“Normally, Earth gains about 40,000 tons of extraterrestrial material every year,” says Philipp Heck, a curator at the Field Museum and associate professor at the University of Chicago, about Earth’s deep freeze 466 million years ago, long before the age of the dinosaurs, from dust created by a colossal asteroid collision. “Imagine multiplying that by a factor of a thousand or ten thousand. To contextualize that, in a typical year, one thousand semi trucks’ worth of interplanetary dust fall to Earth. In the couple million years following the collision, it’d be more like ten million semis.”
“It’s surprising that any galaxy can change its look on human time scales,” said astronomer Sara Frederick at the University of Maryland. “These changes are taking place much more quickly than we can explain with current quasar theory. The forces at play must be very extreme and very dramatic.”
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.
“We do not know what dark matter is, but if it has anything to do with any scalar particles, it may be older than the Big Bang,” says astrophysicist Tommi Tenkanen at the Johns Hopkins University, who was not part of a new University of Tokyo study that proposes the axion as a candidate for dark matter.
“A billion years ago, something in the whirling darkness of space erupted with a fury that obscured the glow of entire galaxies,” reports Robin Andrews in Quanta after scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced the discovery on August 15th of the most massive star ever known to be destroyed by a supernova explosion, challenging existing models of how massive stars die and providing insight into the death of the first stars in the universe.
New research has focused on the abundance of primordial black holes that formed just fractions of a second after the Big Bang that are 50 times more massive than the sun, analyzing the interaction of the light emitted from these extremely distant quasars with the cosmic web, a network of filaments composed of gas and dark matter present throughout the universe.
