA’s Kepler telescope, astronomers search for slight dips in brightness that hint a planet might be transiting in front of a star, blocking a small portion of the star’s light.

“But finding circumbinary planets is much harder than finding planets around single stars,” said SDSU astronomer William Welsh, one of the paper’s coauthors. “The transits are not regularly spaced in time and they can vary in duration and even depth.”

To help verify what they had seen, the researchers made use of the worldwide network of professional and amateur astronomers that Pepper–a coauthor on the paper–had created.

“Most members of our network have small telescopes that are not able to observe distant galaxies–but they are very well-suited to observing bright stars, like the ones Kepler-1647 b is orbiting,” said Pepper.

 Kepler-1647 is 3700 light-years away and approximately 4.4 billion years old, roughly the same age as the Earth. The stars are similar to the Sun, with one slightly larger than our home star and the other slightly smaller. The planet has a mass and radius nearly identical to that of Jupiter, making it the largest transiting circumbinary planet ever found.

“It’s a bit curious that this biggest planet took so long to confirm, since it is easier to find big planets than small ones”, said SDSU astronomer Jerome Orosz, another coauthor on the study. “But it is because its orbital period is so long.”

The planet takes 1,107 days (just over 3 years) to orbit its host stars, the longest period of any confirmed transiting exoplanet found so far. The planet is also much further away from its stars than any other circumbinary planet, breaking with the tendency for circumbinary planets to have close-in orbits. Interestingly, its orbit puts the planet within the so-called habitable zone. Like Jupiter, however, Kepler-1647 b is a gas giant, making the planet unlikely to host life. Yet if the planet has large moons, they could potentially be suitable for life.

Some people think about this quite a lot. . .



Wombat-socho has "Rule 5 Sunday: EDC Girls" up at The Other McCain.

The Martian Bear

and a whole bunch of other weird pictures from Mars.

Do you see it?

Water on Mars!

"IT'S UNAMBIGUOUS EVIDENCE THAT LIQUID WATER IS FLOWING ON MARS​."

In an article published in Nature Geoscience, a team led by Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology confirms that seasonal flows in mountainous regions of the planet correspond with the presence of briny water. The seasonal flows were first noticed in 2010, with water the strongest suspect. Spectral observations of season data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate the presence of hydrated salts on the surface, or water mixing with a thick brine of salts.

These dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks called recurring
 slope lineae flowing downhill on Mars are inferred to
 have been formed by contemporary flowing water.

However, the observations don't have a "smoking gun" as to how the flows occur. Some of the hypotheses include an underground aquifer, accumulations of humidity, or possible seasonal melting, though there is a counter for each. (Like an aquifer extending into mountainous regions, possible lack of sufficient humidity, or lack of regional surface ices, respectively.) The team also is working under the idea that it could be a mix of all of these.

Of course, the question will come up: what does this mean for life on Mars? It's an incremental process to find it, first determining whether the conditions are right for it, then determining further if it's present. All Ojha says is that if there is life currently on the surface, these conditions would be the place to look.

I suspect this means that below Mars surface, where it's warmer and at higher pressure than at the surface, liquid water is rather wide spread. This would be moderately good conditions for life to evolve (or persist if introduced). The water is very salty from minerals leached out of the rock, since there's not a hydrological cycle like Earth's to concentrate the salts in the ocean, and allow fresh water to fall on the land. And some of the chemicals would be inimical to most terrestrial life (the perchlorate which apparently quite common on Mar's surface due to extreme oxidizing conditions). But life on Earth manages to get by in boiling sulfuric acid, so there's still a chance. But if we eventually find life there, it won't be Dejah Thoris:

and that's a shame.

Wombat-socho has the big list "Rule 5 Sunday: Time For The Professionals", ready at The Other McCain.

Pluto

Mankind, by way of NASA, just completed a flyby of the planet Pluto (let's go ahead and grant it full planet status, instead of the "minor" planet status it was recently). After travelling 9.5 years, and about 3 billion miles, the unmanned spacecraft New Horizon flew past the planet at a distance of 476,000 miles, and sent back this photo:

Scientists who had waited on pins and needles for the duration of the flight were as ecstatic as scientists get:

After nearly 15 years of planning, building, and flying the New Horizons spacecraft across the solar system, we’ve reached our goal,” said project manager Glen Fountain at APL “The bounty of what we’ve collected is about to unfold.”

