A team of Japanese scientists led by Masahiro Kayama of Tohoku University’s Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences, has discovered a mineral known as moganite in a lunar meteorite found in a hot desert in northwest Africa. Continue reading “Long suspected theory about the moon holds water”
A star disturbed the comets of the solar system 70,000 years ago
About 70,000 years ago, a small reddish star approached our solar system and gravitationally disturbed comets and asteroids. Astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Cambridge have verified that the movement of some of these objects is still marked by that stellar encounter. Continue reading “A star disturbed the comets of the solar system 70,000 years ago”
Early Earth may have had two moons
Earth once had two moons, which merged in a slow-motion collision that took several hours to complete, researchers propose in Nature today.
Both satellites would have formed from debris that was ejected when a Mars-size protoplanet smacked into Earth late in its formation period. Whereas traditional theory states that the infant Moon rapidly swept up any rivals or gravitationally ejected them into interstellar space, the new theory suggests that one body survived, parked in a gravitationally stable point in the Earth–Moon system. Continue reading “Early Earth may have had two moons”