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The meteorites that bombarded Mars during the early days of the inner solar system may have carried enough water to create a 300-metre-deep ocean on the planet.

Martin Bizzarro at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and his colleagues have analysed the concentration of a rare chromium isotope, known as chromium-54, in samples of meteorites that have come to Earth from Mars to estimate how much water was deposited on the Red Planet by asteroids.

The uppermost layer of Mars contains the chemical signatures of carbonaceous, or C-type, meteorites that bombarded it as its crust solidified some 4.5 billion years ago.

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All of our civilization exists only a thin layer of Earth’s surface, and our deepest mines barely scratch our planet. We often talk about finding new mineral resources on other worlds or asteroids in the future, but are we ignore a treasure beneath our feet, and what other technologies and engineering might we utilize in Earth’s depths?

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Many have believed Earth might have a spirit, but Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis contemplates this as a scientific possibility. Could our world be alive itself?

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What should be the future goal of the Moon exploration (after the Artemis launch was finally successful): A human base! We could do some amazing science with a human base on the Moon.

Posted on Big Think, direct Weblink at.

Posted on BigThink.

During Artemis I, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket will send the agency’s Orion spacecraft on a trek 40,000 miles beyond the Moon before returning to Earth. To capture the journey, the rocket and spacecraft are equipped with cameras that will collect valuable engineering data and share a unique perspective of humanity’s return to the Moon.

Water covers three-quarters of the Earth’s surface and was crucial for the emergence of life, but its origins have remained a subject of active debate among scientists.

Now, a 4.6bn-year-old rock that crashed on to a driveway in Gloucestershire last year has provided some of the most compelling evidence to date that water arrived on Earth from asteroids in the outer solar system.

Researchers have discovered the heaviest-known bound isotope of sodium and characterized other neutron-rich isotopes, offering important benchmarks for refining nuclear models.

The neutron dripline marks a boundary of nuclear existence—indicating isotopes of a given element with a maximum number of neutrons. Adding a neutron to a dripline isotope will cause the isotope to become unbound and release one or more of its neutrons. Mapping the dripline is a major goal of modern nuclear physics, as this boundary is a testing ground for nuclear models and has implications for our understanding of neutron stars and of the synthesis of elements in stellar explosions. Now studies by two groups extend our knowledge of the properties of nuclei close to the dripline [1, 2]. Working at the Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory (RIBF) in Japan, Deuk Soon Ahn of RIKEN and colleagues have discovered sodium-39 (³⁹ Na), which likely marks the dripline location for the heaviest element to date (Fig. 1) [1].

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Continue reading “Are there Undiscovered Elements Beyond The Periodic Table?” »

The space observatory’s most recent image shows a star’s preamble in the nearby universe.