meteorites tagged posts

We can estimate the age of heavy elements in the primordial Solar System by measuring the traces left in meteorites by specific radioactive nuclei synthesized in certain types of supernovae.
Credit: NAOJ

An international team has proposed a new method to investigate the inner workings of supernovae explosions. This new method uses meteorites and is unique in that it can determine the contribution from electron anti-neutrinos, enigmatic particles which can’t be tracked through other means.

Supernovae are important events in the evolution of stars and galaxies, but the details of how the explosions occur are still unknown...

This is Jupiter’s southern hemisphere photographed by NASA’s Juno spacecraft.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/GeraldEichstaedt/Sean Doran

Researchers can now show how Jupiter was formed. Data collected from meteorites had indicated that the growth of the giant planet had been delayed for two million years. Now the researchers have found an explanation: Collisions with kilometer-sized blocks generated high energy, which meant that in this phase hardly any accretion of gas could take place and the planet could only grow slowly.

With an equator diameter of around 143,000 kilometers, Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and has 300 times the mass of the Earth. The formation mechanism of giant planets like Jupiter has been a hotly debated topic for several decades...

Schematic of the history of precipitation of moganite and subsurface H2O ice in the Moon. Credit: Masahiro Kayama and M. Sasaoka (SASAMI-GEO-SCIENCE)

A team of researchers led by Masahiro Kayama of Tohoku University has found evidence in a lunar meteorite that water once existed on the moon. In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, the team describes their study of the meteorite and why they believe it offers evidence of water on the moon. Water on the moon, some have suggested, would be valuable, because it could support a colony—or perhaps be used for other purposes, such as powering spacecraft. But thus far, efforts to find any below the surface in the more temperate regions have come up empty-handed...

A NASA team scanned these terrestrial rock samples, all measuring two to four inches in diameter, to investigate possibilities for future in-space use of non-destructive evaluation techniques. The two rock samples on the bottom are from Earth’s newest volcanic island in the Kingdom of Tonga; the sample on the upper left from kilometers deep contains large green olivine crystals and came from Oahu in Hawaii. The sample on the upper right is a 3.7-million-year old impact melt breccia from the Elgygytgyn impact crater in Siberia. Credit: NASA/W. Hrybyk

A diagnostic tool, similar in theory to those used by the medical profession to non-invasively image internal organs, bones, soft tissue, and blood vessels, could be equally effective at “triaging” extraterrestrial rocks and other samples befor...