Watch live as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, the new record holder for the longest single U.S. spaceflight, returns home from the International Space Station. T…
Rocks and soil collected from the asteroid Bennu and brought back to Earth last month by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe are rich in carbon and contain water-bearing clay minerals that date back to the birth of the solar system, scientists said Wednesday. The discovery gives critical insight into the formation of our planet and supports theories about how water may have arrived on Earth in the distant past.
The clay minerals “have water locked inside their crystal structure,” said Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator of the asteroid sample return mission, while revealing initial photographs of the material.
The powdery material that NASA officials unveiled on Wednesday looked like asphalt or charcoal, but was easily worth more than its weight in diamonds. The fragments were from a world all their own—pieces of the asteroid Bennu, collected and returned to Earth for analysis by the OSIRIS-REx mission. The samples hold chemical clues to the formation of our solar system and the origin of life-supporting water on our planet.
The clay and minerals from the 4.5 billion-year-old rock had been preserved in space’s deep freeze since the dawn of the solar system. Last month, after a seven-year-long space mission, they parachuted to a desert in Utah, where they were whisked away by helicopter.
Continue reading “NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials” »
Some asteroids are dense. So dense in fact, that they may contain heavy elements outside of the periodic table, according to a new study on mass density.
The team of physicists from The University of Arizona say they were motivated by the possibility of Compact Ultradense Objects (CUDOs) with a mass density greater than Osmium, the densest naturally occurring, stable element, with its 76 protons.
“In particular, some observed asteroids surpass this mass density threshold. Especially noteworthy is the asteroid 33 Polyhymnia,” the team writes in their study, adding that “since the mass density of asteroid 33 Polyhymnia is far greater than the maximum mass density of familiar atomic matter, it can be classified as a CUDO with an unknown composition.”
One of the largest ozone holes on record has been observed over Antarctica this year, according to measurements from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite.
A lower concentration of O3 molecules
The ozone hole is a section of the stratosphere of Earth where there is a markedly lower concentration of ozone (O3) molecules. The ozone layer is severely diminishing in some parts of the stratosphere, although it is not technically a hole. By absorbing the bulk of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation, the ozone layer, a region of the Earth’s atmosphere with a relatively high concentration of ozone molecules, plays a crucial role in safeguarding life on the planet.
Continue reading “ESA satellite reveals one of the biggest ozone holes ever” »
Oct. 5, 2023: (Spaceweather.com) The sun is about to lose something important: Its magnetic poles.
Recent measurements by NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory reveal a rapid weakening of magnetic fields in the polar regions of the sun. North and south magnetic poles are on the verge of disappearing. This will lead to a complete reversal of the sun’s global magnetic field perhaps before the end of the year.
An artist’s concept of the sun’s dipolar magnetic field. Credit: NSF/AURA/NSO.
Scientists at Yale and the Southwest Research Institute (SRI) say they’ve hit the jackpot with some valuable new information about the story of gold.
It’s a story that begins with violent collisions of large objects in space, continues in a half-melted region of Earth’s mantle, and ends with precious metals finding an unlikely resting spot much closer to the planet’s surface than scientists would have predicted.
Jun Korenaga, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Simone Marchi, a researcher at SRI in Boulder, Colorado, provide details in a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Exploring the interface between classical and quantum physics and where it breaks down to provide answers for some long-standing mysteries.
To understand the behavior of tiny, microscopic entities such as elementary particles, atoms, and even molecules, it is necessary to apply the mind-bending principles of quantum mechanics. In this realm, physics takes on bizarre properties necessary to unravel the perplexing behaviors of the Universe at this level.
In stark contrast, the macroscopic world we navigate daily adheres faithfully to the more comforting and intuitive laws of classical physics, which serve as approximations to much more complex quantum laws. These classical laws, while impressively accurate for our everyday experiences, merely graze the surface of the quantum mechanics that orchestrates the Universe at its smallest scales.
We need a way to boost the magnetic fields around the earth because it could eventually scorch some parts of the earth if left in mitigated.
The Sun has been punching holes in the Earth’s magnetic field lately – but that’s not as alarming as it sounds.
Instead, they have been sparking magnificent light shows across Europe and North America, made up mainly of crimson auroras and sustained periods of red sky.
On October 10, the European Space Agency (ESA) published some interim data from its nearly a decade-long Gaia mission. The data includes half a million new and faint stars in a massive cluster, over 380 possible cosmic lenses, and the position of over 150,000 asteroids within the solar system.
[Related: See the stars from the Milky Way mapped as a dazzling rainbow.]
Launched in December 2013, Gaia is an astronomical observatory spacecraft with a mission to generate an accurate stellar census, thus mapping our galaxy and beyond. A more detailed picture of Earth’s place in the universe could help us better understand the diverse objects that make up the known universe.
