Category Astronomy/Space

Traces of Long-Ago Climate Change Could Foretell Earth’s Own Climate Troubles. A seasonal imbalance in the amount of solar energy absorbed and released by the planet Mars is a likely cause of the dust storms that have long intrigued observers, a team of researchers reports.

Mars’ extreme imbalance in energy budget (a term referring to the measurement of solar energy a planet takes in from the sun then releases as heat)...

New chemistry ‘forensics’ indicate that the stone named Hypatia from the Egyptian desert could be the first tangible evidence found on Earth of a supernova typeIa explosion. These rare supernovas are some of the most energetic events in the universe.

This is the conclusion from a new study published in the journal Icarus, by Jan Kramers, Georgy Belyanin and Hartmut Winkler of the University of Johannesburg, and others.

Since 2013, Belyanin and Kramers have discovered a series of highly unusual chemistry clues in a small fragment of the Hypatia Stone.

In the new research, they eliminate ‘cosmic suspects’ for the origin of the stone in a painstaking process...

Professor Emeritus Unto K. Laine of Aalto University has made recordings of auroral sounds, showing that the phenomenon is much more common than previously believed and occurs even in the absence of visible northern lights. “This cancels the argument that auroral sounds are extremely rare and that the aurora borealis should be exceptionally bright and lively,” Laine says.

Laine has been studying sounds associated with the northern lights for many years. In 2016, he published a paper linking recordings of crackling and popping sounds during an auroral event with temperature profiles measured by the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI)...

A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with a colleague from the University of Copenhagen, has found evidence that water was present on Mars more recently than has been thought. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their analysis of data from China’s Zhurong rover and what it showed them about ice in hydrated minerals.

Prior research has suggested that parts of the Martian surface were covered with water up until approximately 3 billion years ago. The time since the water dried up on Mars is known as the Amazonia period. In this new effort, data from the Chinese rover Zhurong has shown the researchers evidence that water on Mars might have persisted longer than has been thought.

Rover Zhurong has been traveling ...