This week in space: Scientists find signs of life on Venus – Albany Times Union

"This Week in Space" brings you whats new and exciting in space exploration and astronomy once a week, every week. From supernovae to SpaceX or Mars missions to black holes, if its out of this world, its covered here.

Astronomers announced the discovery of one of the youngest planets ever. The newborn planet, a gas giant like Jupiter, orbits a star that's only 14 million years old. If the Sun is middle-aged, this star is the equivalent of a month-old baby. What's especially cool is that the planet was discovered through direct imaging, meaning the scientists actually took a photo of the star, blocked out the star's light as best they could, and saw the planet in what was left over.

Only a handful of planets like this have been discovered, and each one is immensely valuable for helping astronomers figure out how planets form.

You may recall a lot of hubbub last fall about astronomers discovering phosphine on Venus. The chemical isn't expected to be abundantly formed in Venus' atmosphere by any known natural processes, so it was an exciting possibility that the discovery was evidence for life. Following the discovery a bunch of papers came out saying that the detection was bad science. Last monday, however, the scientists behind the original study released a refutation of these claims and found that a second, more conservative look still turns up a strong phosphine signal. All the more reason to explore Venus for more potential signs of life.

New findings showed that the closest star to us, Proxima Centauri, recently erupted in a flare that made it one thousand times brighter. The flare is the biggest that has ever been observed from Proxima. While the outburst wont affect things on Earth, Proxima Centauri is famous for hosting a potentially habitable Earth-sized planet around it. Some have been holding out hopes for signs of intelligent life on the planet, since it is at the right distance from its star to host liquid water on its surface. But with this giant flare, it grows more likely that the planet is in too inhospitable an environment to sustain life. The next closest known planet, Epsilon Eridanus b, is about three times as far away. Cross your fingers for it?

In 2017, the Juno space mission surprised everyone with news that Jupiters core was fuzzy - neither made of rock nor gas, but a weird slush of the two. Now, two astronomers at Caltech have found that Saturn has a strikingly similar center through a careful study of its famous rings. The fact that both planets have such diffuse cores could mean that they both experienced huge head-on collisions billions of years ago, or, perhaps more likely, that they started off rocky and then eroded over time.

Either scenario would challenge our current understanding of how the Solar Systemand Earth itselfevolved.

Asa Stahl is an astrophysics PhD candidate at Rice University and the award-winning author of the pop science childrens book "The Big Bang Book." His research is aimed at discovering planets around other stars in order to answer some of our biggest questions, like "How special is the Earth?" and "How did we get here?" His recent book has been recognized as an Edward Jack Keats Award Honoree, an NSTA-CBC Outstanding Science Book, and a Sakura Medal Finalist.

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This week in space: Scientists find signs of life on Venus - Albany Times Union