“We know there were periods when the surface of Mars was frozen; we know there were periods when water flowed freely,” said Briony Horgan with Purdue University at the at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Barcelona. “But we don’t know exactly when these periods were, and how long they lasted. We have never sent unmanned missions to areas of Mars which can show us these earliest rocks, so we need to use Earth-bound science to understand the geochemistry of what may have happened there.
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.
I’m hopeful that other planets around M dwarfs could keep their atmospheres, says Laura Kreidberg, a researcher at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, about a new study using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope provides a rare glimpse of conditions on the surface of a rocky planet, LHS 3844b, located 48.6 light-years from Earth. “The terrestrial planets in our solar system are enormously diverse, and I expect the same will be true for exoplanet systems.”
An experiment to test a popular theory that dark energy –the unknown force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate– is a ‘fifth’ force that acts on matter has found no evidence of its existence. “The discovery of dark energy has greatly changed how we think about the laws of nature,” said Edward Witten, one of the world’s leading theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. who has been compared to Newton and Einstein.
Astronomers are confident that they’ve just detected the first black hole gobbling up a neutron star, with one slight but intriguing possibility that the swallowed object was a very light black hole—”much lighter than any other black hole we know about in the Universe.”
