Top Stories from Space 2015

21 Oct 2015

Water on Mars? A possible habitable exoplanet? Pluto has a heart?! Yes, you read right – 2015 really was an exciting year when we look back at the key discoveries in the deep blue sky.

As we saw in my last blog from a few weeks ago, 2014 provided us with some interesting stories about the latest water discoveries across the universe, but it’s only this year that the 15 year search for water on Mars finally bore fruit. In this blog on Back to the Future day we will take a look at a few more interesting and universe-discovering breakthroughs that 2015 has shed light on.

1. Water on Mars Confirmed

In the Spring, NASA’s robotic rover Curiosity showed evidence that films of liquid brine form in the upper five centimeters of Mars’ subsurface at night. The quantity discovered, however, remains below the requirements for reproduction and metabolism of known terrestrial microorganisms – or so they tell us anyway!

In addition to this, evidence for a large ancient ocean that covered the northern hemisphere of Mars was also reported by NASA around the same time. Check out the full story here.

From all the evidence that we have, it is clear that the proof for flowing water on Mars is mounting and are sure that over the next few decades as NASA prepare for manned missions to Mars in 2030s, that even more indications for water and life on Mars will surface. Watch this space!

2. A Heart for Pluto

Ok, so Pluto doesn’t really have a heart exactly, but what we did discover in July was the result of the almost decade long journey to Pluto, showing a different side to the dwarf planet. It’s actually red for a start and has a giant frozen core formed from carbon monoxide ice.

The New Horizon mission has yielded some interesting discoveries as well as some lovely imagery including this one below.

High resolution image of Pluto taken by New Horizons mission. — Image courtesy of NASA [http://go.nasa.gov/1NlvSaj]

3. Super Earth

Again in July, the Kepler Space Telescope (otherwise known as NASA’s alien planet hunter) confirmed the discovery of Kepler-452b, or, a super earth, 60% bigger in diameter than our own and 1,400 light years away within what scientists refer to as the habitable zone of the universe – where temperatures should be suitable for liquid water to exist depending upon the existence of an atmosphere. Read more about that here.

Since then the following have also been discovered:

an exoplanet with a ring system that appears to be even larger than the one around Saturn
an extremely rare five-ring system
another rocky exoplanet called HD-219134b which is about 1.6x the size of the Earth which is thought to be the closest exoplanet to us at 21 light years away

We hope that you agree that 2015 has been an exciting year for space exploration and look forward to reviewing 2016 at next year’s World Space Week.