Free Republic

The question about the origin of oceans on Earth is one of the most important questions with respect to the formation of our planet and the origin of life. The most popular theory is that water was brought by impacts of comets and asteroids. Data from the Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis (ROSINA) instrument aboard the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft indicate that terrestrial water did not come from comets like 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The findings were published today in the journal Science. Researchers agree that water must have been delivered to Earth by small bodies at a later...

“While this approximately 400-meter sized asteroid has a three-year orbital period around the sun and returns to the Earth’s neighborhood periodically, it does not represent a threat because its orbital path does not pass sufficiently close to the Earth’s orbit … Any statements about risk for impact of discovered asteroids and comets should be verified by scientists and the media by accessing NASA’s Near Earth Object (NEO) program web site.”

The Earth is presently in an interglacial period—a period between ice ages. Since the end of the last ice age, Earth’s surface temperatures have been above the temperature needed to maintain ice sheets and glaciers, which covered much of the land masses at mid-to-high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. As a result, those ice sheets and glaciers have been melting for tens of thousands of years and sea levels have risen…and will continue to rise until the start of the next ice age.Many of us are old enough to remember the scare stories from the 1970s, a time when climate...

Geologists may be close to cracking one of the biggest seismological mysteries in the Pacific Northwest: the origin of a powerful earthquake that rattled seven states and provinces when Ulysses S. Grant was president. Preliminary evidence points to a newly discovered fault near the town of Entiat in Chelan County, Wash. The find adds to a growing body of evidence that Central and Eastern Washington are more quake-prone than previously thought, and will help refine seismic risks in an area that's home to 1.5 million people, more than a dozen hydropower dams and the Hanford nuclear reservation, said Craig Weaver,...

VLT reveals alignments between supermassive black hole axes and large-scale structure New observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have revealed alignments over the largest structures ever discovered in the Universe. A European research team has found that the rotation axes of the central supermassive black holes in a sample of quasars are parallel to each other over distances of billions of light-years. The team has also found that the rotation axes of these quasars tend to be aligned with the vast structures in the cosmic web in which they reside.See Full Size Photo Quasars are galaxies with...

The hashtag #boycottexodusmovie has been trending on Twitter as posters express there anger over the film's casting of white actors as Egyptians Director Ridley Scott has been bullish about the issue of casting and said it was a business decision to hire white actors He claimed he wouldn't get financing if he hired 'Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such' The cast does includes a number of actors of color, although it is mainly in minors roles including as servants. Sir Ridley Scott has found himself embroiled in a race row after his latest film was branded ‘too white’. Twitter users are urging...

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has provided researchers strong evidence the moon’s volcanic activity slowed gradually instead of stopping abruptly a billion years ago. Scores of distinctive rock deposits observed by LRO are estimated to be less than 100 million years old. This time period corresponds to Earth’s Cretaceous period, the heyday of dinosaurs. Some areas may be less than 50 million years old. Details of the study are published online in Sunday’s edition of Nature Geoscience. “This finding is the kind of science that is literally going to make geologists rewrite the textbooks about the moon,” said John Keller,...

About 35 million years ago an asteroid about 5 to 8 kilometers in diameter, travelling at a speed of about 15 to 20 kilometers per second slammed into the area that is now known as the Tamyr Peninsula of northern Siberia, Russia. [1] The energy delivered by this hypervelocity impact was powerful enough to instantly melt thousands of cubic kilometers of rock and blast millions of metric tons of ejecta high into the air. Some of that ejecta landed on other continents. The explosion produced a 100 kilometer-wide impact crater with a rim of deformed rock up to 20 kilometers...

"Our evidence shows definitively that the population decline in this period cannot have been caused by climate change," says Ian Armit, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Bradford, and lead author of the study. Graeme Swindles, Associate Professor of Earth System Dynamics at the University of Leeds, added, "We found clear evidence for a rapid change in climate to much wetter conditions, which we were able to precisely pinpoint to 750BC using statistical methods." According to Professor Armit, social and economic stress is more likely to be the cause of the sudden and widespread fall in numbers. Communities producing...

Nicolo Marchetti of the University of Bologna is project director of the excavation at Karkemish, a 5,000-year-old city located along the Turkey-Syria border. About one-third of the site lies inside Syria and is off-limits. The site is also very close to Jarablous, a Syrian city that is now ISIS-controlled territory. “Still, we have had no problem at all.…We work in a military area. It is very well protected,” Marchetti told the Associated Press. This year his team has recovered sculptures from the palace of King Katuwa that date to 900 B.C., and a 700 B.C. mosaic floor in the palace...

