Astro Blog

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected what could be a chemical relic of long-ago life on Mars: long-chain organic molecules. Found after painstaking reanalysis of data on a sample drilled from a lake that dried up billions of years ago, the molecules likely derived from fatty acids, a common building block of cell membranes on Earth. The finding,  published  today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is not a definite detection of past life; the fatty acids could also have formed without life. But it’s another in a series of tantalizing hints....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/curiosity-rover-detects-long-chain-carbon-molecules-mars . 

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: ...the Moon formed some 65 million years after the start of the Solar System—and only tens of millions of years after Earth. The findings promise to resolve decades of debate about the Moon’s age, says Thorsten Kleine, a cosmochemist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research who  presented new work  here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC). Several strands of research are converging on a new and older age for the Moon, he says: “It’s about 4.5 billion years.”...  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/impact-formed-moon-struck-practically-newborn-earth .

By Hannah Devlin , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Astronomers have discovered 128 new moons orbiting  Saturn , giving it an insurmountable lead in the running tally of moons in the solar system. Until recently, the  “moon king” title was held by Jupiter , but Saturn now has a total of 274 moons, almost twice as many as all the other planets combined....  Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/11/astronomers-discover-128-new-moons-orbiting-saturn . 

By MARCIA DUNN, Associated Press.  Excerpt: A  private lunar lander  carrying a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA touched down on the moon Sunday, the latest in a  string of companies  looking to kickstart business on Earth’s celestial neighbor ahead of  astronaut missions . Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander descended from lunar orbit on autopilot, aiming for the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome in an impact basin on the moon’s northeastern edge of the near side. ...An upright and stable landing makes Firefly — a startup founded a decade ago — the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon  without crashing or falling over . Even  countries have faltered , with only five claiming success: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan. ...the lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA. The space agency paid $101 million for the delivery, plus $44 million for the science and tech on board. It’s the third mission under N...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Staring deep into space and far back in time, a team of astronomers may have spotted a galaxy full of stars made from only the primordial gas created in the Big Bang. Such “population III stars” would have formed from hydrogen and helium and nothing else, and researchers have been searching for them for decades.... If confirmed, the discovery, made with NASA’s JWST space observatory, opens a window on the starting point of the chemical enrichment of the universe, in which the heavier elements needed to make planets and life began to be forged in stellar explosions. ...The nature of population III stars remains uncertain. Most theorists think they were huge, with masses up to 1000 times that of the Sun, 10 times larger than any star around today. ...The gigantic stars that resulted would also burn hot and fast, ending in a supernova explosion after just a few million years. That brief first flash of population III stars is hard for astronomers to...

By Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: Mars today is a cold, dry, dusty planet with its only obvious water locked up in frozen polar ice caps. But billions of years ago, it appears to have had sandy beaches lapped by waves along the shoreline of a vast ocean. The evidence for beaches on Mars comes from a Chinese rover, called Zhurong, that landed on the planet in 2021. During its short life it detected evidence of underground beach deposits in an area thought to have once been the site of an ancient sea, bolstering the idea that the planet long ago had large bodies of water. ...between May 2021 and May 2022, Zhurong traveled 1.9 kilometers (1.2 miles) roughly perpendicular to escarpments thought to be an ancient shoreline from a time — 4 billion years ago — when Mars had a thicker atmosphere and a warmer climate. Along its path, the rover used ground penetrating radar (GPR) to probe up to 80 meters (260 feet) beneath the surface. ...“The structures don’t look like sand du...