Tag Archives: space

A Microscopic Layer of Diamonds Beneath the Surface of North America

Diamonds show comet struck North America, scientists say

A discovery of microscopic diamonds a few feet beneath the surface of North America reveals that a comet caused a cataclysm of fire, flood and devastation nearly 13,000 years ago that extinguished mammoths and mastodons and dealt a blow to early civilization, scientists said Friday.

The nanodiamonds, so small that they are barely visible in an electron microscope, are thought to be remnants of that comet, which would have hit about 65 million years after the much larger collision that wiped out the dinosaurs.
…
Battered by fire and ice, as many as 35 species of mammals, including American camels, the short-faced bear, the giant beaver, the dire wolf and the American lion, either immediately vanished or were so depleted in number that humans hunted them to extinction.

The humans, a Paleo-Indian grouping known as the Clovis culture for the distinctive spear points they employed, suffered a major population drop, disappearing in many areas for hundreds of years.
…
gems can only be created under the extreme temperatures and pressures of a massive explosion, such as a comet striking the Earth’s surface.

“There’s no other way we can interpret the presence of these diamonds other than an extraterrestrial impact,” said James Kennett, a paleooceanographer.

Such an impact would be the most likely source of nanodiamonds, critics agreed. But many argued that the one-page paper in Science did not provide enough evidence to support the authors’ claim.

“Nanodiamonds could be a good indicator of an impact event . . . but after reading the paper, I wasn’t convinced they found diamonds,” said physicist Tyrone Daulton of Washington University in St. Louis. “Maybe they found diamonds and maybe they didn’t.”

Learning About the Moon

Planetary scientist Jennifer Heldmann discusses the Moon. From Fora.tv which has a wide selection of great webcasts.

Before the Big Bang

Did our cosmos exist before the big bang?

The theory that the recycled universe was based on, called loop quantum cosmology (LQC), had managed to illuminate the very birth of the universe – something even Einstein’s general theory of relativity fails to do.
…
LQC is in fact the first tangible application of another theory called loop quantum gravity, which cunningly combines Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics. We need theories like this to work out what happens when microscopic volumes experience an extreme gravitational force, as happened near the big bang, for example.
…
If LQC turns out to be right, our universe emerged from a pre-existing universe that had been expanding before contracting due to gravity. As all the matter squeezed into a microscopic volume, this universe approached the so-called Planck density, 5.1 Ã— 1096 kilograms per cubic metre. At this stage, it stopped contracting and rebounded, giving us our universe.

In classical cosmology, a phenomenon called inflation caused the universe to expand at incredible speed in the first fractions of a second after the big bang. This inflationary phase is needed to explain why the temperature of faraway regions of the universe is almost identical, even though heat should not have had time to spread that far – the so-called horizon problem. It also explains why the universe is so finely balanced between expanding forever and contracting eventually under gravity – the flatness problem. Cosmologists invoke a particle called the inflaton to make inflation happen, but precious little is known about it.

Canadian Meteorite Fragments Found

University of Calgary graduate student Ellen Milley poses with a fragment of a meteorite

Pictures of Canadian Meteorite Fragments

Planetary scientist Dr. Alan Hildebrand from the University of Calgary and graduate student Ellen Milley brought reporters to a site where they have found numerous meteorite fragments from the bolide that streaked across the sky in Western Canada
…
The fireball that streaked across western Canadian skies was witnessed by thousands, and Hildebrand believes it was a 10-ton fragment from an asteroid. Videos from surveillance and police cameras [see below] showed the meteor exploding before it hit the ground

Photo: University of Calgary graduate student Ellen Milley poses with a fragment of a meteorite in a small pond. By Geoff Howe, The Canadian Press.

Related: U of C team finds meteor fragments – Meteorite, Older than the Sun, Found in Canada (this is a different meteorite – story from 2007) – In Tunguska, Siberia 99 Years Ago – Meteorite Lands in New Jersey Bathroom
Continue reading →

Looking for Signs of Dark Matter Over Antarctica

Dark Matter Proof Found Over Antarctica?

High-energy electrons captured over Antarctica could reveal the presence of a nearby but mysterious astrophysical object that’s bombarding Earth with cosmic rays, researchers say. Or the electrons may be the long-awaited physical evidence of elusive dark matter.

Either way, the unusual particles are exciting for astrophysicists, who say they could someday confirm or deny decades of unproven theories. “In the first case, we have now seen for the first time a nearby source of cosmic rays.
…
Cosmic rays are not beams per se but are any protons, electrons, and other subatomic particles that careen toward Earth from a variety of sources, including the supernova explosions that mark the deaths of stars.

