In 1976, NASA's Viking 1 and 2 missions landed on Mars and began conducting the first astrobiology studies on another planet. This involved the analysis of soil samples for possible indications of organic molecules and biological processes (aka. "biosignatures"). The results of these studies were inconclusive and led to a general sense of pessimism towards the idea that Mars ever hosted life. However, the presence of features that could only have formed in the presence of flowing water - flow channels, delta fans, hydrated minerals, etc. - led to renewed astrobiology efforts by the 1990s.

Since then, no less than 25 missions (a combination of orbiters, landers, and rovers) have been sent to Mars to learn more about its past and resume the search for biosignatures. These efforts have been bolstered by the discovery of Recurring Slope Lineae (RSL), which refers to dark linear features on steep slopes on Mars. These features appear to be seasonal in nature, appearing in summer and fading away during winter, which suggests the presence of liquid water. In a recent paper, Vincent Chevrier of the University of Arkansas (UArk) presents the most compelling evidence to date that seasonal brines occur on Mars.

Between the extreme variations in temperature and Mars' very low atmospheric pressure (less than 1% that of Earth), water cannot exist in a stable form on the surface. As such, the existence of RSLs remains a controversial issue for scientists. These "brines" are believed to result from seasonal melts mixing with the natural perchlorates in Martian soil. Assuming they can exist, these patches could host life in the form of single-celled microbes. According to the latest research by Vincent Chevrier, an associate research professor at UArk's Center for Space and Planetary Sciences,

Vincent Chevrier, an associate research professor at the University of Arkansas' Center for Space and Planetary Sciences.

Credit: UArk

Seasonal frosts are common on Mars and present the best chance for finding liquid brines. However, because of Mars' thin atmosphere, water tends to transition directly from ice and vapor without becoming a liquid (aka. sublimates). To investigate the possibility of liquid existing periodically in the form of brines, Chevrier consulted meteorological data collected by the Viking 2 mission, which landed in the Utopia Planitia region on September 3rd, 1976. Located in Mars' Northern Lowlands, this region is known to have permafrost and is believed to have once been covered by a planetwide ocean.

This was combined with data from the Mars Climate Database and computer modeling to determine if brines could form from melting frost for brief periods. Chevrier selected the Viking 2 data because it is the only mission to have clearly observed, identified, and characterized frost on Mars. Chevrier has spent the last 20 years studying Mars for signs of liquid water and has long suspected that perchlorates are the most promising salts for brine formation because of their extremely low salt-water melting point.

This includes brines composed of water and calcium perchlorate, which solidifies at -75 °C (-103 °F), whereas average surface temperatures on Mars range from 20 °C (68 °F) during the day to -153°C (-243°F) at night. Based on the climate modeling data, Chevrier determined there is a brief window lasting for one Martian month (roughly two months on Earth) between late winter and early spring when temperatures are right for the formation of brines. He further concluded that ideal temperatures are present between early morning and late afternoon, and are either too hot or too cold at other times.

These brines would be scarce, since calcium perchlorate accounts for about 1% of Martian regolith, and frosts that form in the Northern Lowlands are extremely thin. While these findings are not conclusive proof that brines exist on Mars, they do indicate that Mars could conceivably support life adapted to much colder, drier conditions. What's more, they offer a tantalizing prediction of what future missions to Mars could find and suggest that similar processes may occur in other frost-bearing regions, such as the mid-to-high latitudes.

• The paper that describes his findings was recently published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment.

Further Reading: 

• University of Arkansas, Nature Communications Earth and Environment

Next time you're drinking a frosty iced beverage, think about the structure of the frozen chunks chilling it down. Here on Earth, we generally see ice in many forms: cubes, sleet, snow, icicles, slabs covering lakes and rivers, and glaciers. Water ice does this thanks to its hexagonal crystal lattice. That makes it less dense than nonfrozen water, which allows it to float in a drink, in a lake, and on the ocean.

