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In March 2017, Jupiter was in the perfect location to be observed using the Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, which has the Dark Energy Camera and can survey the sky for faint objects. Astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science and his team were using the telescope to search the edge of the solar system for signs of Planet Nine. They realized they could observe Jupiter at the same time. They would be able to tell the difference between Jupiter and the objects around it versus the distant solar system objects because any...

A team of scientists made an enormous discovery when they recently uncovered a "quadrillion" tons of diamonds,buried more than 100 miles below Earth's surface, according to a new study Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, the Carnegie Institution of Washington and several other universities used seismic devices to measure the speed of sound waves traveling through the Earth's crust. "Sound waves move at various speeds through the Earth, depending on the temperature, density, and composition of the rocks through which they travel," MIT explained in a news release. "Scientists have used this relationship between seismic velocity and...

(snip) --- A team of scientists made an enormous discovery when they recently uncovered a "quadrillion" tons of diamonds buried more than 100 miles below Earth's surface, according to a new study. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, the Carnegie Institution of Washington and several other universities used seismic devices to measure the speed of sound waves traveling through the Earth's crust. "Sound waves move at various speeds through the Earth, depending on the temperature, density, and composition of the rocks through which they travel," MIT explained in a news release. "Scientists have used this relationship between...

There may be more than a quadrillion tons of diamond hidden in the Earth's interior, according to a new study from MIT and other universities In the new study, scientists estimate that cratonic roots may contain 1 to 2 percent diamond. Considering the total volume of cratonic roots in the Earth, the team figures that about a quadrillion (1016) tons of diamond are scattered within these ancient rocks, 90 to 150 miles below the surface. However, in using seismic data to map the Earth's interior, scientists have been unable to explain a curious anomaly: Sound waves tend to speed up...

Did climate change already kill all the aliens we've been searching for? According to astrophysicist Adam Frank, it's certainly a possibility — and whether humans are doomed to the same fate may already be out of our hands. Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York, is the lead author of a new paper published May 1 in the journal Astrobiology that aims to take what Frank calls a "10,000-light-year" view of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Using mathematical models based on the disappearance of a real-life lost civilization here on Earth (the former...

In the middle of eastern Washington, in a desert that gets less than eight inches of rain a year, stands what was once the largest waterfall in the world. It is three miles wide and 400 feet high—ten times the size of Niagara Falls—with plunge pools at its base suggesting the erosive power of an immense flow of water. Today there is not so much as a trickle running over the cataract’s lip... Dry Falls is not the only curiosity in what geologists call the Columbia Plateau. Spread over 16,000 square miles are hundreds of other dry waterfalls, canyons without...

Traces of platinum, a metal associated with meteorite impact, have been found at archaeological sites of the Clovis people across the US, suggesting that they were wiped out in a mini-Ice-Age triggered by the impact of an extraterrestrial object. The Clovis people disappeared from North America about 12,800 years ago. Many of the large creatures they hunted – a total of about 35 species – went extinct at about the same time.

A research team led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) found the fingerprint of a massive flood of fresh water in the western Arctic, thought to be the cause of an ancient cold snap that began around 13,000 years ago... The cause of the cooling event, which is named after a flower (Dryas octopetala) that flourished in the cold conditions in Europe throughout the time, has remained a mystery and a source of debate for decades. Many researchers believed the source was a huge influx of freshwater from melting ice sheets and glaciers that gushed into the North Atlantic... However,...

...the experts have shown the end of the occupation of this part of the province of Seville happened between the 24th and 23rd centuries BCE, despite evidence of it being frequented and used in the Bronze Age (c. 2200-850 BCE). "In fact, the abandonment of the site seems rather abrupt, without a gradual transition towards a different social model. The possibility that the end of the Valencina settlement was due to a social crisis has been hinted at by the dates obtained from several human skulls separated from the rest of the skeletons in a pit in a Calle Trabajadores...

Archaeologists in Egypt made a surprising discovery dating back more 2,500 years near the country's famed pyramids south of Cairo. Their findings, which include a mummification workshop and a shaft, used as a communal burial place, are located at the vast Saqqara necropolis part of the Memphis, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Memphis was the first capital of ancient Egypt and its large necropolis houses a wide range of temples and tombs as well as the three pyramids of Giza. The latest find, announced at a press conference Saturday, belongs to the Saite-Persian Period, from 664-404 B.C. The site, which...

