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...burn up in the planet’s atmosphere in 2003 rather than risk a future crash into its microbially habitable moon Europa. The same fate awaits Juno in February 2018. This makes sense. When we eventually send landers capable of detecting life, it would be frustrating and potentially misleading if all they found was the descendants of microbes that we’d accidentally sent...

...burn up in a flash of light. Smaller particles are the lucky ones. They can deal with the sudden change in pressure when entering Earth’s atmosphere and make it all the way to the surface. NASA regularly uses special ER2 aircraft, a research version of the U2 spy plane, to fly at stratospheric heights (around 20km, twice that of a commercial plane) to collect space...

...burning until the core runs out of helium, then it collapses again. The contraction heats up the core, and the temperature rises so much that helium burning starts in a shell around an inert core of carbon and oxygen. This leads to a further expansion and cooling of the star. Helium shell burning is not a stable process, and leads to a series of pulses, where the shell...

...out more about The Open University's Science courses and qualifications In theory, you can make soap by treating almost any fat or oil with sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide (for a 'soft' soap). Some recipes use animal fats like tallow (from beef) or lard (from pork). Others use vegetable oils, like coconut or olive oil. Soapmaking (or saponification as the chemical...