Tag: Solar System

Dinosaur-killing asteroid was a rare rock from beyond Jupiter, new study reveals

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The space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was a rare strike from an asteroid beyond Jupiter, a new study details. The finding pins down the nature of the fateful space rock and its origin within our solar system, and may benefit technology that forecasts asteroid strikes on our planet. Most scientists agree that the Chicxulub impactor — named after the community in modern-day Mexico near the 90-mile-wide (145 kilometers) crater carved by the rock — came from within our solar system. But its precise origins…

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The sun might’ve just had a record-breaking number of visible sunspots

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On Aug. 8, scientists may have caught hundreds of individual sunspots on images produced by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). To us, sunspots might seem really tiny — but don’t be fooled. They are actually dark areas typically the size of the entire Earth on the sun’s surface. Plus, they exhibit strong magnetic fields that can fire off solar flares, which spew pulses of electromagnetic radiation into space. These are the explosions that lead to coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that can create solar storms on Earth. “The process of the…

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Weird, ‘watermelon shape’ asteroids like Dimorphos and Selam may finally have an explanation

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The unusual shapes of the tiny asteroids Dimorphos and Selam have perplexed astronomers for years, but a new study finally explains how they got so strange. It also suggests these bizarrely shaped “moonlets” may be more common than scientists thought. Binary asteroids — pairs of asteroids that are essentially mini versions of the Earth-moon system — are pretty common in our cosmic neighborhood. These include the Didymos-Dimorphos duo that headlined NASA’s 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. Previous research suggests that such binary asteroids form when a rubble-pile “parent”…

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NASA satellite data adds key pollutant to national environmental justice database

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Scientists harnessed satellite technology to track a key air pollutant previously absent from a national database, NASA announced earlier this week, marking a crucial step forward in monitoring differences in air quality across the U.S. and identifying groups whose health is unfairly affected. Measurements of nitrogen dioxide, which is primarily released into air through the burning of fossil fuels and can lead to respiratory diseases like asthma among other health problems, had been missing from the Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool, or EJScreen. The database is maintained by the…

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Mars Express orbiter takes a deep dive into ancient Red Planet lake (images)

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 A Mars orbiter has just taken a “deep dive” into an ancient Martian lake, figuratively, at least.  Larger than any lake currently on Earth, the dried-up remnants of this ancient lakebed were just captured in incredible detail by the European Space Agency (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2003. “This patch of Mars — shown in a new view from Mars Express’s High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) — is known as Caralis Chaos,” ESA scientists wrote in a statement. “We believe that water, and a…

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The sun fires off 2 powerful X flares in less than 2 hours (video, photo)

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The sun showcased its immense power yet again this morning (August 5), firing off not one but two X-class flares. X flares are the strongest solar flare class. Today’s first X blast, which launched from a sunspot called AR3767, reached its peak around 9:40 a.m. EDT (1340 GMT), clocking in at X1.7 on solar scientists’ flare scale. Then, less than two hours later, the sunspot AR3780 fired off an X1.1 class solar flare, which peaked at 11:27 a.m. EDT (1527 GMT).  Solar flares are often accompanied by huge eruptions of solar…

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The moon’s thin atmosphere is made by constant meteorite bombardment

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It is easy to imagine the moon as an atmosphere-less hunk of rock orbiting Earth. However, while lacking breathable air, our planet’s loyal natural satellite companion does have a thin and wispy atmosphere.  Scientists have long puzzled over the existence of this tenuous atmosphere or “exosphere” and have searched for the main process that sustains it, but new research indicates that this tenuous lunar atmosphere or “exosphere” owes its existence to renewal and replenishment caused by the violent bombardment of space rocks upon the moon.  The team behind the research…

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Magnetic fields on the sun could solve longstanding solar heating mystery

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Scientists have long wondered why the hot soup of charged particles in our sun’s atmosphere gets hotter moving away from the surface of the sun. New research may have the answer, finding the super-hot nature of the sun’s outer atmosphere or “corona” could be due to the intriguing behavior of small-scale waves in this nebulous plasma. These waves, known to scientists as “kinetic Alfvén waves” or “KAWs,” are wave-like vibrations of magnetic fields manifested by motions in the sun’s photosphere. The findings could provide an important clue to decoding the…

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Can the moon help preserve Earth’s endangered species?

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Could the moon soon be home to frozen biological samples of Earth’s endangered creatures? New research suggests scientists could use naturally occurring lunar cold spots, some of which haven’t seen sunlight for billions of years, to do just this. Recent studies have shown that as many as 8 million species exist on Earth, and over 1 million of these are under threat of extinction. Worryingly, this estimate could be the tip of the iceberg, as there could be many species that could become extinct before they have even been identified.…

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Moon robots could build stone walls to protect lunar bases from rocket exhaust

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An autonomous, robotic hydraulic excavator could build a dry stone wall to act as a blast shield around a launch pad on the moon, propose a team of Swiss researchers. The excavator would make use of in situ materials (rather than the costly practice of transporting building material from Earth to the moon), collecting rocks on the lunar surface for use in a ringed wall with a radius of between 50 and 100 meters (164 to 328 feet). “The robot would be used to both collect the boulders as well…

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