So go have a drink, and let loose a little! Wear a funny colored shirt or something.

And what do these pictures tell them?

The newest photo of Pluto, obtained by New Horizons on Monday and made public Tuesday morning, shows a mottled 4.6 billion-year-old world with a strikingly bright heart-shaped region and numerous craters. Stern said there are indications of tectonic activity — perhaps even recently. Asked if the images show that there’s snow on Pluto, Stern said, “It sure looks that way.”

But is the snow water ice, methane ice, ammonia ice, or even frozen nitrogen ice?

Project scientist Hal Weaver said there is a small bright spot that might be the tip of a mountain covered with snow. He said it looks “almost like a lighthouse.”

“It looks like there are these great mounds — like the mounds with almonds on top,” Weaver said.

 So, maybe a lighthouse, used to guide interstellar travel, or a giant ice cream, with covered with almonds.

Linear features on the surface “could be scarps, or faults,” said New Horizons team member and planetary scientist Cathy Olkin.

Planetary scientist David Grinspoon, who is not part of the team but arrived for the flyby celebration Tuesday, said of Pluto, “I see a range of surface ages and no surface that looks really ancient. And that tells me that I’m looking at an active world.”

I remember when Pluto could be used in fiction as a source for aliens.

In Other World News

Edgar Rice Burroughs wasn't as far out as we used to think, with his rivers and lakes on Mars: NASA finds evidence of a vast ancient ocean on Mars

A massive ancient ocean once covered nearly half of the northern hemisphere of Mars making the planet a more promising place for alien life to have gained a foothold, NASA scientists say.

The huge body of water spread over a fifth of the planet’s surface, as great a portion as the Atlantic covers the Earth, and was a mile deep in places. In total, the ocean held 20 million cubic kilometres of water, or more than is found in the Arctic Ocean, the researchers found.

Still a very small ocean by terrestrial standards; our oceans cover 4/5ths of a larger planet, and average many thousands of meters deeper. Assuming that Earth and Mars derived from the same "star dust", they should have had similar water content to start with; why wouldn't Mars have had more? Were there much faster loss rates to begin with?

Unveiled by NASA on Thursday, the compelling evidence for the primitive ocean adds to an emerging picture of Mars as a warm and wet world in its youth, which trickled with streams, winding river deltas, and long-standing lakes, soon after it formed 4.5bn years ago.

The view of the planet’s ancient history radically re-writes what many scientists believed only a decade ago. Back then, flowing water was widely considered to have been a more erratic presence on Mars, gushing forth only rarely, and never forming long-standing seas and oceans.

But the science was settled. Until it was unsettled.

“Ultimately we can conclude this idea of an ocean covering 20% of the planet which opens the idea of habitability and the evolution of life on the planet,” said Geronimo Villanueva, the first author on the study.

The huge body of water lasted for millions of years. But over time, the Martian atmosphere thinned. The drop in pressure meant more ocean water wafted into space. The planet lost much of its insulation too. No longer warm enough to keep the water liquid, the ocean receded and eventually froze. Today, only 13% of the ocean remains, locked up the Martian polar caps.

We know that Earth and Mars have "swapped spit" via meteorites blasted from one to another; it's not much of a stretch to imagine that primitive microorganisms  living in the rocks could have been transferred from one to another, opening the possibility that we are all descended from martians.

Mystery 'noise' could be an Earth-like world: Strange signals suggest habitable planet exists 22 light years away

Astronomers believe mysterious signals - previously dismissed as stellar bursts - are coming from an Earth-like planet.

The Gliese 581d planet has conditions that could support life, and is likely to be a rocky world, twice the size of Earth.

Signals from the planet were initially discovered in 2010, but last year dismissed as noise from distant stars.Now, a further study claims that the 2014 research was based on 'inadequate analyses of the data' and that Gliese 581d does exist.

 A heavy world would hold more atmosphere, and more water changing the conditions for life significantly.  Lots of aquatic life. Could the whole surface be submerged in water? Smaller wings could life more weight, so maybe more fliers?

The new British research, however, argues the method used by the Pennsylvania team was only suitable for large planets, and that it could miss small ones like GJ 581d.

The study, by Queen Mary University, London and the University of Hertfordshire, claims to use a more accurate model on the existing data.

