Image: An artist’s impression of the newly discovered object. Image Credit: Credit: Ko Arimatsu.
Astronomers have spotted what they claim is a relatively small (1.5 mile-wide) object ‘hovering’ at the outermost edge of our solar system.
According to reports, scientists believe the recently-discovered object is the ‘first ever sighting of its kind’ and could help experts unravel the mysteries of the evolution of our early solar system.
Scientists claim that the mystery object could help us understand the secrets of how our solar system came into existence.
Scientists say that the object is considered an important discovery and stepping stone towards understanding how small clouds of dust and ice became planets we see today.
The object was spotted beyond Neptune in the so-called Kuiper Belt; a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. The Kuiper Belt contains countless smaller cosmic objects and is most famous for being the home pace of ex-planet Pluto.
The bodies inside the Kuiper belt are thought to be the leftover pieces of the formation of ur solar system.
This is why studying the objects within the Kuiper Belt can help answer some of the most important questions about our solar system.
The cosmic bodies located in the inner Solar System (like Asteroids) have been blasted by solar radiation, collisions between different cosmic objects, as well as the gravity of planets around them.
However, the objects located inside the Kuiper Belt have existed in the cold, pristine conditions of the early solar system.
Locating smaller objects within the Kuiper Belt is a difficult task. Scientists believe that the Kuiper Belt is home to objects with radii of around one kilometer or more. But since they are located at extreme distances from the sun, they are extremely dim for telescopes to observe directly.
However, scientists at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan experimented by using a technique known as occultation.
This process has scientists monitor a large number of stars, and observe shadows of objects that pass in front of the stars.
Astronomer Ko Arimatsu led the team that made the discovery.
Scientists mounted two 28 cm telescopes on Miyako Island in Okinawa and observed as many as 2000 stars for a total of 60 hours.
During their surveillance, they noticed that one star dimmed as a 2.4-kilometer-wide object’s shadow obscured it.
This led experts to believe that there are more kilometer-sized objects within the Kuiper Belt than previously thought.
They say that their discovery supports the theory that suggests planetesimals first grow slowly into kilometer-sized objects before runaway growth causes them to form into planets.
The finding supports theories that runaway growth is a crucial stage in plane formation.
“We didn’t even have enough money to build a second dome to protect our second telescope!”
“Yet we still managed to make a discovery that is impossible for the big projects. Now that we know our system works, we will investigate the Kuiper Belt in more detail.”
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A recent scientific study has proposed that the universe we live in could be a mirror image of an antimatter universe that extends backward in time, existing before the Big Bang.
This is according to scientists from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics of Canada, who have come up with a new cosmological model that suggests the existence of a so-called “anti-universe” that, together with ours, retains a fundamental rule of physics called CPT symmetry.
However, while its existence does make sense, researchers still need to resolve countless details in their theory, but they say it naturally explains the existence of dark matter.
Hunting Dark Matter
The model explains a lot about dark matter, the ‘still’ hypothetical form of matter that is believed to account for as much as 85% of the matter in our universe, and around a quarter of its total energy density.
Most dark matter is theorized as being non-baryonic in nature, possibly made out of yet-undiscovered subatomic particles.
Standard cosmological models suggest that our universe, as well as space, time and mass/energy – came (exploded) into existence more than 14 billion years ago. Since then, they have been expanding and cooling down, a chain reaction that has led to the progressive creation of subatomic particles, atoms, stars, and planets.
But scientists from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics of Canada have a different theory.
They’ve set out to develop a model of the universe that can explain all observable phenomena based only on the known particles and fields.
To do so, they’ve asked themselves whether there is a natural way to extend the universe beyond the Big Bang, a singularity where general relativity breaks down and exits on the other side.
“We found that there was,” he says.
The answer was to assume that the universe we inhabit obeys CPT symmetry as a whole.
This fundamental principle requires that any physical process remains the same if time is reversed, space is reversed and particles are replaced by antiparticles.
The Universe and Antiuniverse, like day and night, like dusk and dawn
Turok explains that this isn’t something we observe in the universe we live in, where we believe that time progresses as space expands and that there is more matter than antimatter.
Scientists explain that instead, what respects the symmetry is the existence of a universe-antiuniverse pair.