Water ice exists across the Solar System beyond Earth, and it’s abundant in the larger Universe. For example, it shows up in dense molecular clouds. These are star- and planet-forming crèches laced with water ice throughout, as well as in the resulting cometary nuclei. That material is called "low-density amorphous ice (LDA)" and it doesn’t have the same rigid structure as Earth ice does.

We all know that water is the basis for life on this planet. Despite how common it may appear across the Universe, scientists still don’t fully understand it. Studying amorphous ice may help explain its still-to-be-solved mysteries. Here in the Solar System, large amounts of LDA exist in the realm of the ice and gas giants, throughout the Kuiper Belt, and the Oort Cloud. A team of scientists at University College London investigated the form of this ice using computer simulations. They found that the simulations matched the makeup of ice that isn’t completely amorphous and has tiny crystals embedded within.

Jupiter's moon Ganymede is covered with water ice. It likely has a deep, subsurface ocean. Other moons in the Solar System, such as Enceladus, also show evidence of water ice and scientists are interested in the structure of that material.

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kalleheikki Kannisto

What the Difference Means

Scientists long assumed that "space ice" would be "disordered" without the structure we see in ice on Earth. Why does the structure of ice matter? According to researcher Michael Davies, who led the research team, water ice plays a crucial role in materials and structures across the cosmos. “This is important as ice is involved in many cosmological processes,” he said, “for instance in how planets form, how galaxies evolve, and how matter moves around the Universe.” In addition, understanding the structure of this ice in comparison to ice that formed on Earth has implications for understanding other similar "ultrastable glass" substances that form similar to the way ice does.

Low-density water ice was first discovered in the 1930s and a high-density version was discovered in the 1980s. Davies and his team discovered medium-density amorphous ice in 2023. This is a form of water ice that has the same density as liquid water. Unlike the ice cubes in our theoretical drink, such water ice would neither sink nor float in water, which seems strange to us.

Davies’s team’s work also has interesting implications for a speculative theory called Panspermia. It looks at how life on Earth began and suggests that the building blocks of life came to the infant planet as part of a barrage of icy comets. LDA ice could have essentially been the carrier for material such as simple amino acids. However, according to Davies, that "flavor" of ice isn't likely the transporter of choice. “Our findings suggest this ice would be a less good transport material for these origin of life molecules,” he said. “That is because a partly crystalline structure has less space in which these ingredients could become embedded. The theory could still hold true, though, as there are amorphous regions in the ice where life’s building blocks could be trapped and stored.”

Testing the Water Ice

According to Davies, water ice is an important material not just for life, but for other uses. “Ice is potentially a high-performance material in space,” he said. “It could shield spacecraft from radiation or provide fuel in the form of hydrogen and oxygen. So we need to know about its various forms and properties.”

The research team used two computer models of water and froze these virtual “boxes” of water molecules by cooling to -120 °C at different rates. Those different rates had different results, creating varying amounts of crystalline and amorphous ice. The team also created larger boxes of water ice containing many small, closely packed ice crystals. Then, they heated the resulting ice so it could form crystals. Eventually, differences in the resulting crystals showed up, based on their original formation.

The result was an LDA ice with about a quarter of its mass in crystalline form. This was indirect evidence, they said, that low-density amorphous ice contained crystals. If it was fully disordered, the ice would not retain any memory of its earlier forms. The tests raise a lot of questions about the nature of amorphous ices and the role they play in processes such as planet formation. Davies’s co-author Professor Christoph Salzmann, of UCL Chemistry, described the difference between the very structured ice on Earth (and implications for its formation) and the amorphous ice in space. “Ice on Earth is a cosmological curiosity due to our warm temperatures,” he said. “You can see its ordered nature in the symmetry of a snowflake. Ice in the rest of the Universe has long been considered a snapshot of liquid water – that is, a disordered arrangement fixed in place.”

Implications

The result of the team’s simulations shows that the theory of liquid water going straight to a blob of amorphous ice isn’t completely true. Salzmann also suggests that the lab work they did could have important implications for other similar substances. “Our results also raise questions about amorphous materials in general,” he said. “These materials have important uses in much advanced technology. For instance, glass fibers that transport data long distances need to be amorphous, or disordered, for their function. If they do contain tiny crystals and we can remove them, this will improve their performance.”

