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Origin of Life

Mars Looks More Hostile to Life
August 6, 2009
The methane Mars produces gets destroyed rapidly.  This is leading some planetary scientists to get depressed about the possibility of finding life there.     The BBC News, Space.com and New Scientist all reported on the paper in Nature,1 saying this represents bad news for life.  In models by Franck Lefevre and Francois Forget, patterns […]
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Media

Salting News with the L Word Life
June 25, 2009
Small amounts of sodium were detected in ice particles erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus.  Deduction: this might lower the melting point of underground ice, forming subsurface pockets of liquid water – perhaps an ocean.  Conclusion: Life!  It doesn’t matter that Enceladus has no other factors conducive to life than water, or that salt is generally […]
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Origin of Life

This Place Really Has Atmosphere
June 11, 2009
Of all the bodies in the solar system, only eight have a substantial atmosphere.  If you add in those with tenuous atmospheres, you can add in Triton and Mercury, and maybe a few others, till it becomes pedantic to call it an atmosphere if there are only a few short-lived molecules hovering over a moon.  […]
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Physics

Planets Can’t Grow Past the Electric Fence
June 9, 2009
In the artwork, it looks so simple: dust clumps into planets that grow into nice, orbiting solar systems – like ours.  It’s not so simple when you try to nail down the real physics.  Planet-building models have to contend with a host of variables and barriers to growth (accretion).  Another barrier was discussed in Astrophysical […]
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Solar System

Milankovitch Cycles Indistinguishable from Randomness
June 2, 2009
A claim has often been made by geologists that the rock sediments record cyclical changes in Earth’s orbit.  Milankovitch cycles, named for the man who analyzed them, are a set of regular periodic changes to the orbital eccentricity, obliquity, and axial precession of the Earth over tens and hundreds of thousands of years.  These subtle […]
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Physics

Building Planets: Can’t Make Them, But Hurry
May 21, 2009
Constructing planets is a delicate business.  Trying to get tiny bits of dust to join up into balls has never been found to work.  It has to work fast, though, because unless the whole planet clears its dust lane, it will be dragged into the star in short order.  It seems you can’t get there […]
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Solar System

State of the Moon Titan Addressed
May 6, 2009
Each May, a series of articles on major topics of geological interest, written by leading experts in the field, is published in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.  This year’s issue includes a treatise on Titan, the large moon of Saturn, written by the two titans of Titan science, Jonathan Lunine and Ralph […]
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Dumb Ideas

Mooning the Public: Life Sells
April 27, 2009
Advertisers have known for a long time that sex sells.  That’s why ads often include a scantily-clad woman standing next to the pickup truck for sale.  It seems that in planetary science, life sells.  An icy moon can be a pretty dull thing, but announce that there might be life there, and eye appeal jumps.  […]
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Dumb Ideas

From Dust to St. Patrick in 5 Billion Years Flat
March 17, 2009
Biblical creationists and evolutionists have one belief in common: we came originally from dust.  How that dust became organized is the difference.  Both views teach that our bodies are comprised of the same atoms found in dust, but creationists say an intelligent designer purposefully molded the dust into a fully-formed man and woman, whereas evolutionists […]
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Bible and Theology

Kepler On the Way to Search for Earth-Size Planets
March 7, 2009
The long-awaited launch of the planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft was successful Friday night, announced the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  Named for the 17th-century German astronomer-mathematician Johannes Kepler, the spacecraft will stare at 100,000 stars for over three years, looking for variations in their light that indicate the presence of planets.  Follow-up studies may determine if some of […]
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Dumb Ideas

Are You Cereous?  Life Came from an Asteroid?
March 5, 2009
Ceres is an icy asteroid way out in space that has a lot of ice.  The DAWN spacecraft is heading there.  When it arrives in 2015, maybe it will find out if a substantial part of the water is in liquid state under an ice crust.  Say the word water, and some think… life.   […]
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Solar System

Titan Methane Age Still a Problem
February 2, 2009
“Our new map provides more coverage of Titan’s poles, but even if all of the features we see there were filled with liquid methane, there’s still not enough to sustain the atmosphere for more than 10 million years.”  So said Elizabeth Turtle, lead author of a paper in Geophysical Research Letters,1 in an article on […]
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Physics

The Moon Has Core Values
January 25, 2009
Did the moon have a molten core?  There has been “a long-held consensus that objects in the solar system smaller than than [sic] Mars, can’t sustain magnetic fields,” said National Geographic News based on a paper in Science January 16.1  Apollo rock samples seem to indicate the presence of long-lived magnetism.  It suggests a molten […]
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Origin of Life

Time for Mars Life Again
January 16, 2009
Methane detection around Mars is giving new life to claims there is life on Mars.  Space.com #1 and Space.com #2 explain why NASA scientists are looking to see if the methane can be explained geologically or biologically.  Some news sites, like The Sun, go over the top with claims life has been discovered.  Only the […]
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Solar System

This Day in History: Genesis from the Moon
December 24, 2008
Forty years ago this day, Christmas Eve, a riotous and troubled world stopped in its tracks and held its breath.  The crew of Apollo 8, which had blasted off 3 days earlier in the new behemoth rocket Saturn V, masterminded by rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, had reached orbit around the moon, and was about […]
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