Category Astronomy/Space

Numerous recent blogs and web postings are erroneously claiming that an asteroid will impact Earth. However, NASA experts say that there is no scientific basis that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates.

That’s the rumor that has gone viral – now here are the facts.
“There is no scientific basis – not one shred of evidence — that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates,” said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object office at the Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, California.
In fact, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program says there have been no asteroids or comets observed that would impact Earth anytime in the foreseeable future. All known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have l<0...

C/2006 P1 Comet McNaught, the ‘Great Comet of 2007′, as seen from Swift’s Creek, Victoria, Australia on 23 January 2007. Image credit: Fir0002 / Flagstaffotos / Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0.

Substantial synthesis of peptides – the first building blocks of life may have been driven by comet impacts. Dr Sugahara from JAMSTEC in Yokahama, and Dr Koichi Mimura, from Nagoya University performed a series of experiments to mimic the conditions of comet impacts on the Early Earth at the time when life first appeared, around 4 billion years ago.

They took frozen mixtures of amino acid, water ice and silicate (forsterite) at cryogenic condition (77 K), and used a propellant gun to simulate the shock of a comet impact...

These images show the central plane of a rotating disk orbiting a newly formed protostar (dark dot) formed in a three-dimensional model of the shock-triggered collapse of a molecular cloud of gas and dust. Density is shown on the left, while the x velocity plot on the right shows how the shock (outer edge) has injected fingers with motions that are responsible for producing the spin of the disk around the central protostar. Image is provided courtesy of Alan Boss.

New details about the trigger that may have started the earliest phases of planet formation in our solar system. For decades, it’s been hypothesized that our Solar System’s genesis was initiated by a shock wave from a supernova...

Artist’s concept of NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft in orbit above the moon. Credit: NASA Ames / Dana Berry

The presence of neon in the exosphere of the moon has been a subject of speculation since the Apollo missions, but no credible detections were made till now. There’s not enough neon to make the moon visibly glow because the moon’s atmosphere is extremely tenuous, about 100 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere at sea level. A dense atmosphere like Earth’s is relatively rare in our solar system because an object has to be sufficiently massive to have enough gravity to hold onto it.

The behavior of a dense atmosphere is driven by collisions between its atoms and molecules...