In layperson’s terms, these substances beyond water ice are part and parcel of such technologies as OLEDs and fiber optics. In the future, an amorphous silicon, for example, could be studied in the same way and lead to major improvements in technologies that depend on the resulting ultrastable glasses.

For More Information

• Low-density Amorphous Ice Contains Crystalline Ice Grains

When rocket engines fire during lunar landings, they don't just kick up a little dust. They unleash massive clouds of high speed particles that behave like natural sandblasting jets, capable of damaging expensive equipment, solar panels, and even entire habitats. As space agencies prepare for permanent lunar settlements through programs like NASA's Artemis mission, understanding this phenomenon has become a matter of survival.

The mystery began during the Apollo era, when astronauts and mission controllers noticed something peculiar, the dust clouds didn't spread randomly. Instead, they formed distinctive streaks radiating outward from the landing site in regular patterns, like spokes on a wheel. The same patterns appeared again recently during Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander mission, proving this wasn't just an Apollo-era anomaly.

Apollo Apollo Lunar Module-5 Eagle as seen from CSM-107 Columbia

(Credit : NASA)

For years, no one could explain why these patterns formed so consistently. Now, a research team led by Rui Ni from Johns Hopkins University has cracked the code. Working with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the University of Michigan, they discovered that the streaks result from something called the Görtler instability, a fluid dynamics phenomenon where curved exhaust flows create rotating vortices that organise the dust into those characteristic patterns.

The vacuum test chamber with its door open at NASA's Johnson Space Center

(Credit : NASA Johnson Space Centre)

To solve this puzzle, the researchers built a sophisticated experimental setup in NASA's 15 foot vacuum chamber. They used six cameras to track how gas jets interacted with simulated lunar soil in near vacuum conditions, mimicking the Moon's environment. This allowed them to observe crater formation and trace the paths of individual dust particles as they were blasted away from the surface.

"We discovered that the strikingly regular streak patterns seen during landings aren't caused by the chosen landing sites. Instead, they result from the behaviour of the supersonic rocket plume as it imprints on the granular surface. This effect is extremely pronounced on the Moon due to its near-vacuum environment.”

- Rui Ni from Johns Hopkins University.

The Moon's lack of atmosphere makes this problem much worse than it would be on Earth. Without air resistance to slow them down, dust particles can travel at tremendous speeds and distances. What might be a minor dust cloud on Earth becomes a dangerous projectile field on the moon.

This outcome of the study is essential for future lunar exploration. High speed lunar dust can damage landing gear, contaminate scientific instruments, reduce solar panel efficiency, and even pose risks to astronauts and their equipment. For permanent lunar bases to succeed, engineers need to understand and prepare for these dust storms.

By understanding how these dust plumes behave, mission planners can better predict where debris will land for future missions, design more resilient equipment, and develop strategies to protect critical infrastructure. They might position sensitive equipment away from predicted dust trajectories for example or design landing pads that minimise dust generation.

Source :

• Engineers study little-known hazard of lunar landings

Georgia State University’s Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA), a six-telescope interferometer, excels at studying stars. It's been observing them for 20 years and has contributed to 276 published papers. The University is celebrating its achievements so far, and underscoring how Georgia State evolved from an institution not known for research to one that's now considered a large research university.

GSU scientist Hal McAlister was the lead author for one of the first papers published based on CHARA data, and is now a Regents' Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at GSU. That paper was focused on the star Regulus, part of the Leo constellation and one of the brightest stars in the sky. "These first results from the CHARA Array provide the first interferometric measurement of gravity darkening in a rapidly rotating star and represent the first detection of gravity darkening in a star that is not a member of an eclipsing binary system," that paper state.

Since then, CHARA has contributed to astrophysics in many ways. It's measured the sizes of stars across a wide range of masses and evolutionary stages, and when combined with data from Gaia and Hipparcos, have let scientists study stellar evolution models more deeply and thoroughly. It's revealed the oblate shapes of rapidly-rotating stars and imaged features on their surface. It's resolved circumstellar disks around Be stars, made of material ejected from the stars themselves.

