China has named the landing site of its Chang’e-4 lunar probe “Statio Tianhe” –after the Chinese name for the Milky Way Galaxy for the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the moon last month. The Chang’e-4 probe, launched on December 8, landed on the Von Karman Crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on January 3. As of today, a total of 12 lunar features have been named by China.
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.
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.
NASA has selected a new space mission, SPHEREx, that will deliver an unprecedented map of the Milky Way containing ‘fingerprints’ from the first moments in the universe’s history, said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “And we’ll have new clues to one of the greatest mysteries in science: What made the universe expand so quickly less than a nanosecond after the big bang?”
