The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
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Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
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UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
22-07-2025
How the Moon’s Hidden Protection Shields Against Solar Wind Erosion
How the Moon’s Hidden Protection Shields Against Solar Wind Erosion
Despite the wonderful images captured from the lunar surface that suggest otherwise, the Moon does have an atmosphere. It's an incredibly thin, rarefied shell of gas known as an exosphere. (Credit: NASA)
The Moon's thin atmosphere, called an exosphere, has been a puzzle to science for some time. Two main processes were thought to create this wispy gas envelope; tiny meteoroids hitting the surface and solar wind particles bombarding the lunar soil. But new research using Apollo moon samples reveals that the Moon's own surface features provide surprising protection against solar wind erosion.
Researchers at TU Wien and the University of Bern conducted the first direct measurements of solar wind ejecting atoms and molecules when striking the lunar soil, a process known as sputtering. Unlike previous studies that relied on Earth based mineral substitutes, the team used Apollo 16 Moon dust and bombarded it with hydrogen and helium ions at solar wind speeds.
Neil Armstrong's footprint immortalised in the soft, powdery lunar regolith
(Credit : NASA)
The results were striking. Solar wind sputter yields were up to an order of magnitude lower than previously used in exosphere models. This dramatic reduction comes from two key factors that previous models had underestimated, surface roughness and the porous, fluffy nature of lunar soil.
The Moon's surface isn't smooth like a billiard ball, it’s incredibly rough and porous at the microscopic level. This texture acts like a natural shield against solar wind bombardment. When ions hit the jagged, crater-filled landscape, many get trapped in tiny pockets or strike surfaces at angles that reduce their erosive power.
Micrographs of three particles of moon dust collected during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. The montage showcases the vast differences seen within a sample. The scale bars are all 1 micrometer. The images were made with a scanning electron microscope at NIST.
(Credit : Chiaramonti Debay/NIST)
The high porosity of lunar regolith further reduces sputter yields, with the combined effects of roughness and porosity making erosion rates largely independent of the solar zenith angle. This means the protective effect works across most of the Moon's surface, regardless of latitude.
An eruption on the Sun, the source of the solar wind.
(Credit : NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
The research team created three dimensional computer simulations of the lunar surface structure, complete with the spaces between dust grains. These models revealed that the Moon's natural "fluffiness" dramatically reduces the number of atoms knocked loose by solar wind impacts.
These findings change our understanding of how the Moon loses material to space. The study provides realistic sputter yield estimates which are ten times smaller than previous estimates! This suggests that micrometeoroid impacts, rather than solar wind sputtering, are likely the dominant source of the Moon's exosphere. The tiny space rocks that constantly pepper the lunar surface may be doing most of the work in creating the Moon's thin atmospheric envelope.
Understanding how solar wind interacts with airless planetary surfaces is crucial for upcoming missions, including NASA's Artemis program and the European Space Agency's BepiColombo mission to Mercury. As for the atmosphere of the Moon, the study helps explain why previous space observations didn't match theoretical predictions. The Moon's surface has been protecting itself all along, we just needed the right tools and real lunar samples to see how.
Bestaat er een mysterieuze negende planeet in ons zonnestelsel? Nieuw bewijs toont aan dat er mogelijk ver voorbij Pluto een hypothetische planeet is die 'Planeet Negen' of 'Planeet X' wordt genoemd. Astronomen voorspellen dat er mogelijk een grote, nog niet ontdekte planeet met gravitationele interactie zich in de Kuipergordel bevindt. Het bestaan van deze mysterieuze planeet kan de afwijkende banen en gravitationele interacties van enkele dwergplaneten en andere objecten in de Kuipergordel verklaren.
Wil je meer weten? Bekijk dan deze afbeeldingen en informatie!
Neptunus Het is bijna 200 jaar geleden dat astronomen op een nieuwe planeet in ons zonnestelsel stuitten. Neptunus werd in slechts één nacht planeten observeren ontdekt, toen Johann Gottfried Galle en zijn student in 1846 een telescoop op de planeet richtten.
California Institute of Technology In 2016 verklaarden Konstantin Batygin en Mike Brown, twee astronomen van het California Institute of Technology (Caltech), dat hun onderzoek bewijs levert voor het mogelijke bestaan van een grote planeet in het buitenste zonnestelsel.
Sterk bewijs Hoewel de astronomen de planeet niet hebben waargenomen, leveren ze sterk theoretisch bewijs voor zowel het bestaan ervan als relevante informatie over de mogelijke impact ervan.
Kuipergordel Dit bewijsmateriaal toont de invloed van de hypothetische planeet op dwergplaneten en kleinere objecten in de Kuipergordel en de mogelijke relatie tussen hen.
