The 13 billion-year-old wind killing nearby stars 🌬️

Mark your calendars: There’s a non-zero chance Apophis crashes into Earth in 2029

Remember when scientists announced that the asteroid veering in our direction would harmlessly brush past us? Unfortunately, the odds of a collision just went up, but just a smidge

In case you missed it…

☄️ Apophis is a 1,100-foot asteroid en route to our corner of the Milky Way. 

☄️ When Apophis was spotted in 2004, it was briefly projected to have a 2.7% chance of hitting Earth in 2029. 

☄️ However, later projections showed Apophis narrowly missing Earth, instead flying right between us and the Moon.

Here’s how the plot recently thickened: 

🪨 A new study suggests that if Apophis collides with anything 11 feet or longer while traveling through space, the chance it crashes into Earth would no longer be zero 🪨

The good news? It’s still less than one in a billion chance — We’ll know for sure where it’s heading by 2027.

The bad news? While Apophis wouldn’t destroy the planet upon impact, it does have the power to wipe out a whole city 🙃

If Apophis does decide to stop by, at least we’ll have two years’ notice 🧘

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Meet the oldest gust of galaxy-killing wind ever discovered

Allow us to 🌬️ blow 🌬️ your minds: we just discovered a blast of wind that’s been shooting from a supermassive black hole for over 13 billion years. 

Technically speaking, the wind’s origin is a quasar, a type of bright object at the center of distant universes powered by supermassive black holes.

What makes this quasar’s winds so special?

💥 This supermassive black hole-powered quasar formed when the universe was just 5% of its current age, making it the third-earliest quasar and the oldest wind blast we’ve ever found.

💥 But wind isn’t just old – it also stretches 7,500 light-years long. That’s the length of nearly 4,000 solar systems lined up side by side!

💥 The wind also moves at 6,000 times the speed of sound. It’s powerful enough to suppress nearby stars from forming, therefore ‘killing’ other solar systems.

Yet again, we have the James Webb Space Telescope to thank for this unsettling find 🔭

Why Mars researchers are geeking over a 2 billion-year-old stone found on Earth

Scientists just uncovered a two billion-year-old stone in South Africa that contains living microbes 🦠 

Before the discovery, the oldest rock with living microorganisms was just a measly 100 million years old – making this new sample the most ancient one on record.

But biologists and geologists aren’t the only researchers jumping for joy…

If NASA achieves its goal of retrieving rocks from mars Mars, they will likely be the same age as the South African one 🔬

In other words, if life once existed on Mars, we might be able to compare two billion-year-old microbes from Earth to two billion-year-old microbes from Mars 🤝

Anyone want to live in a giant mushroom on the Moon?

If humanity were ever to colonize the Moon, the lack of oxygen wouldn’t be the biggest challenge – sending construction materials to space would be.

🏗️ That’s why NASA just awarded $2 million to a group studying mycotecture at NASA's Ames Research Center. 

What is mycotecture, you ask? 

🍄 Mycotecture is an architectural practice that uses fungi as a primary building material  🍄

A ton of research is needed to prove mycotecture’s viability in space, but in theory, we would take fungal spores from Earth and mix them with lunar material to make bricks. 

Who knew life on the Moon would sound so wholesome?

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