Two tiny asteroids sneaked safely past Earth last weekend, only to be discovered hours after they'd buzzed our planet. Asteroids 2018 NX and 2018 NW zipped past our blue-green orb at distances of just 72,000 miles and 76,000 miles, respectively. That's about one-third of the distance from the Earth to the moon. Scientists think the asteroids both stretched between about 16 feet and 50 feet in diameter. That's relatively small for near-Earth asteroids.  Astronomers at an observatory on the Palomar Mountain range in California spotted both space rocks on Sunday, according to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. Although they passed our planet in quick...

The bouncing-baby asteroids were revealed by three radar telescopes, which shoot a beam of radio waves at nearby asteroids and wait for the reflection to return to Earth. Astronomers can use those received signals to paint a picture of the shape of an asteroid. In this case, that meant discovering that what looked like two lobes of one rock are actually two separate rocks, circling each other every 20 to 24 hours. It's a particularly exciting surprise because the two pieces of 2017 YE5 are almost the same size, each about 3,000 feet (900 meters) across. So far, scientists have...

If you simply flew up into space and sawed the moon in half with a giant hacksaw, most likely, nothing would happen. This is because gravitational force would hold the two halves together, sort of like a couple of magnets. But what if you were able to get a couple of giant crowbars and put a person on the other side and then count to 3 and totally separate the two halves of the moon? With enough strength applied, you could theoretically push the two halves far enough apart where the gravitational force no longer pulls them together and now...

describes how the researchers created a method to rewind Earth’s clock by hundreds of millions of years. The system allowed the team to paint a rough picture of what a day on Earth might have been like over a billion years in the past, and better explain the evidence of climate shifts that have been observed in ancient rocks. The researchers note that if you take the timeline back far enough, looking 1.5 billion years in the past, the Moon would have been close enough that Earth’s gravity would have destroyed it. That obviously didn’t happen, but since the Moon...

It turns out that our galaxy looks the way it does today thanks to a run-in with something called the 'Gaia Sausage'. As greasy as space is, we're not talking cosmic processed foods here. Rather, astronomers have found signs that a small galaxy smashed into the Milky Way billions of years ago, leaving behind a mess of stars with some rather unusual orbits. So, what makes this cosmic object a 'sausage'? Cambridge University astronomer Wyn Evans says it all came down to the paths of the stars following the impact... Collisions between galaxies aren't all that unusual, and the Milky...

The startling finding means that experts may not be able to spot the massive space rock hidden in the annual Taurids meteor shower until it is too late. According to a group of researchers, one of the fragments could hit Earth in 2022, 2025, 2032 or 2039 during the annual meteor shower. The Taurids is a spectacular meteor shower that lights up the night skies every November. The meteor shower is the trail of debris left by the comet Encke. But the debris could be obscuring two asteroid chunks known as 2015 TX24 and 2005 UR that are potentially Earth-bound....

Comet Encke next perihelion will be in November 21, 2013. It should become visible with binoculars, beginning in late September of 2013 in the evening skies. It will be one of the brightest comets in 2013, but will pale in comparison to Comet ISON (C/2012 S1). After Comet Encke transits the Sun, it will become visible in the morning sky in December... Earth's position in space and the outgassing of Comet Encke are two of the factors that determine when, and if, this comet will become visible to the naked eye at some point in its path around the Sun....

Astronomers have calculated the Apophis asteroid will speed past Earth on April 13, 2029, at just 18,600 miles away -- a hair's width in astronomical terms. To put that into perspective, the moon is 238,900 miles away... If the 27 billion kg asteroid were to hit Earth, scientists calculate that it would leave a crater over a mile wide and a staggering 518 metres deep. However, most worryingly, the impact would be equivalent to 880 million tons of TNT being detonated -- some 65,000 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima. The next time the...

In the early Cretaceous period, between 125 and 120 million years ago, researchers discovered that dinosaurs began moving away from Europe. A team of scientists from the University of Leeds created a computer model of the fossil record of dinosaurs to figure out their migration pattern up until their extinction 65 million years ago. They found that there was a mass exodus of dinosaurs between 125 and 120m years ago while no new species were moving in. Lead author of the study published in the Journal of Biogeography, Dr Alex Dunhill, of Leeds University, said: "This is a curious result...

What killed the dinosaurs? It’s a question as old as – well the dinosaurs themselves, and one that everyone from school children to scientists have been asking for decades. Movies like Jurassic Park and the Land Before Time only heighten that sense of wonder and raise the stakes behind that question. Now according to a new scientific study, it seems that black gold may have been the source of the dinos’ demise. Japanese researchers at Tohuku University and the Meteorological Research Institute authored a recent study in the research journal Scientific Reports suggesting that a meteor impact 66 million years...