“It’s been a joy to witness CHARA grow to even greater heights thanks to the dedication of so many over the years,” McAlister said.

Theo ten Brummelaar was the lead author of the second paper published based on CHARA. It explained how the array worked and outlined how GSU planned to upgrade the array in the future. ten Brummelaar was director of the CHARA Array until his retirement in 2022.

"At the time, Georgia State University wasn’t the large research university it is now, and very few people thought we’d get the funding, let alone be successful at building the CHARA Array,” ten Brummelaar said of the early days of the project. “We were a very small team of people with little history of designing and building large instruments like this. Nevertheless, we had a great deal of support, both financial and moral, from the university, and now CHARA and GSU are leaders in the field of ground-based optical interferometry and the astrophysics it enables."

In our current age of exoplanet discovery, the nature of the stars they orbit is critically important to understanding the planets themselves. "Without understanding stars, we'll never understand planets," ten Brummelaar said in an interview.

This figure shows 693 stars. It's an HR diagram of stars, many of which host exoplanets, that was created using interferometry data from CHARA, as well as data from other sources. It's a great example of the contribution CHARA has made in its first 20 years.

Image Credit: Ashley Elliott 2024.

“We knew in 2005 that the array would open a new window on the universe,” said current CHARA Director Douglas Gies. “But it is astonishing how much the array has revealed to us about the stars and their lives.”

CHARA also excels at measuring rapidly-rotating stars. They push the boundaries of stellar physics, and anything that pushes Nature's boundaries can tell scientists a lot. Rapid rotators are known for gravity darkening.

These are some of the rapidly-rotating stars studied by CHARA. The rapid rotation deforms the stars into oblate shapes. That means the equators are further from the cores, and are cooler as a result. This is called gravity darkening, since the equators have less gravity than the poles.

Image Credit: CHARA Array/John Monnier

CHARA has also contributed to our understanding of Nova explosions. These occur in tight binaries where one star is a white dwarf. The white dwarf draws hydrogen away from its companion, where it builds up as a layer on the outside of the white dwarf. Eventually, the hydrogen explodes as a Nova, which is bright at first then slowly fades over months. CHARA has imaged the expanding fireballs that form immediately after the explosion. CHARA observations produced the first images of a Nova during the early fireball stage and revealed how the structure of the ejected material evolves as the gas expands and cools.

This research figure shows how the CHARA array was able to measure the expansion of a Nova fireball from Nova Delphinus 2013 (V339 Del). CHARA was able to show that there's more complexity in these events than thought. By measuring the expansion rate accurately, CHARA showed that a bipolar structure forms as early as the second day and indicates that the fireball is clumpy.

Image Credit: Schaefer et al. 2014, Nature, 515, 243

CHARA observing time is in high demand, and in 2024, the National Science Foundation granted CHARA $3.5 million to allow more researchers to access the array.

“The National Science Foundation award is the key to open the array to the best ideas about new avenues for research,” said Chara Director Gies. “There will be remarkable new results coming soon about stars, planets and distant active galaxies.”

CHARA has seen several upgrades in recent years. New instruments and cameras have increased its power considerably. In 2024, a seventh mobile telescope was added to the array. This is a key upgrade, since the other six are in fixed positions, and will help the array image the surfaces of even larger stars. It will increase the array's baseline from 330 meters to 550 meters. The seventh telescope is also a test case for further future development of the array.

“CHARA runs the best optical and infrared interferometer in the world and delivers the highest resolution observations possible at these wavelengths,” said Nigel Sharp, a program director in NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences. “It is exciting to see that such observations can be delivered routinely and that CHARA’s sought-after capabilities are now available to non-experts in the research community.”

Around three decades ago, we weren't certain that other stars had planets orbiting them. Scientists naturally thought there would be, but they had no evidence. Now, not only do we know of more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets, but we can watch as baby planets take shape around distant stars.

When stars form, they're surrounded by rotating disks of gas and dust called protoplanetary disks. Planets form in these disks, and in recent years, ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array has examined many of these disks. It's made headlines by finding telltale signs of planets forming, as they seem to clear orbital paths in the disks.

