Astronomers have spent decades looking for something that sounds like it would be hard to miss: about a third of the “normal,” baryonic, matter in the Universe. New results from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory may have helped them locate this elusive expanse of missing matter.
In July 2017, a giant iceberg broke off from the Larsen C ice shelf east of the Antarctic Peninsula, unveiling a large swathe of ocean that has existed in darkness beneath the ice for more than 100,000 years, and might hold clues to the evolution and mobility of marine life and its response to climate change –an unexplored world that has existed longer than the evolution of the human neocortex, our “super-brain,” no later than 75,000 years ago that spurred our capacity for novelty and invention.
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.
This could be scary! An amazing new map lets you plug in your address to see how it has changed over the past 750 million years, The interactive tool enables users to hone in on a specific location and visualize how it has evolved between the Cryogenian Period, Earth’s greatest ice age, and the present.
Quarks, the smallest building-blocks of matter, never appear alone in nature. They are always tightly bound inside the protons and neutrons. However, neutron stars, weighing as much as the Sun, but being just the size of a city like Frankfurt, possess a core so dense that a transition from neutron matter to quark matter may occur. Physicists refer to this process as a phase transition, a fancy term to describe a holistic change in the overall arrangement of a system’s structure, and in turn, its function.
Topography more dramatic than the Rocky Mountains has been discovered at the 660-kilometer boundary deep in our planet’s interior, report Princeton University geophysicists Jessica Irving and Wenbo Wu.
“The Hubble Constant is one of the most important numbers in cosmology because it is essential for estimating the curvature of space and the age of the universe, as well as exploring its fate,” said Hiranya Peiris, at University College London. Peiris, a British astrophysicist best known for her work on the cosmic microwave background radiation, was one of 27 scientists who received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018 for their “detailed maps of the early universe.”
“Our calculations indicate that, coinciding with the so-called ‘Heavy Bombardment’ produced by the gravitational destabilization of the main asteroid belt, billions of tons of carbonaceous chondrites reached Earth about 3.8 billion years ago. And they did it transporting in their fine matrices water and other volatile elements in form of hydrated minerals”, says Josep M. Trigo-Rodríguez at the Institute of Space Sciences.