ScienceDaily: Space & Time News

Among thousands of known exoplanets,astronomers have flagged three that are actually stars.

Aided by microbes found in the subarctic conditions of Canada's Hudson Bay, an international team of scientists has created the first color catalog of icy planet surface signatures to uncover the existence of life in the cosmos.

Scientists review research on gravitational wave detectors as a historical example of quantum technologies and examine the fundamental research on the connection between quantum physics and gravity. The team examined recent gravitational wave experiments, showing it is possible to shield large objects from strong influences from the thermal and seismic environment to allow them to evolve as one quantum object. This decoupling from the environment enables measurement sensitivities that would otherwise be impossible.

When the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft discovered abundant molecular oxygen bursting from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P) in 2015, it puzzled scientists. They had never seen a comet emit oxygen, let alone in such abundance. But most alarming were the deeper implications: that researchers had to account for so much oxygen, which meant reconsidering everything they thought they already knew about the chemistry of the early solar system and how it formed. A new analysis, however, shows Rosetta's discovery may not be as strange as scientists first imagined. Instead, it suggests the comet has two internal reservoirs that make it seem like there's more oxygen than is actually there.

Earth is believed to have formed partly from carbonaceous meteorites, which are thought to come from outer main-belt asteroids. Telescopic observations of outer main-belt asteroids suggest that they formed with ammonia ice which is only stable at very low temperatures. A new study suggests these materials may have formed very far out in the early Solar System then been transported into the inner Solar System by chaotic mixing processes.