Planeet Negen De mysterieuze planeet, die ook wel 'Planeet X' (de 'X' staat voor de letter, niet voor het Romeinse cijfer) of 'Planeet Negen' wordt genoemd, is vermoedelijk 1,5 keer zo groot als de aarde en bevindt zich ver voorbij Pluto.
Vijf tot tien keer grotere massa dan die van de aarde De massa van de planeet is mogelijk 5 tot 10 keer groter dan die van de aarde en hij zou in een 20 tot 30 keer grotere baan om de zon kunnen draaien dan Neptunus. NASA merkt op dat het Planeet Negen, mocht deze theorie kloppen, 10.000 tot 20.000 aardjaren zou kosten om één keer om de zon te draaien.
Unieke banen Astronomen zeggen dat het mogelijke bestaan van deze planeet het gedrag van bepaalde objecten in het buitenste zonnestelsel zou kunnen verklaren, met name de unieke banen van dwergplaneten en ijzige objecten in de Kuipergordel.
Gerard Kuiper De Kuipergordel is vernoemd naar de astronoom Gerard Kuiper. Het is een koud gebied dat zich voorbij de baan van Neptunus bevindt en wordt soms de 'derde zone' van het zonnestelsel genoemd.
IJzige objecten Astronomen denken dat er naast Pluto nog miljoenen andere ijzige objecten in de Kuipergordel aanwezig zijn, waaronder stoffen als ammoniak en methaan.
Opgeblazen donut De Kuipergordel staat bekend als een van de grootste samenstellingen in ons zonnestelsel en wordt over het algemeen beschreven als een opgeblazen donut.
Rand van de baan van Neptunus De Kuipergordel begint aan de rand van de baan van Neptunus en strekt zich uit over bijna 1.000 AE (1 AE komt overeen met de afstand van de zon tot de aarde).
Meer dan 2.000 objecten ontdekt Hoewel astronomen rond de 2.000 objecten hebben geïdentificeerd in de Kuipergordel, is het waarschijnlijk dat er nog honderdduizenden onontdekte objecten zijn. Deze worden vaak beschouwd als 'overblijfselen' van de vorming van het zonnestelsel.
Vorming van het zonnestelsel De theorie over hoe dit tot stand kwam, is dat toen het zonnestelsel zich vormde, Uranus en Neptunus door verschuivingen in de banen van Jupiter en Saturnus gedwongen werden om verder van de zon te bewegen.
Jupiter De zwaartekracht van de baan van Neptunus duwde deze objecten in de richting van de zon en grote planeten zoals Jupiter, terwijl Jupiter ze vervolgens uit het zonnestelsel slingerde of naar verre banen bracht.
Verbrokkelde stukken De zwaartekracht van Neptunus duwde de resterende objecten de Kuipergordel in, waar ze soms op elkaar botsten en in verbrokkelde stukken uiteenvielen.
Dwergplaneten en samengeklonterde objecten Astronomen die de Kuipergordel onderzoeken, merken dat verschillende kleinere planeten en sommige objecten de neiging hebben om in dezelfde banen rond te draaien en daarbij samen te klonteren.
Theorie over Planeet Negen Het is de analyse van deze banen, oftewel de gravitationele interacties met een grote planeet, waar astronomen hun theorie over het bestaan van Planeet Negen op baseren.
Sommige onderzoekers ontkennen het bestaan ervan Sommige criticasters in de gemeenschap van wetenschappers ontkennen het mogelijke bestaan van Planeet Negen. Zij beweren dat de waargenomen banen slechts te wijten zijn aan de willekeurige verspreiding van objecten langs de Kuipergordel.
Alle middelen worden ingezet Wetenschappers proberen wanhopig de planeet te vinden om het bestaan ervan te bevestigen. Met behulp van een speciaal observatorium, krachtige telescopen en burgerprojecten proberen astronomen zoveel mogelijk gegevens te verzamelen om de planeet te lokaliseren.
Complexe computersimulaties De huidige theorie is gebaseerd op complexe computersimulaties waarbij rekening wordt gehouden met een aantal voorwaarden. Het model dat het meest aansluit bij het waargenomen gedrag van banen is het model waarin Planeet Negen is opgenomen.
Vera C. Rubin Observatory Wetenschappers hopen dat het nieuwe Vera C. Rubin Observatorium in Chili zal bijdragen aan het beantwoorden van een aantal vragen over Planeet Negen en het oplossen van andere kwesties m.b.t. sterrenkunde.
Gedetailleerde timelapse Dankzij innovatieve technologie kan het observatorium gedurende tien jaar een uitgebreid en gedetailleerd overzicht van het heelal bieden met behulp van de grootste camera die ooit is gebouwd.
Verzamelde beelden De beelden die het observatorium verzamelt, kunnen een gedetailleerder inzicht verschaffen in de verspreiding van objecten langs de Kuipergordel.
