Bright spots on Ceres continue to puzzle astronomersExcerpt from sciencetimes.com NASA has released the most brilliant images of Ceres to date, truly showcasing the surface of the dwarf planet located in the asteroid belt. The new images could...
Tag: puzzle (page 1 of 3)
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| It now seems more probable that a collision between two planets of similar composition led to the formation of the Moon. |
Excerpt from nature.com
A nagging problem at the heart of the leading theory of how the Moon formed seems to have been explained away.
But the theory also implies that the Moon is made up mostly of impactor material. Since lunar and Earth rocks have such similar compositions, this suggests that Earth and the planet that smacked into it resembled each other too. They would have needed to be sister planets, with a relationship much closer than that of any other planetary bodies we have studied in our Solar System. The odds of this being possible were thought to be around a 1% chance, or “uncomfortably rare”, according to Robin Canup, a planetary researcher at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado1.
Better odds
Now it seems that the scenario is not so far-fetched, says Hagai Perets, an astrophysicist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. He and his colleagues performed simulations of the Solar System’s formation, to investigate how similar planets tend to be to their last giant impactor. They estimated that for 20% to 40% of collisions, the two bodies would be sufficiently similar to explain the Moon’s composition — considerably better odds. The findings are published in Nature2.The planets would have closely resembled each other because of their similar distance from the Sun, meaning that they would have formed from the same kind of orbiting proto-planetary material. “The Earth and the Moon are not twins born from the same planet, but they are sisters in the sense that they grew up in the same environment,” says Perets.
This artist's illustration shows interstellar gas, the raw material of star formation, being blown away.Excerpt from cnet.com It takes a mighty wind to keep stars from forming. Researchers have found one in a galaxy far, far away -- and NASA mad...
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| The machine NASA scientists used to zap out three components of our hereditary material from a chunk of ice. |
Excerpt from cnet.com
We know a whole lot about life on our planet, but one mystery persists: how it got here.
NASA scientists working at the Ames Astrochemistry Laboratory in California and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland may have just found a clue to that mystery. They've determined that some of the chemical components of our DNA can be produced in the harsh crucible of space.
Pyrimidine is also found on meteorites, which prompted the researchers to explore how it reacts when frozen in water in space.
So they put their chunk of ice in a machine that reproduces the vacuum of space, along with temperatures around -430°F and harsh radiation created by high-energy ultraviolet (UV) photons from a hydrogen lamp.
They found that not only could the pyrimidine molecules survive these brutal conditions, but the radiation actually morphed some of them into three chemical components found in DNA and RNA: uracil, cytosine and thymine.
"We are trying to address the mechanisms in space that are forming these molecules," Christopher Materese, a NASA researcher working on these experiments, said in a statement. "Considering what we produced in the laboratory, the chemistry of ice exposed to ultraviolet radiation may be an important linking step between what goes on in space and what fell to Earth early in its development."
Added Scott Sandford, a space science researcher at Ames, "Our experiments suggest that once the Earth formed, many of the building blocks of life were likely present from the beginning. Since we are simulating universal astrophysical conditions, the same is likely wherever planets are formed."
While this research might help fill in a piece of the puzzle of our cosmic origins, another mystery remains. Scientists don't exactly know where meteoric pyrimidine comes from in the first place, although they theorize that it could arise when giant red stars die. And the search continues...
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NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA |
Excerpt from nbcnews.com
NASA's Dawn spacecraft is snapping increasingly detailed pictures of the dwarf planet Ceres as it zooms in for next month's rendezvous, but so far the images have only heightened the mystery surrounding bright spots on the surface.
The pictures released Thursday show that Ceres — the largest asteroid as well as the closest and smallest known dwarf planet — is pockmarked by craters. The craters are to be expected: The 590-mile-wide (950-kilometer-wide) mini-world has been pummeled for billions of years by other objects in the asteroid belt. But the white spots? They're a real puzzle.
One spot in particular has shown up prominently in pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope and from Dawn, which was launched back in 2007 to study Ceres and its sister asteroid Vesta. The latest pictures, taken on Wednesday from a distance of about 90,000 miles (145,000 kilometers), appear to show still more bright blips on Ceres. Are they patches of light material or ice at the bottom of craters? Or frost on the top of prominences?
