Category Astronomy/Space

The first lunar rocks brought back to Earth in decades show the Moon was volcanically active more recently than previously thought, Chinese scientists said Tuesday.

A Chinese spacecraft carried lunar rocks and soil to Earth last year—humanity’s first mission in four decades to collect samples from the Moon, and a milestone for Beijing’s growing space program.

The samples included basalt—a form of cooled lava—from 2.03 billion years ago, scientists found, pushing the last known date of volcanic activity on the moon closer to the present day by as much as 900 million years.

Analysis of the samples “reveals that the Moon’s interior was still evolving at around two billion years ago”, the Chin...

The cosmic boundary, perhaps caused by a young Jupiter or a wind from the solar system emerging, likely shaped the composition of infant planets. In the early solar system, a “protoplanetary disk” of dust and gas rotated around the sun and eventually coalesced into the planets we know today.

A new analysis of ancient meteorites by scientists at MIT and elsewhere suggests that a mysterious gap existed within this disk around 4...

How a conductive form of ice is formed at several thousand degrees and millions of times atmospheric pressure. Not all ice is the same. The solid form of water comes in more than a dozen different – sometimes more, sometimes less crystalline – structures, depending on the conditions of pressure and temperature in the environment. Superionic ice is a special crystalline form, half solid, half liquid — and electrically conductive. Its existence has been predicted on the basis of various models and has already been observed on several occasions under — very extreme — laboratory conditions...

Strike-slip faulting, the type of motion common to California’s well-known San Andreas Fault, was reported recently to possibly occur on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. New research, led by planetary scientists from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), suggests this tectonic motion may be active on Titan, deforming the icy surface.

On multiple ocean worlds, for example Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, expressions of strike-slip faulting are well documented...