The airborne spicks and specks known as aerosol particles are created by both natural and human processes and can consist of sea salt, sand grains, soot particles, sulfates and other materials of organic and inorganic origin. We blow vast quantities of aerosols into the air with our cars, power plants and heating systems, and while […]
Geoscientists from the California Institute of Technology have proposed a new explanation for the formation of monsoons, overhauling a traditional theory that had held firm for more than 300 years. The old idea of monsoon formation was developed in 1686 by English astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley (mainly known for his eponymous comet). In Halley’s […]
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of a “blizzard” of particles in a disk around a young star, shedding light on the process by which planets form from tiny dust grains. They were detected in a disk encircling the 12-million-year-old star AU Microscopii which is 32 light-years distant in the southern constellation of Microscopium. […]
A frenetic period of star-making in the Milky Way about two-and-a-half billion years ago had extraordinary effects on life on Earth, says Dr. Henrik Svensmark, of the Danish National Space Center. Writing in the journalAstronomische Nachrichten, Dr. Svensmark reports how bacterial populations in the sea flunctuated wildly, with an instability unique to that period. Based […]
Astronomers from Yale and Leiden University in The Netherlands have discovered that old stars dominated many large galaxies in the early universe, raising the issue of why these galaxies progressed into galactic adulthood so early on in the life of the universe. Cosmologists know that every year, only a handful of new stars are born […]
NASA scientists say that more than one-third of the giant planet systems recently detected outside Earth’s solar system may harbor Earth-like planets. Even more astonishing, they say that it’s quite likely that these Earth-like planets would have deep oceans with the potential for life. The new projections come from calculations centered on gas giant planetary […]
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has snapped some pictures of the dusty core of two merging galaxies and uncovered a region where star formation has gone wild. The colliding galaxies appear as a single, strange looking galaxy named Arp 220 (the galaxy is the 220th object in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies). Astronomers say the […]
Geologists writing in the journal Nature say they have discovered that the time it takes for mountain ranges to form is millions of years shorter than previously thought. The duration of many geological processes that shape the Earth had been thought to last for hundreds of millions of years. The research, by geologists at Queen’s […]
