Earth may have had a ring system during the middle Ordovician period, approximately 466 million years ago. According to researchers, the ring formed when a massive asteroid came within Earth’s Roche limit and broke apart.
A recent study shows that a plume of debris produced by NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission’s impact on Dimorphos in 2022, could reach Mars and Earth within 7 years, creating a new meteor shower.
Chinese experts propose using nuclear weapons as a last resort to protect Earth from potential asteroid crashes. The team, led by Zhang He of the Beijing Institute of Spacecraft System Engineering, stressed that current planetary defense technologies, including NASA’s DART mission, may be insufficient against larger asteroids.
Two Australian scientists discovered a ‘seismic abnormality’ in the Earth’s outer core — a “donut” of energy around the equator, where seismic waves move about 2% slower than in other core regions. Their study provides new clues about the dynamics of our planet’s magnetic field.
A recent study led by Dipanjan Dey of the University of Southampton, in collaboration with international scientists, revealed the vital role that Atlantic and Arctic water mixing plays in maintaining the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), an essential component of the global climate system.
A massive asteroid struck Ganymede, Jupiter’s and the Solar System’s largest moon, roughly 4 billion years ago, producing a significant shift in its rotational axis. This event, which formed the conspicuous Valhalla Basin, was so powerful that it shifted Ganymede’s axis about 7 degrees, changing the moon’s geological history.
A team of scientists compared data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and ESA’s Solar Orbiter and discovered that magnetic waves known as Alfvén waves, essentially a form of plasma wave, are responsible for pumping energy into the solar wind, causing it to accelerate and heat up as it travels away from the Sun.
A new study was conducted to understand the precursors to the 2021 Fukushima Prefecture Offshore Earthquake (Mj = 7.3), which occurred on February 13, 2021, off the coast of Fukushima, Japan, as an aftershock of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. The investigation, led by Masashi Hayakawa and Yasuhide Hobara, focused on the Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling (LAIC) channels and multi-parameter anomalies that occurred before the earthquake.
A recent study by Társilo Girona of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Kyriaki Drymoni of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich proposed a new machine learning technique for predicting big earthquakes months in advance. The study, published in Nature Communications on August 28, 2024, intended to improve earthquake predictions and public safety.
Researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks identified a new electromagnetic wave called the “specularly reflected whistler.” This wave, caused by low-latitude lightning, challenged earlier notions by revealing that lightning energy can escape the ionosphere and enter the magnetosphere, impacting space weather dynamics. The discovery of the “specularly reflected whistler” which is an electromagnetic wave…
