Scientists have confirmed the existence of a "lost continent" under the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius (above) that was left-over by the break-up of the supercontinent, Gondwana, which started about 200 million years ago. The piece of crust, which was subsequently covered by young lava during volcanic eruptions on the island, seems to be a tiny piece of ancient continent, which broke off from the island of Madagascar, when Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica split up and formed the Indian Ocean.
A recent analysis of data for millions of stars from the Gaia space mission show that many stars in the halo that surrounds the Milky Way travel in groups.. Astronomers report their discovery today in the international journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
On three occasions, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected gamma rays from solar storms on the far side of the sun, emission the Earth-orbiting satellite shouldn’t be able to detect. Particles accelerated by these eruptions somehow reach around to produce a gamma-ray glow on the side of the sun facing Earth.
Scientists have identified the origin of key stardust grains present in the dust cloud from which the planets in our Solar System formed, a study suggests. The researchers solved a long-standing puzzle concerning the source of the grains, which formed long before our Solar System and can be recovered from meteorites that fall to Earth. The discovery was made by an international team at an underground laboratory in Italy. The Laboratory for Underground Nuclear Astrophysics – or LUNA – is located more than one kilometer beneath the Earth's surface, hosted by the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics Gran Sasso Laboratory.
"To the naked eye, the fossils we studied look like tiny black grains, but under the microscope the level of detail was jaw-dropping, " Simon Conway Morris, from the University of Cambridge told BBC News. "We think that as an early deuterostome this may represent the primitive beginnings of a very diverse range of species, including ourselves. All deuterostomes had a common ancestor, and we think that is what we are looking at here."
