I know that's not how the phrase is meant to be read, but I can't unsee it as it flying separately by the earth and the moon and deciding to buzz one of the two a bit closer.
This means it’s an asteroid with a weight-class that would have burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, if its orbit happened to intersect ours more directly.
A quick search suggests that something as small as 5 meters can survive hitting the ground, however there are a number of calculations to consider including the speed it is traveling, the entry angle, and the material it is made of.
“In early March, NASA announced that construction and testing of the three CADRE rovers was complete and the trio was ready for integration with Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander, which will deliver the mini explorers to the lunar surface later this year or early next year as part of the company’s third lunar lander mission, IM-3.”
There are five confirmed dwarf planets in the solar system: Ceres, Haumea, Eris, Makemake and the ex-planet Pluto. All of these planetary pretenders, apart from Ceres, are located in or around the Kuiper Belt, a disk of comets and other small objects beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Pluto is so far from the sun and still has never seen such shade.
That’s the zone for liquid water at the planet surface. There’s other sources of heat; gravitational pressure, geothermal vents from plate tectonics, etc. In this case they’re looking for methane with a chemical signature that indicates it comes from geothermal activity as opposed to other processes that generate methane.
So that’s also studies by astrobiologists looking at atmospheric methane because we know it can be created in large quantities by metabolism in an organism in addition to non organic processes, and in the atmosphere it reacts to sunlight so it needs to be replaced to stay present in large quantities.
This is something different where they’re looking for chemical signatures, primarily methane, indicating geothermal vents which we’ve seen providing the energy to sustain life on earth at the bottom of the ocean. If abiogenesis requires some non organic processes like sublimation, evaporation, heating up and cooling down, etc to allow a self repeating process to start and continue to hold form until it’s able to use sugars to continue to maintain itself instead of depending on its environment to kick start the life process then you’ll want to look for those phase changes or boundaries like water/atmosphere or extreme heat/cold to provide the gradient that natural process may need like those studied in systems chemistry.
I always thought of our universes as just a bubble, with dark matter all around us. It’s not the edge of the existence as much as the edge of our bubble.
We might not be the only bubble, but it’s impossible to interact or even observe them. Could be millions, could just be us. No way to every know.
Our bubble keeps expanding, until the edges aren’t dense enough to displace whatever’s out there. And we’ll either slowly fade and future civilizations will assume the universe has always shrunk. Because that’s all they’ve ever seen. Like if the human lifespan was a single minute, people would freak out everytime it approaches dawn or dusk. Not understanding that it’s a cycle.
livescience.com
Gorące