“Driving through the lonely, windswept ranchlands of southwestern North Dakota, we got out of our field vehicle, passed through through a rickety gate in a flimsy barbed-wire fence, and entered a postage-stamp-sized plot of eroded landscape. Soon we were digging out fossil fish that died 66 million years ago choking on melt-glass spherules thrown into the atmosphere by the meteor impact 1800 miles to the south in Yucatan, Mexico, that had killed the dinosaurs, opening the way for mammals, and eventually humans, to take over the terrestrial world,” planetary scientist Mark Richards wrote to The Daily Galaxy in an email about what was one of the defining events in the history of planet Earth.
Editor, Jackie Faherty, astrophysicist, Senior Scientist with AMNH. Jackie was formerly a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Aside from a love of scientific research, she is a passionate educator and can often be found giving public lectures in the Hayden Planetarium. Her research team has won multiple grants from NASA, NSF, and the Heising Simons foundation to support projects focused on characterising planet-like objects. She has also co-founded the popular citizen science project entitled Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 which invites the general public to help scan the solar neighbourhood for previously missed cold worlds. A Google Scholar, Faherty has over 100 peer reviewed articles in astrophysical journals and has been an invited speaker at universities and conferences across the globe. Jackie received the 2020 Vera Rubin Early Career Prize from the American Astronomical Society, an award that recognises scientists who have made an impact in the field of dynamical astronomy and the 2021 Robert H Goddard Award for science accomplishments.
“The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747,” writes Peter Brannen in Ends of the World about the Chicxulub impact. “In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun,” hitting Earth with enough force enough to lift a mountain back into space at escape velocity.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
Globular Clusters: The Home of Space-Faring Civilizations?
Transcendent Human Brain to Our Future if We Survive Another Million Years (Planet Earth Report)
Will Gravitational Waves Solve One of the Biggest Mysteries in Physics? (Weekend Feature)
The Most Overhyped Space Movie to Soaring to Alpha Centauri to Mars’ Ancient Killer Asteroid (The Galaxy Report Weekend)
3,000 Light-Year-Long Anomaly In Milky Way’s Sagittarius Arm
Detecting Our Solar System’s Center of Gravity: “The Location of Absolute Stillness”
How the Space Economy Will Change the World to Conscious Artificial Intelligence? (Planet Earth Report)Rise of Oxygen –An Evolutionary Moment that Shaped Our PlanetOur Universe Wouldn’t Exist Without Phase Transitions to The Quest for Quantum Gravity (The Galaxy Report Weekend)
