Scientists have discovered unexplained climate patterns on Jupiter that periodically repeat in years-long cycles, and weirdly mirror each other in each hemisphere. The strange finding raises intriguing questions about the biggest planet in our solar system, as well as giant gas worlds that orbit alien stars, reports a new study.

Jupiter is so humongous that it could contain 1,300 Earths, a size that makes it one of the brightest objects in the sky. Over the past few centuries, telescopes have revealed the mesmerizing tempests that swirl across the upper layers of its skies and visiting spacecraft have confirmed that Jupiter’s atmosphere is unimaginably complex.

Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, has been watching Jupiter since he was a kid with a backyard telescope. 

In the 1990s, Orton and his colleagues spotted tantalizing signs of weird climate patterns on the planet, but the researchers needed a specific set of long-term infrared data in order to get a sense of the bigger picture. 

Now, Orton and his colleagues have discovered “unexpected seasonal and non-seasonal periodicities,” along with other “associated puzzles,” in infrared observations of Jupiter that span 40 years, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy. The results suggest that a higher layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere, called the stratosphere, is heavily influencing temperatures at a lower level, known as the troposphere.

“Although…there were some earlier hints in the stratosphere, the types of things we’ve discovered include several things we never anticipated,” Orton told Motherboard in an email. “That was one of our first ‘wow’ moments.”

Over the course of his career, Orton has seen Jupiter come into sharper focus thanks to both ground-based telescopes and a succession of NASA space missions, starting with Pioneer 10 and 11, launched in 1972, through to the Juno orbiter, which is currently circling the planet. These images have offered brief glimpses of periodic patterns in temperatures in the troposphere that have intrigued Jupiter-watchers for decades.

“My thesis work at Caltech had included analyzing a combination of Pioneer 10/11 and ground-based infrared observations,” Orton said. “There were a couple of differences between Pioneer 10 and 11 maps of Jupiter that were separated by several months. So I thought of using ground-based infrared instrumentation to continue to see if things continued to change. And they did, so I kept looking. And they were changing still with the Voyager infrared observations.”

Little snippets of odd behavior continued to be revealed by new missions and ground-based telescopes, such as NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF). To build a more comprehensive view of just what is going on in Jupiter’s skies, Orton’s team used imagery from IRTF, the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, and the Very Large Telescope in Chile that covered 1978 to 2019.

The extended timeline showed that tropospheric temperatures on Jupiter varied periodically on timescales of four years, seven to nine years, and 10 to 14 years, for reasons that are not at all clear. Even stranger, these climatic rhythms appear to be “anticorrelated” in latitudes in each hemisphere of the gas giant, “deepening the mystery,” according to Orton. 

“When temperatures at these latitudes in the north rise, the temperatures at these latitudes in the south fall and vice-versa,” he said. “So their variabilities are mirror images of each other.” 

The researchers speculate that the variations might be caused by oscillations in the stratosphere that produce “teleconnected patterns of variability between the two hemispheres,” potentially similar to Earth’s southern El Niño and the North Atlantic oscillations, according to the study. Earth may also be a model for understanding the key role the stratosphere plays in tropospheric cycles, as sudden warming events on our planet can display this “top-down” dynamic.

“In general, we will be testing global climate models based on the same fundamental principles we use for the Earth’s atmosphere to the atmosphere of Jupiter,” Orton said. “In fact, some of that work has already started.”

In addition to examining these models, the team has continued collecting observations of Jupiter that might provide insights into the mysterious climate patterns they’ve discovered. Most recently, the researchers have used the Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument onboard Juno to explore how stratospheric and tropospheric variabilities correspond to phenomena deeper in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

These efforts may uncover the forces that are driving Jupiter’s turbulent climate, which would in turn help scientists understand giant planets, and failed stars called “brown dwarfs” that exist across the universe.

“Realistic global climate models for Jupiter must address the origins of these unexpected seasonal and non-seasonal periodicities on a virtually aseasonal gas giant in preparation for their eventual extension to a wider array of brown dwarfs and gas giant planets outside our solar system,” Orton and his colleagues concluded in the study. 

