Space and astronomy news
400 photos. 11 minutes. That’s what it took to create this time-lapse of the Earth and stars as the International Space Station over Namibia toward the Red Sea. NASA astronaut Christina Koch captured these images.
Continue reading “Time-lapse Captured from the International Space Station”Hosts:
Fraser Cain (universetoday.com / @fcain)
Allen Versfeld (https://www.urban-astronomer.com/ / @uastronomer)
Dr. Morgan Rehnberg (MorganRehnberg.com / @MorganRehnberg & ChartYourWorld.org)
Moiya McTier (https://www.moiyamctier.com/ / @GoAstroMo)
Jeff Kargel is a Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. He is a geologist, a glaciologist, and a planetary scientist. Climate change is a major thread, and that is what he is here today to talk about.
Podcast (wshaudio): Download (Duration: 59:13 — 43.9MB)
Podcast (wshvideo): Download (Duration: 1:00:54 — 413.4MB)
The title of Earth’s Earliest Life has been returned to the fossils in the Pilbara region of Australia. The Pilbara fossils had held that title since the 1980s, until researchers studying ancient rocks in Greenland found evidence of ancient life there. But subsequent research questioned the biological nature of the Greenland evidence, which put the whole issue into question again.
Now a new study of the Pilbara fossils has identified the presence of preserved organic matter in those fossils, and handed the ‘Ancient Life’ crown back to them.
Continue reading “Confirmed. Fossils That Formed 3.5 billion Years Ago, Really are Fossils. The Oldest Evidence of Life Found So Far”
About 466 million years ago, there was an asteroid collision in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The collision caused the breakup of a major asteroid, creating a shower of dust throughout the inner Solar System. That event is called the Ordovician Meteor Event, and its dust caused an ice age here on Earth.
That ice age contributed to an enormous boost in biodiversity on ancient Earth.
Continue reading “A Distant Asteroid Collision Gave Earthly Biodiversity An Ancient Boost”
The most comprehensive and widely-held theory of how the Moon formed is called the ‘giant impact hypothesis.’ That hypothesis shows that about 150 million years after the Solar System formed, a roughly Mars-sized planet named Theia collided with Earth. Though the timeline is hotly-debated in the scientific community, we know that this collision melted Theia and some of Earth, and that molten rock orbited around Earth until it coalesced into the Moon.
But now a new study, though not contradicting the giant impact hypothesis, is suggesting a different timeline, and an older Moon.
Continue reading “The Moon is Older Than Scientists Thought”
As global warming ramps up, expect to see Greenland in the news a lot. That’s because its ice sheet is under threat of melting. But that’s not the only reason. The other reason is fire.
Continue reading “There’s A Fire in Greenland… Again. It’s 10 Degrees Hotter Than Normal”
In 2008, scientists from Oxford and Aberdeen University made a startling discovery in the northwest of Scotland. Near the village of Ullapool, which sits on the coast opposite the Outer Hebrides, they found a debris deposit created by an ancient meteor impact dated to 1.2 billion years ago. The thickness and extent of the debris suggested that the meteor measured 1 km (0.62 mi) in diameter and took place near to the coas
Until recently, the precise location of the impact remained a mystery to scientists. But in a paper that recently appeared in the Journal of the Geological
There are a handful of major science institutions around the world that keep track of the Earth’s temperature. They all clearly show that the world’s temperature has risen in the past few decades. One of those institutions is NASA.
Continue reading “NASA’s Long-Term Climate Predictions have Proven to be Very Accurate, Within 1/20th of a Degree Celsius”
Scientists at the University of Munster have discovered that Earth got its water from a collision with Theia. Theia was the ancient body that collided with Earth and formed the Moon. Their discovery shows that Earth’s water is much more ancient than previously thought.
Continue reading “The Collision that Created the Moon Might Have Also Brought Water to the Early Earth”
Jupiter: a massive, lifeless gas giant out there on the other side of the asteroid belt. It’s a behemoth, containing 2.5 times as much mass as all the other planets combined. To top it off, it’s named after the Roman God of War.
Earth: a tiny rocky world, almost too close to the Sun, where life rises and falls, punctuated repeatedly by extinctions. Compared to Jupiter, it’s a gum-drop world: Jupiter is 317.8 times the mass of Earth. And Earth is named after a goddess in German paganism, or so we think.
Continue reading “Jupiter or Earth? Which One’s Which, and Why Do They Look so Similar?”“Out of all the complexity flows beauty…”
Norman Kuring, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.