This image shows some of the protoplanetary disks imaged by ALMA. The gaps and rings show where planets are forming and creating lanes in the gas and dust.

Image Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), S. Andrews et al.; NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello

Other telescopes have studied these young protoplanetary disks, too, and uncovered their own evidence of planets forming. Astronomers working with the ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and its SPHERE instrument found spiral arm patterns in the disk around the star HD 135344B. While those patterns suggest the presence of a planet, there was no direct evidence.

The SPHERE instrument on the ESO's Very Large Telescope observed these spiral arm patterns around HD 135344B. This instrument suggested the presence of a planet, but didn't provide any direct evidence that one was there. The central black region shows how the star itself is blocked by the telescope's coronagraph.

Image Credit: ESO/T. Stolker et al.

Now astronomers working with another of the VLT's instruments, the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph, may have found direct evidence of a gas giant forming around the star. The discovery is presented in a research letter titled "Unveiling a protoplanet candidate embedded in the HD 135344B disk with VLT/ERIS" published in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The lead author is Francesco Maio, a doctoral researcher at the University of Florence, Italy.

"High-angular-resolution observations in infrared and millimeter wavelengths of protoplanetary disks have revealed cavities, gaps, and spirals," the authors write in their research. "One proposed mechanism to explain these structures is the dynamical perturbation caused by giant protoplanets."

Previous research examined the disk around HD 135344B. ALMA observations revealed spiral arms and hints of a massive planet forming, and other features like a blob. This research has refined those observations with more powerful instruments.

"We identified the previously detected S1, S2, S2a spiral arms and the “blob” features southward of the star," they added. They also found a new point source at the base of the S2 spiral arm. They identify it as a gas giant with about 2 Jupiter masses.

This figure shows the two spiral arms and the candidate companion. The shadow, marked by the arrow, is also evident, along with a fully shadowed region highlighted by the horizontal solid line. This visualization of the shadows further confirms the extended nature of the blob south of the star and highlights that it is part of the S2 spiral interrupted by the shadow.

Image Credit: Maio et al. 2025. A&A

These observations are markedly different from previous observations showing the telltale gaps carved out by exoplanets. With those images, researchers could only deduce that planets created them. And when it comes to spirals, there were other potential explanations, too. "Spiral arms can also be explained by other mechanisms not involving an external perturber," the researchers write, explaining that gravitational instability could potentially create the arms, as could shadows. A 2021 paper explained that asymmetries in circumstellar disks can cast shadows on other regions of the disk. Those shadows create regions of low pressure that could trigger the formation of spirals.

But this time, astronomers have detected light signals from the planet itself.

“What makes this detection potentially a turning point is that, unlike many previous observations, we are able to directly detect the signal of the protoplanet, which is still highly embedded in the disc,” says Maio, who is based at the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, a centre of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). “This gives us a much higher level of confidence in the planet’s existence, as we’re observing the planet’s own light.”

This system is 440 light years away, and the planet is about twice as large as Jupiter. It's about as far away from its star as Neptune is from the Sun (~4.5 billion km).

A different group of researchers have also discovered spiral arms in the disk around another star. It's named V960 Mon, and the researchers used the ERIS instrument on the VLT to observe it. They say they discovered a companion object forming in the disk, and their discovery is in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. It's titled "VLT/ERIS Observations of the V960 Mon System: A Dust-embedded Substellar Object Formed by Gravitational Instability?" and the lead author is Anuroop Dasgupta from the European Southern Observatory.

"V960 Mon is an FU Orionis object that shows strong evidence of a gravitationally unstable spiral arm that is fragmenting into several dust clumps. We report the discovery of a new substellar companion candidate around this young star," the researchers report. It's deeply embedded in the disk, and is close to some previously reported clumps in the disk around V960 Mons. "This candidate may represent an actively accreting, disk-bearing substellar object in a young, gravitationally unstable environment," they write.

The object could be one million years old and have 660 Jupiter masses.