Phoebe probably distant traveller Cassini's images of Phoebe Images of Saturn's moon Phoebe from the Cassini spacecraft suggest it may be a relic of objects that formed billions of years ago in the outer Solar System. The pictures seem to show ice in its craters, boosting the theory that it is more similar to comets and very distant Solar System objects than to asteroids. Scientists think Phoebe migrated inwards and was probably captured by Saturn's gravity billions of years ago. Several tiny Saturn moons may have been blasted out of Phoebe by space impacts. "Battered and beat-up as [Phoebe] is,...

Asteroids and comets have a few things in common. They are both celestial bodies orbiting our Sun, and they both can have unusual orbits, sometimes straying close to Earth or the other planets. They are both “leftovers” — made from materials from the formation of our Solar System 4.5 billion years ago. But there are a few notable differences between these two objects, as well. The biggest difference between comets and asteroids, however, is what they are made of. While asteroids consist of metals and rocky material, comets are made up of ice, dust, rocky materials and organic compounds. When...

This is the moment an explosively bright orange flash briefly illuminated the sky above a remote region in central Russia. Locals compared the bright orange glow with what they would have expected from a nuclear explosion and many managed to capture the images in Russia’s Sverdlovsk region in the Urals in pictures and video. But despite the ample illustrations online, neither astrologist's or emergency services in the region so far have managed to come up with an explanation for exactly what is happening. Scientist Viktor Grokhovsky, who is a member of the meteorites committee of the Russian Academy of Sciences,...

Nov. 19, 2014 - 0:30 - Officials mum on origin of explosion caught on dash cam

An extraordinary bright orange flash has lit up the sky in Russia’s Sverdlovsk region in the Urals. While locals captured the massive ‘blast’ on numerous cameras, both scientists and emergency services still struggle to explain the unusual event. Dark evening skies in the town of Rezh in Sverdlovsk region near Russia's Ekaterinburg turned bright orange for some ten seconds on November 14, with the event being caught on several cameras by the locals. A driver filmed the massive flash with his dashcam, later posting the video on YouTube, with more people commenting they’ve seen it too. Teenagers in the town...

We’ve heard it time and time again. When it comes to new exoplanet findings, our conventional wisdom never holds. So the surprise that a batch of extrasolar planets are moving retrograde, orbiting in directions opposite to the way their stars are spinning, shouldn’t come as a surprise. Then again, maybe it should. These discoveries turned the long-standing view of how planets form on its head. Now Eduard Vorobyov at the University of Vienna and colleagues argue that chaotic conditions in the planetary system’s gaseous wombs may be to blame. Theorists have long assumed that stars and their planetary companions assemble...

With just 60 hours of battery power, the lander drilled, hammered and gathered science data on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko before going into hibernation. Despite appearances, the comet’s hard as ice. The team responsible for the MUPUS (Multi-Purpose Sensors for Surface and Sub-Surface Science) instrument hammered a probe as hard as they could into 67P’s skin but only dug in a few millimeters: “Although the power of the hammer was gradually increased, we were not able to go deep into the surface,” said Tilman Spohn ... “If we compare the data with laboratory measurements, we think that the probe...

Pavlof is one of the most active volcanoes in North America. In the past 100 years, Pavlof has erupted at least 24 times and may have erupted on several other occasions. The remote location and weather with limited visibility, combined with the fact that there are few local inhabitants, may have allowed some eruptions to go unconfirmed. Today, daily satellite monitoring and real-time data from instruments around the volcano bring a continuous stream of information to scientists. [1] Although there is very little human activity on the land immediately surrounding Pavlof, the sky above is heavily travelled. Each day at...

Scientists used to think that things were pretty chill over in the south hemisphere of Uranus. In fact, they thought it was one of the calmest regions of any of the gas giants. But in analyzing images taken nearly three decades ago by NASA's Voyager-2 spacecraft, researchers think they've found a kerfuffle of activity — which might indicate that there's something unusual about the planet's interior. If you look at these old photos of Uranus, the planet appears to be a stark, featureless ball. And even to scientists, who were able to identify more lively features of the gas giant,...

A team of archaeologists have unearthed new evidence of massive, monumental defensive works at the Citadel Mound site of ancient Gordion in Turkey. Excavations have also revealed ancient industrial activity dating back to the 11th century BCE... Brian Rose of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues have uncovered massive defensive walls, part of a road, and industrial work spaces dated back to some of the earliest periods of the site... "Gordion’s historical significance derives from its very long and complex sequence of occupation, with seven successive settlements spanning a period of nearly 4500 years," says Rose. "What we discovered was...