Nyx, a vast new stellar stream discovered in the vicinity of the Sun, named after the Greek goddess of the night, may provide the first indication that a dwarf galaxy had merged with the Milky Way disk. These stellar streams are thought to be globular clusters or dwarf galaxies that have been stretched out along its orbit by tidal forces before being completely disrupted.
“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
“Our observations show that Sun-like stars actually create lithium later in their lives, after they have swelled to become red giants. This means that the Sun itself will also manufacture lithium about five billion years in the future,” said Dr. Yerra Bharat Kumar from National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences about the “lithium-rich” red giants first discovered about 40 years ago that create up to 1,000 times as much lithium as other giant stars. Yet how they create their lithium remains a mystery. The amount of lithium produced in just one of these giants would be enough to make electric car batteries for 20,000 trillion cars.
The oldest planet ever detected in the universe, The PSR B1620-26 system lies around 5,600 light years away in galaxy cluster M4, directly west of red supergiant star Antares is estimated to be around 13 billion years—almost three times as old as the Solar System.orbiting a binary system of a white dwarf and a pulsar.
Is evolution a gradual process, as Darwin believed, or can transnational change occur suddenly, in a violently brief time span, as suggested by Harvard biologist, Stephen Jay Gould who argued in Ever Since Darwin that “the ‘sudden’ appearance of species in the fossil record and our failure to note subsequent evolutionary change within them is the proper prediction of evolutionary theory as we understand it. That ‘evolutionary ‘sequences’ are not rungs on a ladder, but our retrospective reconstruction of a circuitous path running like a labyrinth, branch to branch, from the base of the bush to a lineage now surviving at its top.”
Scientists don’t yet know if a particular piece of human DNA passed down from Neanderthal interbreeding 60,000 years ago increases the risk of severe illness from covid-19. The coronavirus, like all viruses, has made the ‘dark energy’ of evolution visible, occupying an odd “liminal space” in the life of our planet, not quite alive, but not dead –a hidden world, almost a “first Earth.” New findings, reports Carl Zimmer, author of A Planet of Viruses, for the New York Times, show how some clues to modern health stem from ancient history.
A strange ice giant that can’t be explained by previous theory has been discovered by NASA Scientists using the exoplanet-sleuth Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS, which had “first light” on Aug. 7, 2018). The planet, TOI-849 b, is the most massive Neptune-sized planet detected to date, and the first to have a density that is comparable to Earth. The odd proportions of planet orbits a star about 750 light years from Earth every 18 hours, and is 40 times more massive.
