Category Astronomy/Space

New research into metal-rich asteroids reveals information about the origins and compositions of these rare bodies that could one day be mined. Metal-rich near-Earth asteroids, or NEAs, are rare, but their presence provides the intriguing possibility that iron, nickel and cobalt could someday be mined for use on Earth or in Space.

New research, published in the Planetary Science Journal, investigated two metal-rich asteroids in our own cosmic backyard to learn more about their origins, compositions and relationships with meteorites found on Earth.

These me...

Astronomers from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of CAS and Nanjing University have revealed the wobbly and flared nature of the Milky Way disk based on LAMOST-Gaia data, which updates our understanding about the galaxy.

The results were published in the Astronomical Journal.

The Milky Way is a typical disk galaxy. In the classical view of the Milky Way, the disk is symmetric and flat on the whole, like a pancake. Stars in the disk rotate around the galactic center, with mean radial and vertical velocities to be zero.

With the help of huge observational data provided by large survey projects in recent years, more and more details hidden in the Milky Way disk have become appar...

Benefits of nitrogen-fixing bacteria could aid efforts towards farming soils on Mars. Clover plants grown in Mars-like soils experience significantly more growth when inoculated with symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria than when left uninoculated. Franklin Harris of Colorado State University, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 29, 2021.

As Earth’s population grows, researchers are studying the possibility of farming Martian soils, or “regoli...

On Earth, river erosion is usually a slow-going process. But on Mars, massive floods from overflowing crater lakes had an outsized role in shaping the Martian surface, carving deep chasms and moving vast amounts of sediment, according to a new study led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

The study, published Sept. 29 in Nature, found that the floods, which probably lasted mere weeks, eroded more than enough sediment to completely fill Lake Superior and Lake Ontario.

“If we think about how sediment was being moved across the landscape on ancient Mars, lake breach floods were a really important process globally,” said lead au...