Dirk Shulze-Makuch, a professor in the WSU School of the Environment, is a co-author of an upcoming paper that suggests scientists should look for evidence of life-forms that survived on the Martian surface when most or all of the liquid water had disappeared. » More …
When Michael Allen was 4 years old, his mother gave him a book about astronomy. » More …
Alien life might flourish on an exotic kind of carbon dioxide, according to a new study co-authored by Dirk Schulze-Makuch, professor at Washington State University’s School of the Environment. This “supercritical” carbon dioxide, which has features of both liquids and gases, could be key to extraterrestrial organisms much as water is to biology on Earth. » More …
If there were a black hole between the Earth and the moon, what would you see?
Donuts in the sky. That’s the easy answer, explains Dr. Universe.
The more difficult, and probably much more painful, answer depends on your view. You’d see a spot in the sky where light disappears as if going down the bathtub drain. You might see the oceans lift from the Earth and float away into space. You could see the black hole change from a point of nothingness to a color-shifting tiny orb. It would deepen from red to blue as it sucks everything into it, including you, stretching everything out like taffy on a medieval torture device.
What a black hole does it take a lot of stuff and put it into a small space. It’s like taking a gallon of milk and making it fit into a cup. Then making that cup fit into a tablespoon. Then doing that a billion times.
So what would we see if a black hole showed up between the moon and us?
“You would see rings,” says Michael Allen, a senior instructor of physics and astronomy at Washington State University. Ring inside of ring inside of ring, getting bigger and bigger. “Like multiple donuts. A bunch of donuts in the sky.”
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A Washington State University undergraduate has helped develop a new method for detecting water on Mars. Her findings appear in Nature Communications, one of the most influential general science journals.
Kellie Wall, 21, of Port Orchard, Wash., looked for evidence that water influenced crystal formation in basalt, the dark volcanic rock that covers most of eastern Washington and Oregon. She then compared this with volcanic rock observations made by the rover Curiosity on Mars’ Gale Crater.
The project was funded by the WSU College of Arts and Sciences’ Grants for Undergraduate Scholars and by the NASA Space Grant Undergraduate Scholarship in Science and Engineering.
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