Picture, for a moment, the first human base on Mars. Perhaps you’re thinking of a modest habitat, a communications dish, or a return ship on a launchpad at a distance. As you look around, though, you might be surprised to see a line of wind turbines spinning in the Martian breeze, providing power to the first astronauts to walk on another planet.

This vision of a wind-powered Mars base is not only feasible, it could actually open up novel locations on the Martian surface for exploration, reports a new study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy. The study assessed the viability of turbines as an energy source for future Mars missions, and the results hint that wind power could be an important pillar of energy generation on the red planet, assuming humans are able to successfully land there in the coming decades. 

Scientists have generally written off wind power as a key energy source for Mars missions, compared to solar and nuclear power, because Martian winds are extremely weak. Now, a team led by Victoria Hartwick, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, has used global climate models of Mars to show that, contrary to past assumptions, “wind power represents a stable, sustained energy resource across large portions of the Mars surface,” according to the study.

“Using a state-of-the-art Mars global climate model, we analyze the total planetary Martian wind potential and calculate its spatial and temporal variability,” Hartwick and her colleagues said in the study. “We find that wind speeds at some proposed landing sites are sufficiently fast to provide a stand-alone or complementary energy source to solar or nuclear power.”

“Wind energy represents a valuable but previously dismissed energy resource for future human missions to Mars, which will be useful as a complementary energy source to solar power,” the team added. 

Any human mission to Mars will require multiple reliable sources of power to support the astronauts and their operations, but all of the options for extraterrestrial energy generation have their pluses and minuses. Nuclear power is widely regarded as a key enabler to crewed Mars missions, but placing nuclear devices near human habitats could present safety risks. Solar power has been used on many past Mars rovers, but this form of energy is diminished during the Martian night and during dust storms that obscure the Sun’s light. 

What’s more, many of the most promising landing sites for humans on Mars are located at higher latitudes in and around the poles, where liquid water could potentially be harvested from extraterrestrial ice. However, these areas also experience larger variations in the availability of solar power, presenting the need for a secondary source of energy.

To assess whether wind power could fill that gap, Hartwick and her colleagues used the NASA Ames Mars global climate model to estimate wind speeds across the planet. 

Since Mars’ atmosphere is very thin, with only 1 percent the density of Earth’s atmosphere, Martian winds are pretty wimpy everywhere. Even so, the researchers found that several tantalizing locations could theoretically use wind as the only source of power, and that a combination of solar and wind power would unlock sites across a huge swath of the planet—including icy locations at the poles. 

“During Northern Hemisphere winter, winds blow from cooler surface ice deposits to warm regolith,” the researchers said. “This effect, analogous to a ‘sea breeze’, may be particularly important at proposed high-latitude sites adjacent to seasonal ice deposits. In several locations, the annual average wind power exceeds available solar power by up to 3.4 times.”

“Many sites at these latitudes have been dismissed due to solar energetic limitations during polar night,” they noted. “We demonstrate that if the availability of water outweighs other challenges, wind energy could act as the dominant energy source when solar energy is seasonally depleted, opening a large fraction of the polar landscape to human exploration. Similarly, wind energy resources maximize at night when solar energy is at its minimum.”

To that point, the team identified several sites that would be particularly conducive to wind power, including locations within the icy northern regions of Deuteronilus Mensae and Protonilus Mensae. The researchers envision setting up medium-sized turbines, measuring 50 meters (160 feet) tall, to catch the stronger winds in these areas, allowing astronauts to subsist in the strange glacial terrain of an alien world. Turbines could also be effective if placed near topographical gradients, such as crater rims or the slopes of ancient volcanoes, to catch the gusts generated by these landscapes. 

Of course, wind power also has drawbacks, including the bulky heft of turbines that would need to be packed off on economical missions to Mars. But overall, the results of the new study suggest that wind power could expand exploration options for the Martian landscape, and serve a key role as either a standalone or backup source of power on humanity’s first interplanetary adventure. 

