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Mars has right ingredients for present-day microbial life beneath its surface, study finds
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As NASA’s Perseverance rover begins its search for ancient life on the surface of Mars, a new study suggests that the Martian subsurface might be a good place to look for possible present-day life on the Red Planet.
“”The big implication here for subsurface exploration science is that wherever you have groundwater on Mars, there’s a good chance that you have enough chemical energy to support subsurface microbial life,” said Jesse Tarnas, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led the study while completing his Ph.D. at Brown University. “”We don’t know whether life ever got started beneath the surface of Mars, but if it did, we think there would be ample energy there to sustain it right up to today.””
In recent decades, scientists have discovered that Earth’s depths are home to a vast biome that exists largely separated from the world above. Lacking sunlight, these creatures survive using the byproducts of chemical reactions produced when rocks come into contact with water.
One of those reactions is radiolysis, which occurs when radioactive elements within rocks react with water trapped in pore and fracture space. The reaction breaks water molecules into their constituent elements, hydrogen and oxygen. The liberated hydrogen is dissolved in the remaining groundwater, while minerals like pyrite (fool’s gold) soak up free oxygen to form sulfate minerals. Microbes can ingest the dissolved hydrogen as fuel and use the oxygen preserved in the sulfates to “burn” that fuel.
In places like Canada’s Kidd Creek Mine, these “sulfate-reducing” microbes have been found living more than a mile underground, in water that hasn’t seen the light of day in more than a billion years. Tarnas has been working with a team co-led by Brown University professor Jack Mustard and Professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar of the University of Toronto to better understand these underground systems, with an eye toward looking for similar habitats on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system. The project, called Earth 4-D: Subsurface Science and Exploration, is supported by the Canadian Institute for Advances Research.
For this new study, the researchers wanted to see if the ingredients for radiolysis-driven habitats could exist on Mars. They drew on data from NASA’s Curiosity rover and other orbiting spacecraft, as well as compositional data from a suite of Martian meteorites, which are representative of different parts of the planet’s crust.
The researchers were looking for the ingredients for radiolysis: radioactive elements like thorium, uranium and potassium; sulfide minerals that could be converted to sulfate; and rock units with adequate pore space to trap water. The study found that in several different types of Martian meteorites, all the ingredients are present in adequate abundances to support Earth-like habitats. This was particularly true for regolith breccias — meteorites sourced from crustal rocks more than 3.6 billion years old — which were found to have the highest potential for life support. Unlike Earth, Mars lacks a plate tectonics system that constantly recycle crustal rocks. So these ancient terrains remain largely undisturbed.
The researchers say the findings help make the case for an exploration program that looks for signs of present-day life in the Martian subsurface. Prior research has found evidence of an active groundwater system on Mars in the past, the researchers say, and there’s reason to believe that groundwater exists today. One recent study, for example, raised the possibility of an underground lake lurking under the planet’s southern ice cap. This new research suggests that wherever there’s groundwater, there’s energy for life.
Tarnas and Mustard say that while there are certainly technical challenges involved in subsurface exploration, they aren’t as insurmountable as people may think. A drilling operation wouldn’t require “a Texas-sized oil rig,” Mustard said, and recent advances in small drill probes could soon put the Martian depths within reach.
“The subsurface is one of the frontiers in Mars exploration,” Mustard said. “We’ve investigated the atmosphere, mapped the surface with different wavelengths of light and landed on the surface in half-a-dozen places, and that work continues to tell us so much about the planet’s past. But if we want to think about the possibility of present-day life, the subsurface is absolutely going to be where the action is.”
The research was supported by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
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Early dark energy could resolve cosmology’s two biggest puzzles
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A new study by MIT physicists proposes that a mysterious force known as early dark energy could solve two of the biggest puzzles in cosmology and fill in some major gaps in our understanding of how the early universe evolved.
Now, the MIT team has found that both puzzles could be resolved if the early universe had one extra, fleeting ingredient: early dark energy. Dark energy is an unknown form of energy that physicists suspect is driving the expansion of the universe today. Early dark energy is a similar, hypothetical phenomenon that may have made only a brief appearance, influencing the expansion of the universe in its first moments before disappearing entirely.
