Eliana Willis

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A weird ice that may form on alien planets has finally been observed

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A strange type of ice thought to dwell deep in the oceans of alien planets has finally been proven to exist.

For the first time, researchers have directly observed a sort of hybrid phase of water called plastic ice, which forms at high temperatures and pressures and exhibits traits of both solid ice and liquid water. The observations, reported February 12 in Nature, may help researchers better understand the internal architecture and processes of other worlds in our solar system and beyond, some of which might be habitable. More

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  • 163 Shares56 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    A weird ice that may form on alien planets has finally been observed

    A strange type of ice thought to dwell deep in the oceans of alien planets has finally been proven to exist.

    For the first time, researchers have directly observed a sort of hybrid phase of water called plastic ice, which forms at high temperatures and pressures and exhibits traits of both solid ice and liquid water. The observations, reported February 12 in Nature, may help researchers better understand the internal architecture and processes of other worlds in our solar system and beyond, some of which might be habitable. More

  • 138 Shares82 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    The moon’s two grand canyons formed in less than 10 minutes

    A giant impact 3.8 billion years ago sent a curtain of rock flying away from a point near the moon’s south pole. When that curtain fell, its rocks plunged up to 3.5 kilometers into the lunar surface with energies 130 times greater than the global inventory of nuclear weapons, new calculations show.

    And that’s how a hailstorm of boulders carved out two gargantuan canyons on the moon in less than 10 minutes.

    “They landed in a staccato fashion, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang,” says planetary geologist David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, who reports the finding February 4 in Nature Communications. More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Ancient rocks reveal when rivers began pouring nutrients into the sea

    Rivers may have operated on a global scale around 3.5 billion years ago.

    The new find comes courtesy of ancient rocks in China and South Africa. A change in rock chemistry around that time provides the earliest known chemical evidence for the weathering of Earth’s continents and the subsequent delivery of nutrients from land to ocean, geobiologist Kurt Konhauser and colleagues report December 12 in Geology.

    Water chips away at rocks on land, removing minerals and washing them away. “As soon as you get weathering, you’ve got a nutrient influx to the oceans, which can lead to … life thriving in coastal waters,” says Konhauser, of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. More

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    Pluto may have captured its moon Charon with a kiss

    Pluto and Charon’s meet-cute may have started with a kiss. New computer simulations of the dwarf planet and its largest moon suggest that the pair got together in a “kiss-and-capture” collision, where the two bodies briefly joined up before settling into their current positions.

    “It’s a U-Haul situation,” says planetary scientist Adeene Denton of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who reports the results January 6 in Nature Geoscience. “They kiss and they say, ‘Yeah, this is it. I want to build a system together with you.’ And then they do.” More

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    NASA’s Perseverance rover found a new potential setting for Martian life

    WASHINGTON D.C. — The Perseverance Rover on Mars may have stumbled upon the oldest rocks humans have ever seen and, possibly, evidence of a new setting that ancient Martian organisms could have inhabited, if they ever existed.

    “This is really one of the most exciting things that this mission is going to do, is to be looking at rocks that were formed so early in the history of the solar system,” said Caltech geochemist Kenneth Farley during a December 12 news briefing at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “Almost the dawn of the solar system.” More

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    Mars’ potato-shaped moons could be the remains of a shredded asteroid

    Mars’ moons could be the remains of an ill-starred asteroid that got too close to the Red Planet.

    A shredded asteroid origin could help explain mysterious features of the small, odd-shaped moons, scientists suggest in the January issue of Icarus.

    Where most moons are big round orbs, Mars’ Phobos and Deimos are small lumpy potatoes.

    There are two main ideas for how the moons formed. One is that the moons actually were asteroids that were caught by Mars’s gravity. But that idea doesn’t explain the moons’ circular, stable orbits around Mars’ equator. More

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    A first look at rocks from the lunar farside create a volcanic mystery

    The first samples from the farside of the moon contain signs of surprising volcanic activity near the lunar south pole.

    Two separate analyses of lunar rocks brought to Earth by China’s Chang’e-6 spacecraft show the rocks formed from cooling magma relatively recently, about 2.8 billion years ago, according to papers published November 15 in Science and Nature. The measurements may help solve the mystery of why the moon’s farside is so different from its nearside, but also raise new questions about the history of lunar volcanism. More

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    Uranus may have looked weird when NASA’s Voyager 2 flew by

    Some of Uranus’ apparent oddities might be due to bad timing.

    In 1986, the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past the planet, recording mysteries of its magnetic field. Turns out, Uranus may have just been in an unusual state. A solar wind event days before the flyby compressed the giant planet’s magnetosphere, researchers report November 11 in Nature Astronomy. That compression could explain several long-standing puzzles about Uranus and its moons, and could inform planning for future missions (SN: 4/20/22). More