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Artist’s conception of the dust and gas surrounding a new planetary system. Credit: NASA ========================================================================= A long time ago — roughly 4.5 billion years — our sun and solar system formed over the short time span of 200,000 years. That is the conclusion of a group of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists after looking at isotopes of the element molybdenum found on meteorites. The material that makes up the sun and the rest of the solar system came from the collapse of a large cloud of gas and dust about 4.5 billion years ago. By observing other stellar systems...

Wow. A low-flying space rock set a record last Friday (appropriately, the 13th), when 2020 VT4 passed just under 400 kilometers (250 miles) over the Southern Pacific. The asteroid was spotted by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in the early morning hours of Saturday, November 14, just 15 hours after approach. This is not uncommon for fast-movers, especially asteroids that are coming at the Earth from our sunward blind-spot, like 2020 VT4. Newly-discovered asteroid A10sHcN approached Earth yesterday, passing only a few hundred miles above the South Pacific Ocean. This...

Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology reported a “high intensity” explosion Monday at the Stromboli volcano, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, located off the southern coast of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea. The institute’s surveillance cameras captured the event in visual and thermal format early Monday. The explosion could be seen sending ash and steam at least 100 meters into the air and streams of lava rapidly running down the center-south side of the volcano. The institute reported the event lasted four minutes. "From the seismological standpoint," it "was characterized by a sequence of explosive...

NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU) ===================================================================== Supernovas may have affected the Earth’s climate in the last 40,000 years. Tree-ring data suggests supernovas caused spikes in radiocarbon. Could the next nearby supernova cause a collapse of civilization? ====================================================================== Dendrochronology is a fancy word for tree-ring dating, where the age of a tree can be determined by the number of growth rings across its trunk. But there’s a lot more to learn from looking at a tree’s rings than simply its age. Like fingerprints, tree rings give scientists clues to what the world was like when a tree was alive....

The remains of a giant, ancient lake have been discovered under Greenland, buried deep below the ice sheet in the northwest of the country and estimated to be hundreds of thousands of years old, if not millions, scientists say. The huge 'fossil lake bed' is a phenomenon the likes of which scientists haven't seen before in this part of the world... Last year, scientists reported the discovery of over 50 subglacial lakes beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet: bodies of thawed liquid water trapped between bedrock and the ice sheet overhead. The new find is of a different nature: an ancient...

The authors present the more than 200 terrestrial impact sites in high-resolution topographic maps and satellite images, complete with detailed geological descriptions and photographs of the crater structures and their rocks. They also explain the essential details of each impact event.

Why is Earth pulsating every 26 seconds, and why canÂ’t scientists explain it after 60 years? This is an enigma wrapped in a periodically predictable mystery motion. It could be a harmonic phenomenon, a regular seismic chirp caused by the sunÂ’s energy, or a beacon drawing scientists to its source to begin a treasure hunt. âž¡ The world is weird. We'll show you how it works. In the early 1960s, a geologist named Jack Oliver first documented the pulse, also known as a "microseism," according to Discover. Oliver, who worked at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory at the time, heard...

International research led by geologists from Curtin University has found that a volcanic province in the Indian Ocean was the world's most continuously active—erupting for 30 million years—fuelled by a constantly moving conveyor belt of magma. It's believed this magma conveyor belt, created by shifts in the seabed, continuously made space available for the molten rock to flow for millions of years, beginning around 120 million years ago. Research lead Qiang Jiang, a Ph.D. candidate from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the studied volcanoes were in the Kerguelen Plateau, located in the Indian Ocean, about 3,000 kilometers...

The South Pole of the Moon. (NASA GSFC Scientific Visualisation Studio) =========================================================================== A distant asteroid trailing in the gravitational wake of Mars has been observed in greater detail than ever before, and the close-up reveals a surprising resemblance – one that raises some interesting questions about the object's ancient origins. The asteroid in question, called (101429) 1998 VF31, is part of a group of trojan asteroids sharing the orbit of Mars. Trojans are celestial bodies that fall into gravitationally balanced regions of space in the vicinity of other planets, located 60 degrees in front of and behind the planet. Most...

This image highlights the bright coma of C/2014 OG392 (PANSTARRS). (Northern Arizona University ======================================================================= Centaurs are rare celestial objects that can combine some of the different features of asteroids and comets. They're basically rocky in nature, like asteroids, but can also throw out clouds of dust and gas as their exteriors vaporize, like comets. When centaurs emit these gases, they're considered active. We've only ever found 18 chemically active centaurs in the last century or so, but now a new one has been added to the list – and it might be able to tell us more about how these...

