Scientists have discovered life in extreme ecosystems beneath the ice sheets covering Antarctica, raising the tantalizing possibility that similar severe environments in our solar system could harbor some kind of life. Researchers have retrieved samples of healthy bacteria and other microorganism living in a freshwater lake buried beneath a half mile of ice on the frigid continent.
The environment in Lake Whillans might not be all that different from environments on a number of the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter, scientists say. Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, orbiting Saturn, both have been found to possess large amounts of liquid water lying beneath their icy crusts.
Drilling down into the depths of Lake Whillans, scientists were surprised to find almost 4,000 microbial species living in the dark water, many of them dining on inorganic compounds as their primary energy source. It's the extreme nature of the environment in the coldest place on Earth that has scientists thinking of the possibilities of life existing elsewhere in our solar system.
There are almost 400 similar lakes trapped deep beneath the permanent ice cover of Antarctica, with a number of them -- including Lake Whillans -- connected by subterranean streams and rivers. Those waterways regularly fill and drain Lake Whillans like a giant bathtub in a cycle lasting between five to 10 years. The lake has been completely entombed in ice for at least a million years, the researchers say.
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A telescope from the European Southern Observatory recently took a beautiful photo of two star clusters in the Milky Way galaxy, NGC 3603 and NGC 3576. The photo was taken at the La Silla Observatory, which is in the Southern Hemisphere, located in Chile, and was released on August 20.
These star clusters are very far from each other (about 10,000 light years), but they seemed to be about the same level of brightness in the photo. The NGC 3603 star cluster is about 20,000 light-years away from the Earth, while the NGC 3576 cluster is about 11,000 light-years away. They can both be found in the Milky Way's Carina-Sagittarius arm.
The NGC 3603 cluster is an area where stars are actively forming. These are some of the largest most violent cosmic bodies in the galaxy. Wolf-Rayet stars form rapidly and also burn up rapidly. These stars are incredibly large - at least 20 times larger than the Earth's sun. The photo that the ESO released this Wednesday shows clouds, HII regions, which are lit by newly-formed young stars. They are made of ultra-violet light created by the stars.
The NGC 3576 nebula also is a region where stars form. Winds from the new stars there have formed gas and dust into objects that look like a pair of ram's horns, spanning a distance of 100 light-years. You can see these objects on the right side of the picture.
There are also, as pictured, a pair of Bok globules that look like dark clouds. They can be seen towards the top of the right side of the image. The new stars that may be forming are unfortunately hidden from cameras by the dark clouds.
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Bloggers who follow the images coming from Mars rover Curiosity spotted a thigh bone recently. It is some kind of bone and the rover captured the image on Aug. 14, according to UFO Blogger.
It's the latest in a string of fossilized animals and other unexplained phenomena that bloggers have reported. These sightings include an iguana, a cat, a dinosaur spine, two dinosaurs, a mysterious light, a toy boat, a half-human and half-goat face and a rock that popped up from one image to the next when the rover wasn't on the move.
NASA was initially puzzled by that one but determined the rock changed position when the rover turned in place and pushed the rock. Curiosity has been on Mars since Aug. 6, 2012. It completed its first Martian year -- 687 Earth days -- on June 24.