Some physicists have suspected that early dark energy could be the key to solving the Hubble tension, as the mysterious force could accelerate the early expansion of the universe by an amount that would resolve the measurement mismatch.
The MIT researchers have now found that early dark energy could also explain the baffling number of bright galaxies that astronomers have observed in the early universe. In their new study, reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the team modeled the formation of galaxies in the universe’s first few hundred million years. When they incorporated a dark energy component only in that earliest sliver of time, they found the number of galaxies that arose from the primordial environment bloomed to fit astronomers’ observations.
“You have these two looming open-ended puzzles,” says study co-author Rohan Naidu, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “We find that in fact, early dark energy is a very elegant and sparse solution to two of the most pressing problems in cosmology.”
The study’s co-authors include lead author and Kavli postdoc Xuejian (Jacob) Shen, and MIT professor of physics Mark Vogelsberger, along with Michael Boylan-Kolchin at the University of Texas at Austin, and Sandro Tacchella at the University of Cambridge.
Big city lights
Based on standard cosmological and galaxy formation models, the universe should have taken its time spinning up the first galaxies. It would have taken billions of years for primordial gas to coalesce into galaxies as large and bright as the Milky Way.
But in 2023, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) made a startling observation. With an ability to peer farther back in time than any observatory to date, the telescope uncovered a surprising number of bright galaxies as large as the modern Milky Way within the first 500 million years, when the universe was just 3 percent of its current age.
“The bright galaxies that JWST saw would be like seeing a clustering of lights around big cities, whereas theory predicts something like the light around more rural settings like Yellowstone National Park,” Shen says. “And we don’t expect that clustering of light so early on.”
For physicists, the observations imply that there is either something fundamentally wrong with the physics underlying the models or a missing ingredient in the early universe that scientists have not accounted for. The MIT team explored the possibility of the latter, and whether the missing ingredient might be early dark energy.
Physicists have proposed that early dark energy is a sort of antigravitational force that is turned on only at very early times. This force would counteract gravity’s inward pull and accelerate the early expansion of the universe, in a way that would resolve the mismatch in measurements. Early dark energy, therefore, is considered the most likely solution to the Hubble tension.
Galaxy skeleton
The MIT team explored whether early dark energy could also be the key to explaining the unexpected population of large, bright galaxies detected by JWST. In their new study, the physicists considered how early dark energy might affect the early structure of the universe that gave rise to the first galaxies. They focused on the formation of dark matter halos — regions of space where gravity happens to be stronger, and where matter begins to accumulate.
“We believe that dark matter halos are the invisible skeleton of the universe,” Shen explains. “Dark matter structures form first, and then galaxies form within these structures. So, we expect the number of bright galaxies should be proportional to the number of big dark matter halos.”
The team developed an empirical framework for early galaxy formation, which predicts the number, luminosity, and size of galaxies that should form in the early universe, given some measures of “cosmological parameters.” Cosmological parameters are the basic ingredients, or mathematical terms, that describe the evolution of the universe.
Physicists have determined that there are at least six main cosmological parameters, one of which is the Hubble constant — a term that describes the universe’s rate of expansion. Other parameters describe density fluctuations in the primordial soup, immediately after the Big Bang, from which dark matter halos eventually form.
The MIT team reasoned that if early dark energy affects the universe’s early expansion rate, in a way that resolves the Hubble tension, then it could affect the balance of the other cosmological parameters, in a way that might increase the number of bright galaxies that appear at early times. To test their theory, they incorporated a model of early dark energy (the same one that happens to resolve the Hubble tension) into an empirical galaxy formation framework to see how the earliest dark matter structures evolve and give rise to the first galaxies.
“What we show is, the skeletal structure of the early universe is altered in a subtle way where the amplitude of fluctuations goes up, and you get bigger halos, and brighter galaxies that are in place at earlier times, more so than in our more vanilla models,” Naidu says. “It means things were more abundant, and more clustered in the early universe.”