"We are at a phase in the mission where the curtain is slowly being pulled back on the nature of the surface," UCLA planetary scientist Chris Russell, the principal investigator for the $466 million mission, told NBC News in an email. "But the surface is different from that of other planets, and at this stage the increasing resolution presents more mysteries rather than answers them."
Russell said the science team was particularly interested in the big bright spot and the region surrounding it.
"Naively we expect a bright region to be fresh and a dark region to be old. So the surface of Ceres seems to have a number of circular features of varying freshness on a predominantly dark, presumably old surface," Russell wrote. "The one type of feature that clearly came into view this time were examples of central peak craters with overall similarity to large lunar craters."
The mysteries will be cleared up by the time Dawn enters orbit around Ceres in March. OR WILL THEY?
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Excerpt from dailymail.co.ukBy Jonathan O'Callaghan UK researchers studied the asteroid impact 66 million years agoThey found the heat near the impact site in Mexico was not intense enough to ignite plant materialA heat pulse lasted less than a minute...
Excerpt from cnn.com It's enough to make Mulder and Scully seethe with envy.Nearly 130,000 pages of declassified Air Force files on UFO investigations and sightings are now available in one place online.Declassified government records about UFOs ...
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has snapped an image of a mysterious circular landform that scientists say could be volcanic in origin.Excerpt from csmonitor.comA NASA Mars probe has photographed a strange Red Planet landform that resembles a fres...
A weird circular landform recently spotted on the surface of Mars might look like a deformed waffle--or maybe the surface of a human brain. But as to what the strange feature really is--and how it got there--scientists at this point have only opinions....
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| Clay, Neolithic period, Late 7th Millennium B.C.E., From Israel (excavated at Sha'ar Hagolan). On loan from the Israeli Antiquities Authority to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. |
The Yarmukian culture was a Neolithic culture, the first culture in prehistoric Israel, dating to circa 6400–6000 BC. The archeological site was first discovered in the 1930's, but excavation did not begin until 1949 by a team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, led by Moshe Stekelis. The site was again excavated in 1989–90, 1996–2004), by another team from the same University and led by Yosef Garfinkel . The dig's official website can be found here.
A large number of extraordinary figurines have been unearthed at this Neolithic site, artifacts that continue to puzzle modern day researchers.
The official perspective concerning these pieces is that they are 'highly stylized' pieces of art, and may be symbolic of fertility. I will allow you to form your own opinions about these artifacts, but I will say that I feel it is at least possible these pieces are not 'highly stylized' pieces of art, instead, as remarkable as it may seem, these figurines may have been crafted to depict just what the artists were looking at while they molded clay between their fingers.
Greg Giles
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| This is a figurine head, broken off from the rest of the piece. |
Below is a figurine of what looks very much like a terrier breed of dog. Note this piece does not appear to be stylized at all, but an accurate representation of the popular breed.
Excerpt from sciencedaily.comSource: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory Summary: Experiments prompted by a 2008 surprise from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suggest that soil examined by NASA's Viking Mars landers in 1976 may have contained carbon-b...
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| These infrared images of the planet Uranus show a white spot that is actually a massive storm on the planet. This image was recorded by the Keck II telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii on Aug. 6, 2014 in the 2.2-micron wavelength. |
Excerpt from space.com
By Elizabeth Howell
Uranus is finally having some summer storms, seven years after the planet reached its closest approach to the sun, leaving scientists wondering why the massive storms are so late.
The usually quiet gas giant now has such "incredibly active" weather that some of the features are even visible to amateurs, said Imke de Pater, the project's lead researcher and an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. Astronomers first announced the extreme storms on Uranus in August, and have been trying to understand them ever since.
This is by far the most active weather de Pater's team has seen on Uranus in the past decade, examining its storms and northern convective features. It also paints a different picture of the quiet planet Voyager 2 saw when the NASA spacecraft flew by in 1986.