“We encourage additional study aimed at advancing wind turbine technology to operate efficiently under Mars conditions and to extract more power from Mars winds,” the team concluded

Scientists have discovered that the most energetic beams of light in the universe, known as gamma rays, may have played a key role in the emergence of life on Earth, a finding that provides clues about one of the ultimate mysteries in science, reports a new study. 

In a first-of-its-kind experiment, researchers showed that compounds called amino acids, which are the building blocks of life, can be forged by gamma rays that erupt inside space rocks due to the decay of radioactive elements. The results pinpoint one possible origin for the amino acids that ended up strewn across Earth billions of years ago, enriching our planet with the necessary ingredients for life.  

The question of how life arose has inspired countless myths across time and cultures, and it has also become one of the most enduring problems in science. Scientists have long suspected that some of the ingredients for life were delivered to Earth by space rocks that pelted its surface more than four billion years ago. However, it’s not clear what kinds of amino acids might have existed within these ancient meteorites, or how they might have formed.

Now, scientists led by Yoko Kebukawa, an astrobiologist at Yokohama National University, have experimentally demonstrated that formaldehyde and ammonia, common compounds in space rocks, can transform into amino acids when exposed to gamma rays, a finding that points to “a new prebiotic amino acid formation pathway that contributes to life’s origin,” according to a study published in ACS Central Science.

“As far as we know, it is the first time amino acids [have been produced] from formaldehyde and ammonia by gamma-rays,” Kebukawa said in an email to Motherboard, adding that her team was “surprised by the results.” 

“We kind of expected that some amino acids would be produced, but the results were much better than expected, with quality and quantity,” she continued. “Various amino acids were produced by gamma-ray and their amount was significant.”

Kebukawa and her colleagues had previously demonstrated that ammonia and formaldehyde could transform into amino acids, and organic molecules, in the presence of liquid water and heat. Ammonia, formaldehyde, and water are all present in carbonaceous chondrites, an ancient group of space rocks, leading scientists to believe that these meteorites played an important role in making Earth habitable. However, the heat source that catalyzed the reactions that make amino acids has remained unclear.

In the new study, Kebukawa’s team explored the possibility that gamma rays created by the decay of radioactive atoms, such as aluminum isotopes, may have been the cauldron that cooked up these primordial biomolecules. To do this, the researchers exposed tubes of dissolved ammonia and formaldehyde to gamma rays emitted by the decay of cobalt isotopes. 

The experiment created a panoply of compounds that are useful to living creatures, including alanine, glycine, and several beta amino acids. What’s more, the team estimated that it would take fewer than 100,000 years for some amino acids to reach the abundances seen in a rock like the Murchison meteorite, a carbonaceous chondrite that landed in Australia in 1969. This short timeframe hints that amino acids were probably common in carbonaceous chondrites in the early solar system, bolstering the notion that these rocks helped to pave the way for life on Earth—and perhaps other planets. 

“Amino acids can be produced non-biologically in various space environments,” Kebukawa explained. “Among them, meteorite parent body processes are the final stage of organic evolution in space before being delivered to the Earth. The amino acids produced in meteorite parent bodies would be directly delivered to the ancient Earth as meteorites, and might become building blocks of life.”

“Similar to the Earth, such amino acids could be delivered to ancient Mars where the weather was mild and there were oceans,” she added. “Also, amino acids produced by gamma rays possibly occurred in the subsurface ocean worlds in icy moons such as Enceladus” within “a few million years after the solar system formation” before the radioactive gamma ray sources were depleted.  

The researchers hope to build on these findings by exploring whether gamma rays might produce other kinds of organic compounds that were important to the emergence of life. While there are still far more questions than answers when it comes to life’s origins, the new study opens a tantalizing window into the energetic reactions that briefly warmed space rocks billions of years ago, potentially converting them into seeds that would ultimately blossom into the vibrant biosphere we inhabit today.

