Back To Wild

Early Mars was warm and wet for millions years, a perfect place of life development, according to a new study. Scientists made use of Mars Reconnaissance orbiter belonging to NASA to observe closely the clays on the surface of the planet, which is associated with water. The study appears in this week’s issue ( July 2008) of Nature.

The clays, known as phyllosilicates, were scattered across the surface of the planet in craters, delta formations, valleys and dunes. This implies that water existed in the terrain, according to the scientists.

Planetary geologist Jack Mustard of Brown University claims that Mars was not as hot as it is now. It was rich with water for considerable period of time. One would think of lakes and ocean, but it was in the crust that tons of water was found percolating. The watery era on Mars came to end very abruptly.

The study held the view that the watery period came to an end at the close of the Noachian epoch, which was the earliest geologic age of the planet. This would imply that Mars was wet about 4.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago.

source

Mercury, the smallest and the innermost planet of the solar system is experiencing an iron meltdown. Though the law of physics claims that the core of this small planet (40% smaller than Earth) could have solidified and cooled years ago, a radar technique revealed that the planet had both solid and semi-liquid matter. This partial liquid core explains the poor magnetic field of the planet.

Researchers are of late masticating on a new theory that it could be raining iron flakes inside Mercury. This scenario opens more ground into speculating the magnetic field of the planet because mercury is the only other terrestrial rocky body apart from Earth.

The “messenger spacecraft” launched by NASA reveals that when it passed Mercury this January 2008, the planet’s magnetic field seemed to be dipolar which implies that Mercury like Earth has a north and south pole. Explicating further, the researchers claimed that such fields are caused by the “dynamo effect” which exists when a conductive molten core rotates.

Researchers from the University of Illinois and Case Western Reserve University, Ohio assert that it could be a combination of sulfur and iron which could be creating iron flakes in the form of snow which is appearing at the outer edge of the planet’s core.

The scientists took a sample of sulfur and iron and blend them together to determine the results of Mercury’s core. It was finally concluded that as the planet’s core cools, iron atoms condense to form tiny cubic iron flakes which travel to the center of the planet. On reaching the center, the light and sulfur-laden liquid lying deep inside the core, rises and causes convection currents that produce Mercury’s weak magnetic field.

Earlier discoveries support the view that sulfur led to the half molten state of Mercury’s core. Researchers are stating that further evidence is required by means of images of the planet’s magnetic field, chemical studies and sulfur deposits inside the planet in order to determine whether it is snowing iron flakes inside Mercury.

source

A team of scientists have discovered the coolest star which is about 40-light years away from the Earth. It has been unearthed that this dim-lit, cool and lonely star has a mass between 15-30 times the mass of Jupiter.

The star, which is also being referred to as the “brown dwarf star” , is said to have a surface temperature of 660 degrees Fahrenheit or 350 degrees Celsius, which is equal to the surface temperature of the planet Mercury at the equator and cooler than the surface temperature of Venus.

This brown dwarf star is distinct because it falls right in the middle of the mega-planets and the smaller stars. Usually the stars which fall in this territory are referred to as the “Y class dwarf”.

Loic Albert, stellar researcher from the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, Hawaii is of the opinion that the “CFBDS0059” star, as it has been named, maybe the last visible spectral type of star lying between the planets and the stars.

Albert’s team claims that Y class dwarfs are generally dim in nature and cannot be identified so easily. Forget naked eye, it is difficult to identify the same through a telescope too. This is mainly due to the fact that it is not hot enough to glow red and bright. Instead, the dwarf star glows below the red hot temperature in the infrared light.

The team therefore made use of studying the CFBDS0059 star with the help of near-infrared and infrared instruments of the Canada France Hawaii and the Gemini North telescopes in Hawaii, together with the European Southern Observatory’s NTT telescope in Chile.

Asteroids are small bodies that are supposed to be left over from the beginning of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. They are stony objects with round or uneven shapes up to several hundred km across, but most are much smaller.

There are more than 100,000 asteroids lying in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. These asteroids lie in a site in the solar system where there seems to be a jump in the spacing between the planets. Scientists believe that these remains may be the remnants of an early planet, which could have broke up early in the solar system.

Several thousand of the biggest asteroids in this belt have been given names. The probabilities of an asteroid having a collision with Earth are very small! But some do come close to Earth, like Hermes. The closest approach was of 777,000 km.

The region in our solar system, called the Asteroid Belt or Main Belt, possibly contain millions of asteroids ranging extensively in size from Ceres, which are at 940 km in diameter is about one-quarter the diameter of our Moon, to bodies that are less than 1 km across.

As they rotate around the Sun in elliptical orbits, giant Jupiter’s gravity and occasional close meet with Mars or with another asteroid change the asteroids’ orbits, knocking them out of the Main Belt and throwing them into space across the orbits of the planets.

Twin NASA spacecraft that are studying the sun have sent back spectacular first images of Earth that will help the scientists detect and track solar storms.This picture gives a close-up view of the sun’s activity, like the snapshot of loops in a magnetically active region that soon afterward produced a series of intense flares.

Scientists say that this sweeping viewpoint will let them study the flow of energy from the sun to Earth, coronal mass ejections—violent eruptions of electrically charged gas from the sun’s atmosphere that can cause dangerous solar storms.

The dust from the comets that survived the death of their star is clouding the “eye” of the distant Helix nebula, reveals this image released by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The nebula, which is places around 700 light-years from Earth, is the colorful remnant of a dying sun like star that left off its outer layers to become a white dwarf.

Many such nebulae litter our galaxy, but the Helix nebula is among a few known to show evidence of cosmic survivors. There is a haze of red formed around the dead star at the center of the formation and is most probably caused by dust that comes from colliding comets, According to NASA scientists.

Before the star died, the comets that were present around it were orbiting in an orderly fashion. As the dying star increased in size, it blew the comets into each other’s paths, so that they now just are around and send dust moving around the white dwarf.