Most of the cosmic electrons that reach Earth are low-energy, because the highest-energy ones fizzle the fastest and don’t last long enough to get here.

Magnetic Portals Connect Sun and Earth

Magnetic Portals Connect Sun and Earth by Dr. Tony Phillips

During the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn’t believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page.

“It’s called a flux transfer event or ‘FTE,'” says space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible.”
…
Researchers have long known that the Earth and sun must be connected. Earth’s magnetosphere (the magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet) is filled with particles from the sun that arrive via the solar wind and penetrate the planet’s magnetic defenses. They enter by following magnetic field lines that can be traced from terra firma all the way back to the sun’s atmosphere.

“We used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active,” says Sibeck. “We were wrong. The connections are not steady at all. They are often brief, bursty and very dynamic.”
…
On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth’s magnetic field presses against the sun’s magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or “reconnect,” forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth.

See more posts on scientific inquiry and scientists advancing our understanding of how things work.

Extra-Universal Matter

Unknown “Structures” Tugging at Universe, Study Says

The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger – a multiverse – and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know, according to study leader Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

The theory could rewrite the laws of physics. Current models say the known, or visible, universe – which extends as far as light could have traveled since the big bang – is essentially the same as the rest of space-time (the three dimensions of space plus time).
…
Not everyone is ready to rewrite physics just yet. Astrophysicist Hume Feldman of the University of Kansas has detected a similar, but weaker, flow. He said the Kashlinsky team’s study is “very interesting, very intriguing, [but] a lot more work needs to be done.

“It’s suggestive that something’s going on, but what exactly is going on? It basically tells us to investigate,” he said. David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, echoed the sentiment. “Until these results are reanalyzed by another group, I have strong doubts about the validity of the conclusions of this paper,” he wrote in an email.

Very interesting stuff and another example of the scientific process of discovery.

Astronomers Find a Planet Denser Than Lead

Astronomers find a planet denser than lead

Meet the planet COROT-exo-3b. It orbits a star slightly larger, hotter, and brighter than the Sun. The star is not an unusual one in any way, but the planet is definitely weird: it orbits the star in just over 4 days, which is pretty close in, though not a record breaker in and of itself. What’s bizarre is that it has about the same diameter of Jupiter, but has 21.6 times Jupiter’s mass. That makes it denser than lead.
…
This planet is challenging to models. How did it form? It most likely formed farther out from the star — gravitational influences make it hard for a large planet to form close to a star — and then gradually moved in.
…
It was discovered by COROT, an orbiting European Space Agency mission designed to look for stars that dip in brightness as an orbiting planet passes in front of them. That gives the size of the planet (the amount the light dims is proportional to the size of the planet).

As a planet (the alternative is classifying it as a brown dwarf – a failed star, not a planet), COROT-exo-3b would be the densest known planet.

More Mysterious Space Phenomenon

One of the things I really hope this blog helps accomplish is to show how science progresses (which explains why I use that tag so often, 3rd most, other popular tags: animals (most used), engineers 2nd, fun and webcasts tied for 4th).

Science is a process of continual learning as curiosity leads us to seek better understanding. On a small scale this can mean a person learning more about knowledge already understood by others. But it also means the scientific community facing new questions and coming up with new explanations for the new questions raised by observations (and testing those new explanations…). Mysterious New ‘Dark Flow’ Discovered in Space

Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can’t be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon “dark flow.” The stuff that’s pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.
…
They discovered that the clusters were moving nearly 2 million mph (3.2 million kph) toward a region in the sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela. This motion is different from the outward expansion of the universe (which is accelerated by the force called dark energy).

“We found a very significant velocity, and furthermore, this velocity does not decrease with distance, as far as we can measure,” Kashlinsky told SPACE.com. “The matter in the observable universe just cannot produce the flow we measure.”

Mars Rover Continues Exploration

Mars Rover

Ageing Mars rover to embark on epic two-year journey

The ageing but intrepid Mars rover Opportunity is set to embark on a two-year mission it may never complete – a seven-mile journey to a crater far bigger than one it has called home for two years, NASA have revealed.

The golf-cart-sized robot with a wobbly front wheel climbed out of Victoria crater earlier this month and scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are steering the probe toward a crater more than 20 times larger, dubbed Endeavor.
…
There are also small rocks strewn about the surface on the route, which appear to have been dug up by meteor impacts farther away. This will give scientists the chance to examine material that otherwise would be too deep to reach. Opportunity still has the use of all six of its wheels, though the right front wheel can no longer be steered.