'The existence (or not) of GJ 581d is significant because it was the first Earth-like planet discovered in the 'Goldilocks'-zone around another star and it is a benchmark case for the Doppler technique,' said lead author, Dr Guillem Anglada-Escudé.

An exciting time to be an extra-terrestrial biologist. Just enough information to be tantalizing, and not enough to rule out much.

Wombat-socho celebrates Miss Palin's impending nuptials with "Rule 5 Sunday: Congratulations, Miss Palin!"

New Hope for Finding Life on Mars?

From behind the Science paywall: Search for Martian Life Clears Another Hurdle

Members of the Curiosity Mars rover's science team have announced a milestone in their search for signs of ancient life on Mars. After carefully checking recent results, the researchers said last week at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference here, they are now reasonably confident that contaminants brought from Earth cannot entirely explain certain carbon compounds Curiosity spotted in martian rock.

If so, these simple organic compounds—chlorine-carrying methane and the like—either came with the tons of never-alive cosmic debris that sifts onto every planetary body or are something far more exciting: remains of martian life from eons ago, when a habitable lake and a rushing stream graced the rover's now-dry landing site.

The big question is did Mars have enough surface, or near surface water for life to evolve, the way it did on earth? If so, traces are likely to remain somewhere; the question is where.  Even more tantalizingly, if it evolved on the surface, there's some chance that some of it adapted to life deep in the subsurface, the way it has on earth.

To reach that conclusion, scientists had to clear some daunting hurdles. First, they had to account for the effects of perchlorate, a corrosive, oxidizing compound that is pervasive on Mars and, when heated, can chew up any complex organic matter into little bits (Science, 12 April 2013, p. 138). They also had to reckon with known sources of contamination in Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument package (Science, 31 August 2012, p. 1032). A chemical reagent brought along for future analyses of organics had somehow leaked into the system, and gases driven off soil and rock samples were reacting with a polymer used to prepare compounds for identification by mass spectrometry. As a result, the rover was making its own organics, including the small chlorinated methanes and the sizable compound chlorobenzene.

As a practicing analytical chemist, looking at trace metals in some of the most dilute and difficult medium, seawater, I sympathize with the chemists who had to sort out the contributions of an inadvertent leak of the same chemicals that they were trying to measure using a special purpose machine built for the purpose located millions of miles from the workers.

To sort out which of the device's detections are truly martian, the team instructed SAM to run blanks: analyses made with empty sample vials. They flushed both blanks and real samples with inert gas and warmed them to drive off the contaminating reagent. On Earth, they ran samples containing known organics through a SAM apparatus under Mars-like conditions. And on the rover, they tried experiments such as analyzing samples three times as big as normal to see whether the yield of particular organics would triple as well.

At the meeting, Caroline Freissinet and Daniel Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a score of fellow SAM team members reported that the latest results are persuasive. The new findings offer "compelling" evidence that some of the carbon-containing compounds SAM recently detected such as chlorinated methane, ethane, and propane came from organic matter in ancient martian rock, not from earthly contamination, Freissinet said. And Glavin said that other results are "a good indication" that some of the chlorobenzene is martian as well. Or as one of his slides pointedly put it: "The detection of reduced organic compounds in Martian near-surface samples is a significant step."

Add caption

Sounds promising; I'm a little curious why they chose the chlorinated organic compounds for study.  Chlorinated organic compounds aren't terribly common in terrestrial (in the planetary sense) organisms, though they certainly exist, but in a strong oxidizing environment with perchlorate present, they can be created from the perchlorate. Shouldn't they be looking for the kinds of compounds left by terrestrial organisms, the melange of compounds we call petroleum?

Some experts outside the 400-strong Curiosity team are more guarded. "The case for a martian source of carbon builds," responded meteoriticist Mark Sephton of Imperial College London by e-mail. He was not at the meeting but read the four pages of abstracts describing the results.

The case could build further if Curiosity strikes a richer vein of organic matter in future samples. Or SAM team members could try a more sophisticated technique to separate out the organic compounds in rock before the pervasive oxidizing agent chews them up. The next opportunity to drill a new sample will come within a few months when Curiosity is likely to pause on its way to its ultimate target, Mount Sharp.

Alas, we're probably not talking about finding Princess Thuvia's and John Carter's descendents.

Wombat-socho has the the long awaited, post tax day, triple stuffed  edition of "Rule 5 Sunday: Ricochet" up at The Other McCain.