YSM Issue 90.1

NEWS
in brief
Modeling Mars: Life-Supporting Earthquakes?
By Isa del Toro M.
IMAGE COURTESY OF WIKIPEDIA
►A topography map of Mars with different
color intensities indicating the depth
of craters and highlighting areas of possible
seismic activity on its surface.
There’s a new hypothesis on the block related
to the possibility of life on Mars. Research
conducted by Sean McMahon of the Yale Geology
and Geophysics department, in collaboration
with John Parnell and Nigel Blamey,
looks into Earth’s subsurface hydrogen levels
and how these indicate potential microbial
activity on Mars.
Hydrogen serves as an energy source for
certain types of organisms. Subsurface hydrogen
gas is created on Earth due to the grinding
of rocks along ancient earthquake fault
lines. McMahon’s experiment sought to determine
whether these gas levels were enough
to have spurred microbial life. Using crushfast-scan,
a technique that involves crushing
rocks to expel the gas contained with them
and measuring the released gas composition,
the researchers concluded that the hydrogen
contained in these rocks was sufficient to fuel
anaerobic life on Earth. Many types of rocks,
including the basalt found on Mars, can likewise
create hydrogen, leading researchers
to determine that quake activity on Mars
could fuel microbial life. In 2018, NASA’s
InSight mission will collect data concerning
seismological activity on Mars. This data
will allow the researchers to re-evaluate the
“Marsquake” models they used in their conclusions
and determine whether their models
fit Mars’s actual surface.
McMahon’s results are an exciting find.
They shed light on another possibility of life
on Mars, which would have important consequences
on how we approach the idea of human
activity on the Red Planet, as well as our
understanding of how life came to be in the
universe.
The Gruber Cosmology Conference at Yale
By Urmila Chadayammuri
PHOTOGRAPHY BY URMILA CHADAYAMMURI
►Professor Manuela Campanelli of
the University of Rochester presents
her pioneering simulations of black
hole mergers.
The third annual Gruber Cosmology
Conference took place at Yale on October
7th, honoring discoveries advancing our
understanding of the universe. This year’s
Gruber Prize recipients were Rainer Weiss,
Kip Thorne, and Ronald Drever, the leading
scientists on the LIGO collaboration, which
made the groundbreaking discovery of
gravitational waves. The conference began
with a history of gravitational waves, after
which Weiss explained how the LIGO project
worked. Speakers also highlighted upcoming
detectors in Europe, India and Japan, which
aim to pinpoint the origin of gravitational
waves.
The afternoon session outlined the impact
of the discovery. Thorne described the
new science we can probe with the help of
gravitational waves, from learning about how
the very early universe grew, to understanding
spinning and colliding black holes. Harvard
radio astronomer Shep Doeleman closed the
conference with prospects for how we can
directly image black holes and their power as
gravitational lenses, which bend light from
sources behind them, to directly image black
holes.
The presenters all spoke of their work as a
conversation across centuries with the father
of general relativity, Albert Einstein. What
would Einstein have said if he heard of the
LIGO observation? Thorne guessed he would
try understanding the black hole merger that
caused it, while Weiss thought he would ask
how the equipment worked. Doeleman took
a step back. We knew general relativity was
correct before the gravitational wave detection,
he said, as GPS would not work without it. If
we were to present a map app to Einstein, he
would most likely wonder, “What is a phone?”
6 Yale Scientific Magazine December 2016 www.yalescientific.org