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| An infrared composite image of the two hemispheres of Uranus obtained with Keck Telescope adaptive optics. The component colors of blue, green, and red were obtained from images made at near infrared wavelengths of 1.26, 1.62, and 2.1 microns respectively. The images were obtained on July 11 and 12, 2004. The North pole is at 4 o'clock. Lawrence Sromovsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison/W.W. Keck Observatory |
But here's where the mystery comes in: As far as anyone can tell, Uranus has no source of internal heat. Sunlight is thought to be responsible for changes in its atmosphere, such as storms. But the sun's light is currently weak in Uranus' northern hemisphere, so scientists are puzzled as to why that area is so active today.
Huge storms on Uranus
Based on the colors and structure of the storm spotted by amateurs, professional astronomers believe it could hint at a vortex deeper in the atmosphere — similar to phenomena spotted on Jupiter, such as the Great Red Spot.
Follow-up observations with the Keck II telescope revealed that the storm was still raging, although it had changed its shape, and possibly its intensity.
Also contributing to the effort was the Hubble Space Telescope, which examined the entire planet of Uranus Oct. 14 in several wavelengths. The observations revealed storms spanning several altitudes, over a distance of about 5,592 miles (9,000 kilometers).
"If, indeed, these features are high-altitude clouds generated by flow perturbations associated with a deeper vortex system, such drastic fluctuations in intensity would indeed be possible," said Larry Sromovsky, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who performed the newer work.
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| An artist's rendition of the amphibious Cartorhynchus lenticarpus. (Stefano Broccoli) |
My absolute favorite moment of the study though had to be the team's conclusion that the foot and a half long green amphibian "probably had a happy life". I could see now a room full of white lab coats concurring with one another. "Yes yes, happy indeed. I concur." A young lab technician then sheepishly speaks up. "I must disagree sirs. My research shows its not easy being green." "Oh yes, yes," the group of senior scientists now concede. "Indeed, it's not easy being green."
Motani's statement that his team now hopes to find the preceding evolutionary ancestor to Cartorhynchus lenticarpus as their next major breakthrough is the part of this report that I can't get out of my mind. What would the odds be that this small group of researchers not only find one crucial missing link, but will also discover the very next missing piece of the long evolutionary puzzle chain, evidence countless archeologists, scientists and researchers have been, for centuries, turning over stones in search of. Something smells fishy here, and it isn't the great, great, great grandfather of Kermit the Frog.
Greg Giles
Excerpts from the washingtonpost.com article by Rachel Feltman:
Researchers report that they've found the missing link between an ancient aquatic predator and its ancestors on land. Ichthyosaurs, the dolphin-like reptiles that lived in the sea during the time of the dinosaurs, evolved from terrestrial creatures that made their way back into the water over time.
But the fossil record for the lineage has been spotty, without a clear link between land-based reptiles and the aquatic ichthyosaurs scientists know came after. Now, researchers report in Nature that they've found that link — an amphibious ancestor of the swimming ichthyosaurs named Cartorhynchus lenticarpus.
"Many creationists have tried to portray ichthyosaurs as being contrary to evolution," said lead author Ryosuke Motani, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California Davis. "We knew based on their bone structure that they were reptiles, and that their ancestors lived on land at some time, but they were fully adapted to life in the water. So creationists would say, well, they couldn't have evolved from those reptiles, because where's the link?"
Now the gap has been filled, he said.
The creature is about a foot and a half long and lived 248 million years ago.
"Initially I was really puzzled by this fossil," Motani said. "I could tell it was related [to ichthyosaurs], but I didn't know how to place it. It took me about a year before I was sure I had no doubts."
One of the most important differences between this new ichthyosaur and its supposed descendants comes down to being big boned: When other vertebrates have evolved from land to sea living, they've gone through stages where they're amphibious and heavy. Their thick bones probably allowed them to fight the power of strong coastal waves and stay grounded in shallow waters. Sure enough, this new fossil has much thicker bones than previously examined ichthyosaurs.
"This animal probably had a happy life. It was in the tropics, and it was probably a bottom feeder that fed on soft-bodied things like squid and animals like shrimp," Motani said. "And for a predator like that to exist, there has to be plenty of prey. This was probably one of the first predators to appear after that extinction."
This single fossil hasn't revealed all of the ichthyosaurs' secrets. Motani hopes to find the preceding evolutionary ancestor next — one that was also amphibious, but spent slightly more of its time on land. "We're looking for that one now," Motani said.
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