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Solar System

March Moon Madness
March 25, 2008
Moons of our planetary system are supposed to behave themselves.  They were expected to just quietly orbit their host planets like nice, cold, frozen, inactive chunks of rock and ice.  It seems like whenever we get a close look at them, they are madly at work destroying theories – just like their planets have been […]
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Physics

Falling Rocks Leave Holes in Science
March 13, 2008
Hard data in astronomy is hard to come by, except when it comes by special delivery – as with meteorites.  If there is any class of phenomena that should be well understood, it should be space debris and the craters they form, because the processes involved can be watched in real time.  Meteorites adorn many […]
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Solar System

Saturn Moons Continue to Surprise Scientists
March 10, 2008
Just days before a long-awaited dive into the plume of Enceladus (see PhysOrg and JPL press release, flyby stats and news release), Cassini found another surprise in the Saturn system: a moon with rings.     A Jet Propulsion Lab press release on March 6 reported that the large moon Rhea may have rings – […]
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Uncategorized

Grand Canyon: How Do You Get a River Over a Mountain?
March 5, 2008
One would think that the Grand Canyon, one of earth’s most prominent geological features, studied by geologists for 140 years, would be well understood.  Wrong.  “The Colorado River’s integration off the Colorado Plateau remains a classic mystery in geology, despite its pivotal role in the cutting of Grand Canyon and the region’s landscape evolution.”  That’s […]
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Astronomy

Distant Galaxy Surprises Astronomers
February 19, 2008
Using the Hubble Space Telescope viewing a distant galaxy cluster as a gravitational lens, astronomers detected a new record-holder: a galaxy bright with stars almost as old as the big bang.  The story on Science Daily called this a galaxy, with redshift 7.6, a “strong contender for the galaxy distance record.”     According to […]
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Solar System

Titan Is Old-Age Problem, Despite News Media Coverage
February 15, 2008
A paper in Geophysical Research Letters1 about Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, reads like a good-news, bad-news joke.  The good news is that Titan appears to have more hydrocarbons than Earth.  The bad news is that it is not enough to save the assumption that Titan is 4.5 billion years old.     Several science news […]
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Solar System

Something is Cooking Under Enceladus
February 9, 2008
Planetary scientists have been puzzling over Enceladus, a small moon of Saturn, since geysers were discovered erupting from its south pole three years ago.  Some models suggested that eruptions could occur without liquid water, but others were not sure.     Opinion now seems to be shifting back to the necessity of a wet interior, […]
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Physics

Are Long-Term Climate Models Trustworthy?
February 5, 2008
Everything from global warming policy to evolutionary history depends on long-term climate models.  Textbooks make it seem like earth keeps reliable recordings that allow scientists to simply read off the record of years, decades, centuries, millennia and millions of years objectively.  It’s not that simple, wrote Maureen E. Raymo and Peter Huybers in Nature last […]
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Uncategorized

Deep Sea Hydrocarbons Don’t Require Life
February 1, 2008
Remember the “Lost City” deep sea vents that were discovered by surprise in 2000 (12/13/2000)?  It appears that they are producing large quantities of hydrocarbons (methane, alkanes, ethene, acetylene, propene, propyne) without the help of living organisms (cf. 08/13/2002).  A team of scientists deduced that abiogenic reactions like the Fischer-Tropsch process and others may be […]
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Solar System

The Geologists Were Wrong
January 25, 2008
More examples of collapsing theories have appeared in the literature this week (compare last week, 01/21/2008): Dirty Comet:  The Stardust spacecraft that collected comet samples in 2006 was so named because it was believed comets contained pristine material from the birth of the sun.  That has all changed.  National Geographic News summarized a paper in […]
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Uncategorized

Life Influences Dating Method
January 22, 2008
The rate of calcium carbonate precipitation can double if microbes are present, says an article in PhysOrg.  Scientists studying hot spring deposits in Yellowstone made this “surprising discovery about the geological record of life and the environment.”  The article adds, “Their discovery could affect how certain sequences of sedimentary rock are dated, and how scientists […]
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Physics

Million-Degree Plasma Found in Orion
January 19, 2008
The Orion nebula, an object of beauty to stargazers (picture, Hubble view) is pervaded by plasma heated to two million degrees Kelvin, reported astronomers in Science.1  Two funnel-shaped regions of x-ray emitting plasma in the extended nebula were observed by astronomers using the X-Ray Multi-Mirror (XMM)-Newton satellite.     “The energy requirement to heat the […]
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Dinosaurs

Yet Another Dinosaur Extinction Theory: Bugs
January 3, 2008
A press release from Oregon State claims that insects may have finished off the dinosaurs.  Two main reasons were given for this hypothesis: (1) the extinction coincides with the rise of flowering plants and their pollinators, and (2) the impact theory has serious problems. “There are serious problems with the sudden impact theories of dinosaur […]
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Amazing Facts

Geology Sinks in the Mud
December 14, 2007
Question: what is the most abundant sedimentary rock in the world?  Follow-up question: what would happen to the science of geology if the consensus theory of how this most abundant sedimentary rock was deposited turns out to be wrong?  Prepare for a paradigm shift: experiments have shown mistakes in long-held assumptions about mudstone formation. Here’s […]
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Solar System

Stretching Saturn’s Rings in Time
December 13, 2007
An expert on planetary rings proposes a new way to keep them billions of years old.
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