The study published in the Journal Physical Review of Letters, suggests that inside the Antiuniverse, and before the big bang, time ran backward and the cosmos was filled with antimatter instead of matter.
The compelling theory tells us that the universe is actually replete with ‘very massive sterile neutrinos’ which in turn could help us explain the existence of dark matter, the strange ‘substance’ that is believed to make up much of the universe.
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Scientists have long thought that a quarter of all life on Earth lives in the soil beneath our feet. The organisms, including bacteria, store carbon, and greenhouse gases. Now new findings are radically changing that idea.
Instead of just a quarter of all life, the real percentage could be waaaay higher.
In a new study, The Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) estimates that 70 percent of Earth’s bacteria and archaea, single-celled microorganisms, live beneath our feet in a massive biosphere. And we aren’t talking just a few feet or even twenty feet.
We’re talking up to five miles at the very least, but possibly much further down. That’s roughly 2 to 2.3 billion cubic kilometers (roughly 480 to 551 million cubic miles) in size. That equates to twice the volume of all of Earth’s oceans.
The microorganisms are teeming deep down, not just near the surface, but miles down, where there is no light, extreme temperatures as high as 251.6 Fahrenheit, intense pressure, and few sources of energy. A massive biosphere exists, far outnumbering the life living on the surface.
This biosphere has remained pristine and untouched by humans, but new drilling techniques allow samples from boreholes as far down as 5 kilometers. That, along with new powerful microscopes, allow scientists to detect lifeforms where we never knew they existed before.
“[…] scientists estimate this subterranean biosphere is teeming with between 15bn and 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms, hundreds of times the combined weight of every human on the planet.”
In a recent article from The Guardian, they note new and strange lifeforms emerging from the depths. The way they live is changing how we think about life itself.
“One organism found 2.5km below the surface has been buried for millions of years and may not rely at all on energy from the sun. Instead, the methanogen has found a way to create methane in this low energy environment, which it may not use to reproduce or divide, but to replace or repair broken parts.”
Karen Lloyd, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville reveals these organisms not only far outnumber surface dwellers, but they also far outlive us. They live for thousands of years, barely ever moving unless the Earth’s crust shifts around them.
“The strangest thing for me is that some organisms can exist for millennia. They are metabolically active but in stasis, with less energy than we thought possible of supporting life,” remarked Lloyd.
“It’s like finding a whole new reservoir of life on Earth,” said Karen Lloyd, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.https://t.co/m17wBQshUb
Finding so much life so deep below the Earth begs the question: Did life originate from below the surface of the planet? Or, did life start above the surface and move below?
The implications move beyond science:
“The scientists say some findings enter the realm of philosophy and exobiology – the study of extraterrestrial life.”
Alexis Templeton, a Geomicrobiologist from the NASA Astrobiology Institute, has been taking part in a drilling project in Oman. Scientists extract samples of the deep earth and find a bewildering array of colors, textures, and new forms of life. They believe such subterranean lifeforms could well exist deep below the surface of Mars, as long as it is able to store water like lifeforms beneath the mountains of Oman.
“When we look at the surface of Mars, we know it’s dry. But, there’s rocks like these in the shallow subsurface there as well. Are they holding and trapping and storing water we can’t observe at the surface?” asks Templeton.
“We’re looking for the possible cradle of life…these might be the type rocks for the origin of life…” In our new short film we visit the international, multi-disciplinary @OmanDrillProj. https://t.co/674wfoykDp@ICDPdrilling
Over 150 years ago, Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth, asking the question:
“Who in his wildest dreams could have imagined that, beneath the crust of our Earth, there could exist a real ocean … a sea that has given shelter to species unknown?”
Deep biosphere beneath the seafloor explored at American Geophysical Union fall meeting https://t.co/bK8TS0vfXR
In his 1864 science fiction novel, “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” novelist Jules Verne wrote: “Who in his wildest dreams could have imagined that, beneath the… pic.twitter.com/gjAOtolw67
Today, it appears Verne was able to somehow tap into the future, as scientists begin to scratch the surface to find a massive well of life. The surface dwellers are hardly the dominant forms of life. Life forms living in such seemingly harsh and inhospitable conditions have been called “extremophiles,” but now, it looks like their way of life is actually the relative norm.
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is found beneath our feet. But even soil is at risk: