A recent study suggests that the “light fingerprint” of life on other planets might be purple rather than green.

Some microbes on Earth are purple, but in our oxygen-rich environment, green life prevails in most ecosystems. Researchers from Cornell University say that life elsewhere may likely make energy with different types of light from the sun, and use compounds with purple pigments rather than green.

About 2.4 billion years ago, cyanobacteria, the first-known photosynthesizing species, began harnessing sunlight using chlorophyll. Before this, microorganisms relied on a purple-pigment molecule called retinal for energy production. This molecule, if present on other planets, could leave a unique signature detectable by advanced telescopes.

Scientists selected over 20 purple-coloured bacteria from different ecosystems, measuring their vibrant pigments and how they give off light. Then, they simulated the “light signatures” — the unique colour and chemical fingerprints that would be visible in an alien planet’s reflected light — and found these purple bacteria would generate vivid, identifiable signatures.

Space observatories could look for these signs of purple life when observing exoplanets — distant planets beyond the sun. Upcoming powerful telescopes, such as the Extremely Large Telescope and the Habitable Worlds Observatory, will look into the atmospheres of such far-off worlds to determine their composition and habitability.

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Lone travellers

We imagine planets going around a star, endlessly orbiting it as long as they live. It turns out that not all planets exist this way. Astronomers have discovered a few Jupiter-sized planets drifting alone, without a place to call home or a star as a boss. They are thought to have been ejected out of their star system due to some massive explosion event. As long as they are not on a trajectory towards Earth, it’s dreamy fun to think about these lonely nomadic travellers.

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Mars may one day have rings similar to Saturn’s famous halo, research suggests.

The two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, are named after the children of the god Ares, the Greek counterpart to Mars, the Roman god of war. The larger, inner moon, Phobos is the only remaining inwardly migrating moon known to exist today.

Phobos, is just 22 kms wide and orbits the Red Planet rapidly, rising and setting twice each Martian day. The tiny moon is slowly drawing closer to Mars by 6.5 feet every century which may result in a dramatic crash into the Martian surface within 30-50 million years, previous research has shown.

Researchers now suggest that instead of going out in a single, enormous impact, the moon will be pulled apart by Martian gravity. After simulating the stresses caused by the tidal pull of Mars, they found that the moon would break up over the course of 20-40 million years, forming a ring of debris around the planet. The rubble would continue to move inward towards the planet, and over the span of 1 million to 100 million years, the particles would rain down on the equatorial region of Mars. Initially, the ring could be as dense as Saturn’s, but it would become thinner as the particles fall down onto the planet over time.

What would the Martian ring look like? “From one angle, the ring will reflect extra light towards a viewer, and it will look like a bright curve in the sky,” says Tushar Mittal, one of the authors of the research paper. “From another angle, the viewer might be in the ring’s shadow, and the ring would be a dark curve in the sky.”

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Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, is cracked! Photos taken by NASA’s New Horizons space probe, revealed a 1,600 km long chasm stretching across the face of Charon. That’s over four times longer than the Grand Canyon and almost twice as deep in places. Researchers opine that an internal water ocean could have frozen long ago, and the resulting volume change could have led to Charon cracking open, allowing water-based lavas to reach the surface.

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The Sweden Solar System is the world’s largest model of our planetary system, built at a scale of 1:20 million and stretching the entire length of the country. The Sun is represented by the Ericsson Globe Arena in Stockholm, the largest spherical building in the world. Sculptures of the planets are placed and sized according to scale, with Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in Stockholm, Jupiter at Arlanda Airport, Saturn in Uppsala, Uranus in Gavle, Neptune by the River Söderhamnsån and Pluto in Delsbo, with known asteroids, comets and exoplanets along the way. It all ends with the Termination Shock (the boundary where solar wind transitions to subsonic velocity) at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna.

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The flag of Mars is a tricolour used by the Mars Society and the Planetary Society and designed to represent the “future history” of Mars. The red bar symbolizes the Mars we know today. The green and blue bars symbolize stages in the possible terraforming of Mars (the climate and the surface would be deliberately changed to make large areas of the environment hospitable to humans)

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Saturn’s moon Enceladus might be a skier’s paradise. High-resolution maps of the sixth-largest moon of the giant ringed planet confirm that wintry conditions prevail on the icy body. Cryovolcanoes at the south pole shoot large jets of water vapour, volatiles and solid particles (ice crystals, NaCl particles, etc.) into space, totalling approximately 200 kg per second. Some of this falls back onto the moon as “snow” at less than a thousandth of a millimetre per year. To build up roughly 320 feet of the stuff would require a few tens of millions of years or so!

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