Earth’s atmosphere sees several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude each day, so they are quite common. We are just typically unable to see them due to daylight and because a vast majority occur over oceans and uninhabited regions. However, the brighter the fireball, the more rare it is. Do fireballs make a sound? Sounds like sociology’s favorite question of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?” But the answer is quite interesting. According to the American Meteor Society, fireballs can make a sound—two in fact. Both generated...

The massive space rock, known as 2020 UX3, is estimated to have a diameter between 88 and 196 feet, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Studies (CNEOS). For comparison purposes, the wingspan of a 747 is 225 feet long. It will come within 3.2 million miles of Earth, traveling at roughly 36,000 miles per hour. Its size and its proximity to Earth make it a near-Earth object (NEO). NASA unveiled a 20-page plan in 2018 that details the steps the U.S. should take to be better prepared for NEOs, such as asteroids and comets that come within 30 million...

Centaurs are minor planets thought to have originated in the outer region of our Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt. Active centaurs enigmatically display prominent comet-like features such as comae or tails even though they orbit in the gas giant region where it is too cold for water to readily sublimate. Only 18 active centaurs have been identified since 1927 and, consequently, the underlying activity mechanisms are still poorly understood. 2014 OG392 orbits between 10 and 15 AU (astronomical units) where its equilibrium temperature would be around minus 213 degrees Celsius (minus 351 degrees Fahrenheit). Chandler and colleagues initially...

Only a small handful of objects are known to pose a serious threat to Earth, and the gigantic asteroid Apophis is one of them. Scientists are now re-evaluating its potential to strike our planet in 48 years, owing to improved observations of the problematic asteroid. Observations made earlier this year from the Subaru Telescope in Hawai’i are providing astronomers with a better sense of how the Yarkovsky effect is influencing the orbital path of asteroid 99942 Apophis. This effect is like a built-in propulsion system for asteroids, in which trace amounts of leaking radiation can alter an object’s momentum in...

Explanation: What would an erupting volcano on Venus look like? Evidence of currently active volcanoes on Venus was announced earlier this year with the unexplained warmth of regions thought to contain only ancient volcanoes. Although large scale images of Venus have been taken with radar, thick sulfuric acid clouds would inhibit the taking of optical light vistas. Nevertheless, an artist's reconstruction of a Venusian volcano erupting is featured. Volcanoes could play an important role in a life cycle on Venus as they could push chemical foods into the cooler upper atmosphere where hungry microbes might float. Pictured, the plume from...

For more than two decades, astronomers have been systematically tracing mystery sources of high-energy gamma rays to their sources. One, however, remained stubborn - the brightest unidentified source of gamma rays in the Milky Way. It seemed to be coming from a binary system 2,740 light-years away, but only one of the stars could be found. Now, astronomers have solved the mystery and pinned down that second star by searching gamma-ray data obtained between 2008 and 2018. Together, the two stars constitute one of the weirdest binary systems we've ever seen. "The binary star system and the neutron star at...

There is much debate surrounding the age of the Clovis—a prehistoric culture named for stone tools found near Clovis, New Mexico in the early 1930s—who once occupied North America during the end of the last Ice Age. New testing of bones and artifacts show that Clovis tools were made only during a brief, 300-year period from 13,050 to 12,750 years ago.

A team of geologists at the University of Houston College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics believes they have found the lost plate in northern Canada by using existing mantle tomography images—similar to a CT scan of the earth's interior. The findings, published in Geological Society of America Bulletin, could help geologists better predict volcanic hazards as well as mineral and hydrocarbon deposits. "Volcanoes form at plate boundaries, and the more plates you have, the more volcanoes you have," said Jonny Wu, assistant professor of geology in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "Volcanoes also affect climate change. So, when...

They used clay tablets to keep records of state treaties and decrees, prayers, myths, and summoning rituals, using a language that researchers were only able to decipher around 100 years ago. Now, the Hittites' texts, which were written in cuneiform, are being made fully accessible online. The collection will be based on around 30,000 documents, most of which are written in the Hittite language, but other languages such as Luwian and Palaic will also be represented to a lesser extent. Participating in the joint project are researchers from the universities of Mainz, Marburg, and Würzburg, as well as of the...

In central Africa is a deep lake that has a dangerous propensity to explode – but tapping it as a source of energy could help avert disaster. Lake Kivu is one of Africa’s strangest bodies of water. An unusual set of properties make it an intriguing subject for scientists, as well as a potential source of both peril and prosperity for the millions of people living nearby. Kivu doesn’t behave like most deep lakes. Typically, when water at the surface of a lake is cooled – by winter air temperatures or rivers carrying spring snowmelt, for example – that cold,...