Going to Mars
Leaving the Earth and travelling to the red planet involves several technological and physiological challenges. What do we need to go, live and be able to return? Talk with researchers Rui Agostinho and Pedro Fevereiro about travels to Mars.
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Life on Mars
After Earth, the red planet is the Solar System body where life is most likely to have existed. Talk with researchers Adriano Henriques and Zita Martins about the search for life on Mars.
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Multiverse
Modern theories of cosmology appear to predict that our region of space is a minuscule fragment of a huge ‘multiverse’, where over vast distances physical properties, and perhaps the nature of physical laws themselves, can change.
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Water in the Universe: the water pathway
Sun-like stars and planetary systems are known to form in interstellar molecular clouds composed mostly of hydrogen and small amounts of other elements like helium, oxygen and carbon.
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Water in the Universe: water on exoplanets
Astronomers have already confirmed more than 2000 planets orbiting other stars. In some of the larger planets, similar to Jupiter, water vapour was detected in their atmospheres. For smaller planets, this detection is more difficult.
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Water in the Universe: the ice mountains of Pluto
A mantle of water ice is probably enclosing Pluto’s rocky core. Images captured by NASA’s New Horizons mission revealed that part of this water ice is visible at the surface.
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Water in the Universe: Venus, a world nearly without water
With an average temperature above 460 ºC, Venus doesn’t have liquid water on its surface, and only some traces of water vapour were found in the planet’s atmosphere.
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Water in the Universe: the plumes of Enceladus
Enceladus wobbles, as it orbits Saturn, and this may be explained by the presence of a liquid layer between the solid core and the crust.
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