In a major breakthrough for genetic research, scientists have recovered what is by far the oldest DNA to date. The 2-million-year-old DNA reveals an unprecedented glimpse of a unique Ice Age ecosystem that existed long ago, while also offering an eerie preview of our own future in a warming world, reports a new study.

The discovery of this lost world is based on environmental eDNA (eDNA), a mishmash of genetic detritus that represents an entire habitat, extracted from Kap København Formation, a fossil bed that sits in a polar desert in Northern Greenland. The frozen landscape and mineral conditions at the site contributed to the unrivaled preservation of this genetic material, which is a full million years older than the next oldest DNA, found in a mammoth tooth.

Since 2006, researchers led by Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cambridge, have meticulously worked to collect and analyze samples from Kap København. Now, the team unveils a “reconstructed ecosystem [that] has no modern analogue,” home to mastodons, reindeer, geese, horseshoe crabs, corals, and other lifeforms that lived around an open boreal forest that flourished when this part of Greenland was 11 to 19°C warmer than it is today, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.

“It was super exciting when we recovered the DNA of a very different ecosystem,” Willerslev said in a press briefing on Tuesday that included several other study co-authors. “Obviously, it's important that we can go much further back in time, but it's also the time we can go back to. This is a time where it was significantly warmer” and featured “a climate which is very similar to what we expect to face with global warming.”

“Therefore, of course it gives some kind of idea or impression of how nature can respond to increasing temperatures,” he continued. “The great surprise is that this ecosystem that we see is an ecosystem with no modern analogue. It's a mixture between Arctic and temperate species and you don’t see that anywhere today.” 

If you were to travel back in time to Kap København two million years ago, you might see mastodons ambling along a coast forested by poplar, birch, and thuja trees. Perhaps you’d spot a river flowing out to the sea, carrying tiny bits of genetic material shed by the plants and animals along its banks, such as reindeer, geese, and rodents. Gazing out toward the ocean, you might catch a glimpse of horseshoe crabs scuttling through corals on the seafloor, or algal blooms forming on the waves.

This tantalizing vision has one notable omission: Carnivores. While no traces of predators were found in the eDNA samples, Willerslev’s team suggested that this was simply because carnivore populations tend to be far smaller than herbivore populations, producing a sampling bias.

“We believe it's basically a numbers game,” Willerslev told Motherboard during the briefing. “The environmental DNA is really reflecting the biomass of the organisms. The more biomass you have, the more DNA is left in the surroundings. Therefore, obviously plants are more common than herbivores, and herbivores are more common than carnivores, so that's probably the reason why we're not capturing the carnivores.” 

“I would say, though, that if we continued taking and sequencing samples, my prediction would be that then we would catch, at some point, some of the carnivores,” he continued. “But at this stage, I'm afraid to say we don't really know what was up there—probably something that ate mastodons and reindeers.”

Mikkel Pedersen, a geogeneticist at the University of Copenhagen who co-authored the study, speculated to Motherboard that bears, wolves, or even saber-toothed tigers might have been present in this ancient habitat, based on contemporary North American ecosystems. However, he emphasized that this is only conjecture, and there’s no hard evidence of any carnivores at Kap København at this point.

To that point, the researchers are eager to continue collecting and analyzing samples from the site in order to track down more of the bygone creatures that thrived there two million years ago. The team also expressed hope that other frozen landscapes might contain these hidden genetic portals into long-lost biomes. Indeed, Willerslev said that he would not be surprised to find eDNA that is twice as old as the samples from Kap København, potentially pushing the timeline of ancient DNA back to four million years.

This exploration of our past is also a window into our future, as climate change is likely to produce some of the same conditions that were experienced two million years ago. The mastodons, reindeer, and crabs of this northern ecosystem lived long before the rise of modern humans, but now, we live in a world that has been fundamentally altered by our own species, and its activities.

“Nature has already experienced climate change,” Willerslev concluded. “By going back into the past, of course, you had this roadmap of how [species] adapted” which “opens up a new possibility if you want to try to mitigate the impact of climate change.”