Atoms and the Miracle of Life
ByEditor
Astronomers may have, for the first time, directly imaged a planet still in the process of formation, gathering material from a debris disk surrounding its parent star. Author Metanexus Editors
A team of American, Canadian and Chilean astronomers have stumbled onto a remarkably faint cluster of stars orbiting the Milky Way that puts out as much light as only 120 modest Sun-like stars. The tiny cluster, called Munoz 1, was discovered near a dwarf galaxy in a survey of satellites around the Milky Way using…
For more than 30 years, climate scientists have debated whether flood waters from melting of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet, which ushered in the last major cold episode on Earth about 12,900 years ago, flowed northwest into the Arctic first, or east via the Gulf of St.Lawrence, to weaken ocean thermohaline circulation and have a…
Organic molecules — compounds that on Earth can be linked with life — encased within Martian meteorites now reveal biological activity on the Red Planet could not have formed these materials, researchers say. Organic molecules are the carbon-based raw materials that building blocks of life such as proteins and DNA are made from. These organic…
An ancient Buddhist statue that was recovered by a Nazi expedition in the 1930s was originally carved from a highly valuable meteorite. Researchers say the 1,000-year-old object with a swastika on its stomach is made from a rare form of iron with a high content of nickel. They believe it is part of the Chinga…
A pair of detectors that measure minute distortions in images of distant galaxies will probe the riddle of cosmic acceleration.