Category Astronomy/Space

NASA’s InSight lander has detected two strong, clear quakes originating in a location of Mars called Cerberus Fossae—the same place where two strong quakes were seen earlier in the mission. The new quakes have magnitudes of 3.3 and 3.1; the previous quakes were magnitude 3.6 and 3.5. InSight has recorded over 500 quakes to date, but because of their clear signals, these are four of the best quake records for probing the interior of the planet.

Studying marsquakes is one way the InSight science team seeks to develop a better understanding of Mars’ mantle and core...

Earth’s sea level has remained fairly constant during the last 541 million years, but a new study suggests the planet may have been covered by a vast global ocean 4 to 3.2 billion years ago.

The new findings challenge earlier assumptions that the size of the Earth’s global ocean has remained constant over time and offer clues to how its size may have changed throughout geologic time, according to the study’s authors.

Most of Earth’s surface water exists in the oceans. But there is a second reservoir of water deep in Earth’s interior, in the form of hydrogen and oxygen attached to minerals in the mantle.

A new study in AGU ...

Scientists discover one of the first black holes of its kind. Intermediate mass black holes (100 to 100,000 times the mass of the sun) have only been directly detected once before (LIGO, last year). They form an important link between the smaller black holes left behind after the deaths of stars, and the supermassive black holes which lurk in the hearts of every galaxy.

The astrophysicists also find that there are about 40,000 of these objects in the neighbourhood of our galaxy.

The recently discovered ‘Goldilocks’ black hole is part of a missing link between two populations of black holes: small black holes made from stars and supermassive giants in the nucle...

A paper by the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) Director Ooguri Hirosi and Project Researcher Matthew Dodelson on the string theoretical effects outside the black hole photon sphere has been selected for the “Editors’ Suggestion” of the journal Physical Review D...