Space and astronomy news
At times, it seems like there’s an indundation of announcements featuring discoveries of “Earth-like” planets. And while those announcements are exciting, and scientifically noteworthy, there’s always a little question picking away at them: exactly how Earth-like are they, really?
After all, Earth is defined by its relationship with the Sun.
Continue reading “Astronomers Have Found the Star/Exoplanet Combo That’s the Best Twin to the Sun/Earth”
The Chicxulub impact event was an enormous catastrophe that left a huge imprint on the Earth’s surface. Not only did it cause the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, it left a crater 180 km (112 miles) in diameter, and deposited a worldwide layer of concentrated iridium in the Earth’s crust.
But a new study shows that the impact also left its mark deep underground, in the form of a vast hydrothermal system that modified a massive chunk of the Earth’s crust.
Continue reading “The Meteor Impact that Wiped Out the Dinosaurs Created a Vast Underground Hydrothermal System”
The Antarctic Peninsula is the northernmost part of Antarctica, and has the mildest climate on the continent. In January, the warmest part of the year, the temperature averages 1 to 2 °C (34 to 36 °F). And it’s getting warmer.
Those warm temperatures allow snow algae to grow, and now scientists have used remote sensing to map those algae blooms.
Continue reading “The Coast of Antarctica is Starting to Turn Green”
We’ve found thousands and thousands of exoplanets now. And spacecraft like TESS will likely find thousands and thousands more of them. But most exoplanets are gassy giants, molten hell-holes, or frozen wastes. How can we find those needles-in-the-haystack habitable worlds that may be out there? How can we narrow our search?
Well, first of all, we need to find water. Oceans, preferably, since that’s where life began on Earth. And according to a new study, those oceans need to circulate in particular ways to support life.
Continue reading “Ocean Circulation Might Be the Key to Finding Habitable Exoplanets”
The North Pole ain’t what it used to be. Well, the geographic North Pole stays fixed over time (mostly because we define it to stay fixed over time) but the magnetic north pole constantly moves. And over the past decade it’s been moving out of Canada towards Siberia four times faster than it has in the past couple centuries. Armed with data from the ESA’s Swarm satellite, scientists might finally know why: the shifting of our magnetic field north pole is caused by a titanic struggle between two competing massive magnetic plumes.
Continue reading “Magnetic north is migrating towards Siberia. Here’s why”
One day, my Grade Nine science class got way more interesting.
Suddenly, volcanoes weren’t just something in textbooks. Though I was in neighbouring British Columbia when Mt. St. Helens erupted, there was still a layer of ash on our cars and everything else. For a teenager with a burgeoning interest in science, it was awesome.
Continue reading “40 Years Ago, Mount St. Helens Blew its Top Off”
One of the most fascinating things about planet Earth is the way that life shapes the Earth and the Earth shapes life. We only have to look back to the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) of 2.4 billion years ago to see how lifeforms have shaped the Earth. In that event, phytoplanktons called cyanobacteria pumped the atmosphere with oxygen, extinguishing most life on Earth, and paving the way for the development of multicellular life.
Early Earth satisfied the initial conditions for life to appear, and now, lifeforms shape the atmosphere, the landscape, and the oceans in many different ways.
At the base of many of these changes is phytoplankton.
Continue reading “New Data Show How Phytoplankton Pumps Carbon Out of the Atmosphere at an Enormous Scale”
In between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra lies the Sunda Strait. And in the Sunda Strait lies the much smaller island of Anak Krakatau, one of Earth’s active volcanoes. It’s erupted more than 50 times in the past 2,000 years, and now it’s doing it again.
Continue reading “Anak Krakatau Erupted a Few Days Ago. Here’s What it Looked Like From Space”
The Coronavirus shutdown has given us an unprecedented opportunity to look at our civilization a little differently. We all have our own ground-level view of life during this pandemic, but our satellites are giving us another look at this Earthly pause on a grand scale. The latest view comes from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.
Continue reading “Venice From Space Looks Very Different This Year”
As the COVID-19 disease continues to wreak its viral havoc on the human population of Earth, governments around the world have closed their schools, shut down non-essential businesses, and told their citizens to stay at home as much as possible. In other words, there’s a lot less human activity on our planet, and it’s led to a detectable drop in seismic activity.
Continue reading “Thanks to COVID-19, nothing’s moving, and seismologists can tell”