“While there have been many dwarf satellites falling onto the Milky Way over its life, this was the largest of them all,” said Sergey Koposov of Carnegie Mellon University, about the collision 10 billion years ago with the massive Gaia Sausage satellite galaxy, whose total mass in gas, stars and dark matter was more than 10 billion times the mass of our Sun, which lies in the center of this enormous cloud of stars.
Scientists have unearthed fossilized fungi in the remote Northwest Territories of the Canadian Arctic dating back to one billion years, in a discovery that could reshape our understanding of how life first arrived on land from the oceans.
“What’s exciting is that we’ll see very soon if I’m right or wrong,” said Christopher Kremer at Brown University about a strange mineral deposit near the Jezero Crater landing site for NASA’s Mars2020 rover. “So that’s a little nerve wracking,” but if it’s not a volcanic ashfall he adds, “it’s probably going to be something much stranger.”
Newly discovered layers of ice buried a mile beneath Mars’ north pole are the remnants of ancient polar ice sheets and could be one of the largest water reservoirs on the planet, according to scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Arizona, using measurements gathered by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) that emits radar waves that can penetrate up to a mile and a half beneath the surface. If melted, the newly discovered polar ice would be equivalent to a global layer of water around Mars at least 1.5 meters (5 feet) deep.
“Our new algorithm helps to draw a more realistic picture of the exoplanet population in space,” says Michael Hippke of Germany’s Sonneberg Observatory about 18 previously undetected planets buried in data from the Kepler Space Telescope, one of which orbits its red dwarf star within the habitable zone. “This method constitutes a significant step forward, especially in the search for Earth-like planets.”
Scientists have confirmed the existence of “superionic ice,” a new phase of water that is black and hot first theoretically predicted more than 30 years ago. Although it has never been seen until now, scientists think the new state of matter, it might be among the most common forms of water in the universe. “It’s not quite a new phase of water. It’s really a new state of matter,” said physicist Livia Bove of France’s National Center for Scientific Research and Pierre and Marie Curie University. “Which is rather spectacular.”
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
The Moon’s collision with a dwarf planet some 4.4 billion years ago provided sufficient carbonaceous material to account for the entire amount of water on Earth. “Our approach is unique because, for the first time, it allows us to associate the origin of water on Earth with the formation of the Moon. To put it simply, without the Moon there probably would be no life on Earth,” says Thorsten Kleine, professor of planetology at the University of Münster.