Thursday, November 7, 2013

ScienceDaily: Astronomy News

ScienceDaily: Astronomy News


Rare new microbe found in two spacecraft clean rooms

Posted: 06 Nov 2013 01:26 PM PST

A rare, recently discovered microbe that survives on very little to eat has been found in two places on Earth: spacecraft clean rooms in Florida and South America. Microbiologists often do thorough surveys of bacteria and other microbes in spacecraft clean rooms. Fewer microbes live there than in almost any other environment on Earth, but the surveys are important for knowing what might hitch a ride into space. If extraterrestrial life is ever found, it would be readily checked against the census of a few hundred types of microbes detected in spacecraft clean rooms.

From one collapsing star, two black holes form and fuse

Posted: 06 Nov 2013 12:24 PM PST

Over billions of years, small black holes can slowly grow into supermassive black holes by taking on mass from their surroundings, and also by merging with other black holes. But this slow process can't explain how supermassive black holes existing in the early universe would have formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. New findings help to test a model that solves this problem.

A shot in the dark: Detector on the hunt for dark matter

Posted: 06 Nov 2013 11:12 AM PST

Physicists are using a detector to hunt for an elusive particle called an axion, a leading candidate for the makeup of cold dark matter that accounts for about one-quarter of the mass of the universe.

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