Such an event, if it transpired on Earth today, would see kilometres-thick ice sheets gouging their way from the Arctic to the Bahamas. Once-diverse ecosystems and climate zones would merge into a single, uniform condition, seemingly destined to be barren. Scientists once argued that such a 'snowball' state could never have existed on Earth since global glaciation could not be reversed. Moreover, on such a world, all life, including our own ancestors, would surely have been extinguished.
Hubble captured the planet's reflected visible light and highlighted Saturn's iconic yellow hues, which are, in part, a product of the sunlight-reflecting ammonia crystals and hydrocarbons such as methane in its atmosphere.
The new work was less notable for showing that we had found these bases in Ryugu than for solving a previous mystery: earlier studies had failed to detect them there, despite their presence in many other asteroid samples.
Observations from the ALMA telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert show that the coma of this celestial object is heavily enriched in methanol, a type of alcohol common in fuels and solvents. Although methanol is commonly found in comets in the solar system, 3I/Atlas contained up to four times the typical amount.
We found that life is more likely to survive an asteroid impact, so it's definitely still a real possibility that life on Earth could have come from Mars. Maybe we're Martians! The idea that life could have spread through the solar system or even the universe on rocks is known as the lithopanspermia hypothesis.
How the most massive objects in the universe first formed is one of the biggest headscratchers in astrophysics. With more advanced telescopes, astronomers have found fully formed galaxies and colossal black holes earlier and earlier in the cosmos, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. This shouldn't be enough time for these structures to reach their incredible size; to astronomers, it's like stumbling on a fully-grown oak tree that's only a year old.
For example, reader David Erickson had this on his mind: If there were aliens 66 million light-years from Earth, how big a telescope would they need to see dinosaurs? Ha! I love this question. I've thought of it myself but never worked out the mathexcept to think, Probably pretty big, which turns out to dramatically underestimate the actual answer.
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