Lord Kelvin’s Core Values Defended
July 2, 2007
Myth: Lord Kelvin held back the progress of geology for 100 years by insisting the Earth was younger than geologists and evolutionists believed. Myth debunked here.
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Saturns Moons Are Bustin Out All Over
June 16, 2007
Add Tethys and Dione to the party blowers around Saturn. Cassini found that these two moons are active, like Enceladus and Titan, though on a lesser scale. Cassini scientists discovered the effects of outbound particles from these moons by studying the plasma fields with the Cassini plasma spectrometer (CAPS) instrument. The results suggest surface activity, […]
How Old Are Sand Dunes?
June 4, 2007
The Namib Desert has some of the largest sand dunes in the world. How old are they? Three scientists from the University of London decided to find out. They took cores out of some dunes in Namibia and analyzed the sand, using multiple high-tech methods. Their conclusion, just published in Geology: the dunes are much […]
Think Fast: News Briefs
May 21, 2007
Of the many news items that cross the CEH desk, many are noteworthy but go unreported due to lack of time. Here are a few that deserve honorable mention lest they pass into oblivion. Cosmology: Dark future – Several sources like Science Now and Space.com commented on the dark future of the universe if cosmic acceleration […]
Tweaking Mercury to Keep it Old
May 4, 2007
Mercury has a magnetic field. That’s odd. It shouldn’t. If it were 4.6 billion years old, the little planet should be solid stiff by now. Planetary scientists have published a new model of its interior with the required molten outer core that allows a dynamo to generate the observed magnetic field. What’s interesting are the […]
Binary Asteroid Formidable Challenge to Theory
April 2, 2007
Two asteroids found orbiting each other in the asteroid belt are found to be mere rubble piles. They are composed of rocks loosely held together by gravity, says an article on Science Daily. French astronomers measured the rotation of the pair and their density with better accuracy, and modeled how the pair might have split […]
The Hot Moon Epidemic Spreads to the Suburbs
March 31, 2007
A planetary symptom we might call “Enceladus fever” is apparently an epidemic. Now, we’ve found that it infects some of the Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) beyond the orbit of Neptune. More and more small bodies are being found with internal heat that has broken out onto the surface. This is a big surprise. Small bodies […]
Saturn Still Serving Surprises
March 28, 2007
The Cassini Spacecraft, three-fourths of the way into its 4-year prime mission, is not running out of new things to see. Some of the latest discoveries are both awesome and strange. A Hex on the Pole: As if the south pole of Saturn, with its earth-sized hurricane (picture) were not dramatic enough, the north pole […]
Lunar Dust Is Deadly
March 22, 2007
A significant fraction of lunar dust could pose deadly risks to future astronauts stationed on the moon, a BBC News report says. About 1-3% of moon dust particles are too small to be coughed up or removed by the cilia lining the respiratory tract. These would lodge in the lungs and become inflamed. As in […]
Did Mars Have a Global Flood?
March 18, 2007
There’s enough ice under Mars’ southern polar cap to flood the entire planet under 36 feet of water, reports Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The MARSIS radar instrument on the ESA-NASA Mars Express determined that the ice cap is more than 2 miles thick in places. According to the report on National Geographic News, traces of possible […]
The Enceladus Problem Heats Up
March 13, 2007
How can a small icy moon produce hot-water geysers? That is the Enceladus problem: for a small moon assumed to be 4.5 billion years old to be forcefully gushing out water from its south pole was a great surprise when the Cassini spacecraft first detected the geysers in 2005 (11/28/2005). Ever since, scientists have been […]
Sun as a Star: How Does It Compare?
March 7, 2007
Not too many years ago, our sun was described as a common, ordinary star. More recently, the Type G2 Dwarf Main-Sequence class, of which Ol Sol is a member, is believed to comprise only 5% of all stars. An important paper in Astrophysical Journal is now revealing that the sun is special within its class: […]
Dynamic Solar System Illuminated in Stunning New Images
March 1, 2007
Images both striking and beautiful continue to arrive on Earth from remote corners of the solar system. Arriving as streams of binary digits with energies mere quadrillionths of a watt, received by giant radio dishes then amplified and processed, the results are nothing short of amazing. Here’s a glimpse of what turned up this week: […]
Theories of the Moon: Looney Tunes?
February 19, 2007
The TV science channels tell it like a matter of fact: our Moon originated from the coalescing debris of a glancing impact with Earth from a Mars-sized object, sometime long ago. They even have computer animations to show how it all happened. How reliable is this theory, though? This month’s Planetary Report from The Planetary […]
Enceladus Spray-Paints Its Neighbors Yards
February 10, 2007
Saturn’s moon Enceladus is not only Yellowstone unto itself. Its shares the National Park experience with its neighbors. The geyser spray coats nearby moons white like snow. Space.com and National Geographic are calling this a case of “cosmic graffiti.” How did scientists catch the tagger? The original paper in Science describes how on […]