Within a geological blink on an eye, a span of only 10 million years, the number of species on the planet tripled. This exotic phenomenon took place within a 40-million-year florescence of life, unlike any before or since known as the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, the biggest expansion of biodiversity in Earth’s history.
“Oumuamua appeared to be a rocky object associated with the inner regions of a star system. Of course, it is the first interstellar object to be observed, so it might not be representative. ‘But if other interstellar objects look like this, there is something wrong with our models of planet formation”, observed University of Groningen astronomer Michael Mueller. (more…)
Buried beneath the Hiawatha Glacier is an ancient 31-kilometer-wide impact crater, left when an iron asteroid 1.5 kilometers across slammed into what is today Greenland, possibly within the past 100,000 years reports Paul Voosen in Science. Big enough to swallow Washington, D.C., the crater was detected by Kurt Kjær, a geologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, and 21 co-authors reported this week in Science Advances. The crater was left when an iron asteroid 1.5 kilometers across slammed into Earth, possibly within the past 100,000 years.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to the day’s news headlines on the discoveries, people, and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
Only six light-years from Earth, Barnard’s star is among the nearby red dwarfs that represents an ideal target to search for exoplanets that could someday actually be reached by future interstellar spacecraft, says Steven Vogt, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California, Santa Cruz. But the search for evidence of planets around this famous red dwarf star over the past 50 years has been unsuccessful.
“Our group has discovered that, contrary to what could be expected intuitively, the never-before-seen rainfall has not triggered a flowering of life in Atacama, but instead, the rains have caused enormous devastation in the microbial species that inhabited the region before the heavy precipitations,” said Dr. Alberto G. Fairén, visiting scientist at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, who focuses on early Mars environments.
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