This image shows a possible companion orbiting the young star V960 Mon. Previous analysis of the disc showed that it contains clumps of unstable material that could collapse to form a companion object. The new candidate found here could be either a planet or a brown dwarf.

Image Credit: ESO/A. Dasgupta/ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Weber et al.

This work adds to previous research that identified spiral arms around V960 Mons. That research also found clumps that could be portions of the spiral undergoing gravitational instability and possibly forming planets. "Estimating the mass of solids within these clumps to be of several Earth masses, we suggest this observation to be the first evidence of gravitational instability occurring on planetary scales," those authors wrote.

That research set the stage for Dasgupta and his co-researchers to search for and find more direct evidence of a companion forming in the disk.

“That work revealed unstable material but left open the question of what happens next. With ERIS, we set out to find any compact, luminous fragments signaling the presence of a companion in the disc — and we did,” says Dasgupta. However, they aren't sure if it's a planet or a brown dwarf.

This is a VLT/ERIS image of V960 Mon. The left panel shows the binary star embedded in its environment, marking the detection of V960 Mon N and V960 Mon NE. The right panel shows a zoom-in onto V960 Mon, overlaid with ALMA contours, and the candidate object.

Image Credit: ESO/A. Dasgupta/ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Weber et al.*

This detection is important because if it's confirmed, it could be the first direct evidence of planets forming through gravitational instability (GI). The core accretion theory is more widely accepted, but gravitational instability could better explain how Jupiter mass planets could form quickly, and further from their stars.

These two systems and their spirals are linked with GI. Astronomers think they support the GI formation model, but differentiating between the two processes in distant disks is challenging.

The quest to observe planets as they're still forming is linked to our strong desire to understand how our planet formed. Intellectual curiosity drives us to look at our surroundings and wonder how everything got this way. There are many unresolved questions about how Earth formed, and by watching as other planets form, we may be able to uncover some answers.

“We will never witness the formation of Earth, but here, around a young star 440 light-years away, we may be watching a planet come into existence in real time,” said Maio.

The Moon's thin atmosphere, called an exosphere, has been a puzzle to science for some time. Two main processes were thought to create this wispy gas envelope; tiny meteoroids hitting the surface and solar wind particles bombarding the lunar soil. But new research using Apollo moon samples reveals that the Moon's own surface features provide surprising protection against solar wind erosion.

Researchers at TU Wien and the University of Bern conducted the first direct measurements of solar wind ejecting atoms and molecules when striking the lunar soil, a process known as sputtering. Unlike previous studies that relied on Earth based mineral substitutes, the team used Apollo 16 Moon dust and bombarded it with hydrogen and helium ions at solar wind speeds.

Neil Armstrong's footprint immortalised in the soft, powdery lunar regolith

(Credit : NASA)

The results were striking. Solar wind sputter yields were up to an order of magnitude lower than previously used in exosphere models. This dramatic reduction comes from two key factors that previous models had underestimated, surface roughness and the porous, fluffy nature of lunar soil.

The Moon's surface isn't smooth like a billiard ball, it’s incredibly rough and porous at the microscopic level. This texture acts like a natural shield against solar wind bombardment. When ions hit the jagged, crater-filled landscape, many get trapped in tiny pockets or strike surfaces at angles that reduce their erosive power.

Micrographs of three particles of moon dust collected during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. The montage showcases the vast differences seen within a sample. The scale bars are all 1 micrometer. The images were made with a scanning electron microscope at NIST.

(Credit : Chiaramonti Debay/NIST)

The high porosity of lunar regolith further reduces sputter yields, with the combined effects of roughness and porosity making erosion rates largely independent of the solar zenith angle. This means the protective effect works across most of the Moon's surface, regardless of latitude.

An eruption on the Sun, the source of the solar wind.

(Credit : NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

The research team created three dimensional computer simulations of the lunar surface structure, complete with the spaces between dust grains. These models revealed that the Moon's natural "fluffiness" dramatically reduces the number of atoms knocked loose by solar wind impacts.

