Planetary Science: The Time Machine
Dating features on the Moon and Mars is guesswork. Scott Anderson is building a tool to change that.
-
-
Meteorites Hold Secrets of Earth’s Formation
Scientists attempting to better understand the formation and the present-day layering of planet Earth have turned to ancient meteorites — meteorites which they say could hold important clues to some of the Solar System’s earliest chemical processes. Those meteorites are known as diogenites, and researchers from the Carnegie Institution, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and…
-
New Planet Found, Smaller Than Earth, Orbiting Distant Star
Thirty-three light-years away, in the constellation Leo the lion, astronomers say they have found a world considerably smaller than Earth, orbiting a dim red-dwarf star. That’s something to think about. While scientists have confirmed the existence of more than 700 so-called exoplanets since 1995, most of them have been giant — many considerably larger than…
-
Why Is Earth So Dry?
With large swaths of oceans, rivers that snake for hundreds of miles, and behemoth glaciers near the north and south poles, Earth doesn’t seem to have a water shortage. And yet, less than 1% of our planet’s mass is locked up in water, and even that may have been delivered by comets and asteroids after…
-
Solar System Ice: Source of Earth’s Water
Scientists have long believed that comets and, or a type of very primitive meteorite called carbonaceous chondrites were the sources of early Earth’s volatile elements — which include hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon — and possibly organic material, too. Understanding where these volatiles came from is crucial for determining the origins of both water and life…
-
Probe Reveals Ice Content of Moon’s Shackleton Crater
Up to 22 percent of the surfaces of Shackleton Crater, located near the moon’s south pole, may be water ice, new findings from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show. That may sound like a lot, but it adds up to only about 100 gallons of water inside the 12-mile wide, two-mile deep crater. “It’s not a…
-
What the Amazon Looked Like Before Columbus
Ancient people had minimal, if any, impact on the outlying forests of South America’s Amazon Basin, and settlements near rivers were likely limited, indicates a new study of soil collected from the western and central Amazon. Previous research has suggested that, prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus and Europeans, indigenous people built dense, complex…
-
Findings of Deep-Sea ‘Alien’ Hunt Revealed
Swedish explorers have put to rest speculation of a spaceship at the bottom of the Baltic — but they’re adding fuel to the ‘what is it’ mystery of this deep-sea object anyway. Digital pictures FoxNews.com has obtained from the team show that the object, located beneath the waves of the Baltic between Sweden and Finland,…
-
Alien Earths May Be Widespread in Our Milky Way Galaxy
Small, rocky planets can coalesce around a wide variety of stars, suggesting that Earth-like alien worlds may have formed early and often throughout our Milky Way galaxy’s history, a new study reveals. Astronomers had previously noticed that huge, Jupiter-like exoplanets tend to be found around stars with high concentrations of so-called “metals” — elements heavier…
-
CERN Scientists Excruciatingly Close to Discovering Higgs Boson
Physicists investigating the make-up of the universe are closing in on the Higgs boson, an elusive particle thought to have been key to turning debris from the Big Bang into stars, planets and finally life, scientists said. Researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are using their large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s…