Rosaly Lopes spent five years carefully inspecting a churning landscape where molten rock spilled forth like the arced jets of a water fountain. Using data from an orbiting probe, she picked out eruptions across the fiery surface, eventually spotting 71 active volcanoes that no one had ever detected before.
"People used to joke with me, 'Oh, you found another active volcano!'" Lopes told me. "'You're going to be in the Guinness World Book of Records'"—until one day, one of those offhand comments made its way to somebody who actually worked for Guinness World Records. Lopes ended up in the 2006 edition, recognized for discovering the most active volcanoes anywhere.
In case you are keeping track:
On Alien Worlds, Extraterrestrials Could Be Spewing a Toxic, Smelly Gas.
Traces of this gas can be found in sewage, marshlands, the intestinal tracts of fish and human babies, in rice fields and in the feces of penguins. But all of these locations have something in common: They have no oxygen.
So Sousa-Silva and her team wanted to see how plausible it would be to detect phosphine on various exoplanets . They simulated phosphine production, survival and destruction on various exoplanets — and found that under certain conditions, they could indeed detect the presence of phosphine by measuring how it interacts with light.
Happening on Twitter
Our solar system is full of ocean worlds like Saturn's moon Enceladus. Join us for a live discussion with @NASA ast… https://t.co/4UM9yOzXTg NASASolarSystem (from Milky Way galaxy) Wed Mar 04 20:15:46 +0000 2020
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