These findings change our understanding of how the Moon loses material to space. The study provides realistic sputter yield estimates which are ten times smaller than previous estimates! This suggests that micrometeoroid impacts, rather than solar wind sputtering, are likely the dominant source of the Moon's exosphere. The tiny space rocks that constantly pepper the lunar surface may be doing most of the work in creating the Moon's thin atmospheric envelope.

Understanding how solar wind interacts with airless planetary surfaces is crucial for upcoming missions, including NASA's Artemis program and the European Space Agency's BepiColombo mission to Mercury. As for the atmosphere of the Moon, the study helps explain why previous space observations didn't match theoretical predictions. The Moon's surface has been protecting itself all along, we just needed the right tools and real lunar samples to see how.

Source : 

• Solar wind erosion of lunar regolith is suppressed by surface morphology and regolith properties

Just imagine it, the news stories are all over your phone when you wake! The day will surely come that we will discover that we are not alone in the Universe! What happens the day after though? A new research paper from the SETI Post Detection Hub at the University of St Andrews tackles this question, outlining how NASA and the global scientific community should prepare for the moment humanity detects signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

The paper, written by 14 researchers representing institutions from York University to the University of Cambridge, emphasises that "a technosignature detection will trigger a complex global process shaped by uncertainty, misinformation, and multiple ideological stakeholders." Unlike searching for simple microbial life, discovering technological signatures from alien civilizations would fundamentally reshape our understanding of our place in the universe and create unprecedented challenges.

The Arecibo Radio Telescope was one of the first to be used for the search for alien intelligence.

(Credit : H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF)

The researchers led by Kate Genevieve from the Astro Ecologies Institution argue that past preparation efforts, including guidelines from 1989, are woefully outdated for our internet age. Early protocols predate the internet and could not account for the complexity of rapid global media dissemination. In an era of viral misinformation and instant global communication, the discovery of alien technology would likely create a media firestorm unlike anything humanity has experienced.

The team proposes six critical areas where NASA should invest now, before any discovery occurs. These range from advancing detection technologies to studying how different cultures might interpret the news of extraterrestrial discovery.

One fascinating aspect of the research involves developing "Other Minds" paradigms, essentially preparing to recognise intelligence that doesn't think like us. The paper suggests that techniques from bioacoustics, machine learning and quantum computing offer significant insights, including studying whale songs and bird navigation to understand non human communication patterns.

Researchers suggest that studying whale song can help understand non-human forms of communication such as those that may be experienced from alien intelligence!

This approach challenges researchers to move beyond Earth centric assumptions. If aliens communicate through methods we've never imagined, perhaps using quantum entanglement or patterns we haven't recognised, then our current detection methods might miss them entirely.

Surprisingly, much of the preparation work focuses not on alien technology but on human psychology and interaction. The researchers emphasise integrating humanities and social sciences, recognising that the biggest challenges might come from how people react to the news rather than from the aliens themselves.

The paper recommends funding research on the psychological, social, and global dynamics of post detection scenarios and even suggests analyzing science fiction stories to understand how different cultures envision first contact. These fictional scenarios, the researchers argue, provide valuable insights into human expectations and fears.

Perhaps most practically, the team calls for creating robust international coordination systems before they're needed. They warn that without a Post Detection SETI Hub, NASA risks a gap in the system, akin to a Moon landing without astronaut retrieval. Just as NASA developed detailed protocols for Apollo missions, including quarantine procedures, the space agency needs comprehensive plans for managing a SETI discovery.

NASA implemented significant safety protocols during the Apollo era. Buzz Aldrin shown on the surface of the Moon captured by Neil Armstrong.

(Credit : NASA)

The researchers don't claim that discovering extraterrestrial intelligence is imminent however, but they argue that preparation now is essential. With advanced telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope already operational and instruments like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory coming online, a technosignature discovery could emerge in any realm of astronomy research.

Their message is clear: the question isn't whether we'll ever detect signs of alien technology, but whether we'll be ready when we do. By investing in research, international cooperation, and communication strategies now, NASA can help ensure that humanity's greatest discovery becomes a moment of unity and wonder rather than chaos and confusion.

Source : 

• SETI Post-Detection Futures: Directions for Technosignature Research and Readiness

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