ScienceDaily: Space & Time News

Iron is an essential nutrient that almost all life requires to grow and thrive. Iron's importance goes all the way back to the formation of the planet Earth, where the amount of iron in the Earth's rocky mantle was 'set' by the conditions under which the planet formed and went on to have major ramifications for how life developed. Now, scientists have uncovered the likely mechanisms by which iron influenced the development of complex life forms, which can also be used to understand how likely (or unlikely) advanced life forms might be on other planets.

Astronomers have found no trace of dark matter in the galaxy AGC 114905, despite taking detailed measurements over a course of forty hours with state-of-the-art telescopes.

Researchers carried out simulations of large-scale structure formation in the Universe that accurately reproduce the dynamics of ghost-like particles called neutrinos left over from the Big Bang. In the demonstrated approach, an equation known as the Vlasov equation is directly solved in six dimensions, which avoids key problems associated with conventional particle-based N-body simulations. In combination with cosmological observations, this work could help to determine the unknown neutrino mass.