Earth's inner core. Credit: Rost-9D/iStock The rotation of the Earth's solid inner core may have recently stopped briefly as well as could be reversing, according to a study released in Nature Geoscience this week. The authors show proof that oscillation in the rotation of the internal core coincides with periodic changes in the Earth's surface...
Intensity as a function of time and spin phase for the two detections of the new eclipsing redback pulsar 47 Tuc ad. Left panel: Parkes observation made on 2004/05/27. Right panel: MeerKAT discovery observation. Credit: Ridolfi et al., 2021. Utilizing the MeerKAT radio telescope, astronomers from the Max Planck Institution for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in...
Boudinage in brecciated dolostone rocks of the Panamint Range (Wildrose Area, Death Valley National Park). New research shows that periclase is stronger than bridgmanite in the earth's lower mantle, analogous to boudins developing in rigid ("stronger") rocks among less competent ("weaker") rocks. Credit: Jennifer M. Jackson, Caltech As you are reading this, more than 400...
Credit: Royal Holloway, University of London Finding the building blocks of life New research released on the organic analysis of the Winchcombe meteorite that crash-landed onto a driveway in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, in 2021. The research, led by Dr. Queenie Chan from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, discovered organic compounds from...
An infrared image of Io snapped by Juno in July 2022. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM) The most powerful volcanic eruptions in the Solar System occur not on Earth, however on Io, a sulfurous moon orbiting the planet Jupiter. And currently, researchers from the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) in the United States have noticed a current outburst that's been surprisingly productive,...
Planet Mars illustration . Credit: © revers_jr / stock.adobe.com On Earth, shifting tectonic plates reshuffle the planet's surface and make for a dynamic interior, so the lack of such processes on Mars led several to think of it as a dead planet where not much occurred in the past 3 billion years. In the present problem...
A donut-shaped magnetic confinement device called a tokamak is one of the leading designs for a working fusion power generator, with many such experiments running worldwide. Credit: Christopher Roux, EUROfusion Consortium, CC BY Our society faces the grand difficulty of offering sustainable, secure, and affordable forms of generating energy while trying to reduce CO2 emissions to net...
Credit: NASA Maybe you believe that one Earth is sufficient. However, what if the number was in the billions? According to a recent research study, the number of Earth-like planets in our Milky Way galaxy can approach 6 billion. Astronomers at the College of British Columbia (UBC) examined information from NASA's Kepler project and also came...
Since the dynamics inside a fusion reactor are extremely complicated, the walls may melt. Image credit: Max Planck Institute of Plasma physics. Cutaway of a Fusion Reactor A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) and the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wein) has actually found a way to manage Type-I...
Artist’s impression of an ultra-hot Jupiter transiting its star Utilizing the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), astronomers have spotted the heaviest element ever found in an exoplanet atmosphere-- barium. They were surprised to find barium at high altitudes in the atmospheres of the ultra-hot gas giants WASP-76 b and WASP-121 b-- two...