“A priori, I would not have expected the abundance of JWST’s early bright galaxies to have anything to do with early dark energy, but their observation that EDE pushes cosmological parameters in a direction that boosts the early-galaxy abundance is interesting,” says Marc Kamionkowski, professor of theoretical physics at Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved with the study. “I think more work will need to be done to establish a link between early galaxies and EDE, but regardless of how things turn out, it’s a clever — and hopefully ultimately fruitful — thing to try.”
“We demonstrated the potential of early dark energy as a unified solution to the two major issues faced by cosmology. This might be an evidence for its existence if the observational findings of JWST get further consolidated,” Vogelsberger concludes. “In the future, we can incorporate this into large cosmological simulations to see what detailed predictions we get.”
This research was supported, in part, by NASA and the National Science Foundation.
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Plant-derived secondary organic aerosols can act as mediators of plant-plant interactions
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A new study published in Science reveals that plant-derived secondary organic aerosols (SOAs) can act as mediators of plant-plant interactions. This research was conducted through the cooperation of chemical ecologists, plant ecophysiologists and atmospheric physicists at the University of Eastern Finland.
The study showed that Scots pine seedlings, when damaged by large pine weevils, release VOCs that activate defences in nearby plants of the same species. Interestingly, the biological activity persisted after VOCs were oxidized to form SOAs. The results indicated that the elemental composition and quantity of SOAs likely determines their biological functions.
“A key novelty of the study is the finding that plants adopt subtly different defence strategies when receiving signals as VOCs or as SOAs, yet they exhibit similar degrees of resistance to herbivore feeding,” said Professor James Blande, head of the Environmental Ecology Research Group. This observation opens up the possibility that plants have sophisticated sensing systems that enable them to tailor their defences to information derived from different types of chemical cue.
“Considering the formation rate of SOAs from their precursor VOCs, their longer lifetime compared to VOCs, and the atmospheric air mass transport, we expect that the ecologically effective distance for interactions mediated by SOAs is longer than that for plant interactions mediated by VOCs,” said Professor Annele Virtanen, head of the Aerosol Physics Research Group. This could be interpreted as plants being able to detect cues representing close versus distant threats from herbivores.
The study is expected to open up a whole new complex research area to environmental ecologists and their collaborators, which could lead to new insights on the chemical cues structuring interactions between plants.
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Folded or cut, this lithium-sulfur battery keeps going
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Most rechargeable batteries that power portable devices, such as toys, handheld vacuums and e-bikes, use lithium-ion technology. But these batteries can have short lifetimes and may catch fire when damaged. To address stability and safety issues, researchers reporting in ACS Energy Letters have designed a lithium-sulfur (Li-S) battery that features an improved iron sulfide cathode. One prototype remains highly stable over 300 charge-discharge cycles, and another provides power even after being folded or cut.
The team coated iron sulfide cathodes in different polymers and found in initial electrochemical performance tests that polyacrylic acid (PAA) performed best, retaining the electrode’s discharge capacity after 300 charge-discharge cycles. Next, the researchers incorporated a PAA-coated iron sulfide cathode into a prototype battery design, which also included a carbonate-based electrolyte, a lithium metal foil as an ion source, and a graphite-based anode. They produced and then tested both pouch cell and coin cell battery prototypes.
After more than 100 charge-discharge cycles, Wang and colleagues observed no substantial capacity decay in the pouch cell. Additional experiments showed that the pouch cell still worked after being folded and cut in half. The coin cell retained 72% of its capacity after 300 charge-discharge cycles. They next applied the polymer coating to cathodes made from other metals, creating lithium-molybdenum and lithium-vanadium batteries. These cells also had stable capacity over 300 charge-discharge cycles. Overall, the results indicate that coated cathodes could produce not only safer Li-S batteries with long lifespans, but also efficient batteries with other metal sulfides, according to Wang’s team.
The authors acknowledge funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China; the Natural Science Foundation of Sichuan, China; and the Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics.
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