Waarom is het zo moeilijk om de planeet te vinden? Het lokaliseren van planeten is een behoorlijke uitdaging. Astronomen gebruiken de transitmethode om planeten in andere zonnestelsels te vinden.
Transitmethode Astronomen kunnen planeten waarschijnlijk beter vinden door de bewegingen van een ster te observeren. Het computermodel dat wordt gebruikt om Planeet Negen te detecteren, schat de kans dat de planeet bestaat op 99 procent.
Malena Rice Malena Rice, universitair docent astronomie aan de Yale-universiteit, stelde dat het vinden van een andere planeet "ons begrip van het zonnestelsel en andere planetenstelsels, en hoe wij in die context passen, volledig zou kunnen veranderen".
Mysteries van het buitenste zonnestelsel Kleine zwarte gaten, potentiële buitenaardse werelden, extra dwergplaneten, vulkanische kometen en asteroïden zijn slechts enkele van de mysteries omtrent het buitenste zonnestelsel die astronomen proberen te ontrafelen.
De zoektocht gaat door Terwijl de zoektocht naar Planeet Negen doorgaat, zetten sommige wetenschappers alles in op indirect bewijs voor het bestaan van de planeet, terwijl anderen er zeer kritisch tegenover staan.
High resolution image of interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS, captured by the Vera Rubin observatory on July 3rd. Credit - C.O. Chandler et al.
Sometimes serendipity happens in science. Whether it’s an apple falling from a tree or a melting chocolate bar, some of the world’s greatest discoveries come from happy accidents, even if their stories may be apocryphal. According to a new paper on arXiv, there’s a new story to add to the archives of serendipitous scientific discoveries - Rubin happened to make observations of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS before its official discovery, while the telescope was still in its Science Validation survey, marking the earliest, high resolution images we will likely get of the comet at that time.
According to the paper, Rubin just happened to be pointing at the part of the sky where 3I/ATLAS was located during its Science Validation (SV) phase. It unknowingly took pictures of the object between June 21st (10 days before it was officially discovered) and July 7th. June 21st was even a few days before the telescope officially released its “First Look” images to the public back on June 23rd.
These observations are important because they are the earliest ones done by a high power telescope. Rubin’s 8.4m Simoyi Survey Telescope and 3.2-gigapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) combined to capture the highest resolution images of the comet released to date. Since the images were captured before full commissioning, the data they represented had to be run through customer data pipelines rather than the standard automated ones that will handle the terabytes of data normally created by Rubin every night.
Fraser discusses the new interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS.
There were 49 images included in the study, though some were excluded due to being captured during telescope alignments, blending with other stars, or just being out of focus. Nineteen of the images were captured during intentional SV operations.
Those images show a comet that largely behaved as expected. They provided the highest resolution proof that 3I/ATLAS is, in fact a comet, and shows cometary behavior, like a coma of gas and dust surrounding it. The apparent size of its coma grew about 58% over the observational period as it continued to approach the Sun. Interestingly, it had a sunward pointing tail. According to the paper this can be explained by “anisotropic dust emission”, and has been observed in other comets, though it is relatively rare. Several explanations are offered, including slow ejection of large particles that aren’t pushed back as quickly by the Sun’s radiation pressure or a rotational axis that nearly aligns with its orbital plane.
Perhaps not as excitingly, 3I/ATLAS doesn’t show any sign of non-gravitational acceleration like 1I/Oumuamua. That’s not to say there won’t eventually be - 1I/Oumuamua’s acceleration was first observed during its perihelion, so astronomers will be watching closely to see if the same effect happens for 3I/ATLAS when it approaches its perihelion in October. However, in an opposite twist of luck, the object itself won’t be visible at that time as it will be blocked by the Sun from September through December.
Fraser discusses the observational power of Vera Rubin and how it could change astronomy forever.
Rubin will lose sight of its slightly beforehand, on August 22nd, when it will move out of the telescope's surveyed area of the sky. Between the final image presented in the paper and that time, the authors expect at least 100 more images of the comet to be captured, many of which will likely be high quality than the earlier sets when the telescope operators didn’t know they had such a valuable and rare object in their field of view. An even more detailed paper is sure to be forthcoming, even if it might not be as much of a surprise.
NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars has discovered unusual "float" rocks on the rim of Jezero Crater while searching for signs of ancient microbial life. Scientists are investigating their origin.
NASA's Perseverance rover found an unusual dark, pitted rock dubbed Skull Hill while exploring Jezero Crater's rim. The rock contrasts with lighter surrounding terrain and was likely transported from elsewhere, scientists say.(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has come across several unusual rocks that don't seem to be in their original place.
Perseverance is currently searching for signs of ancient life in the hills and rocky outcrops along the rim of the Jezero Crater — a barren, bowl-shaped depression north of the Martian equator that scientists suspect held a huge lake billions of years ago. Since December 2024, the rover has been trekking down a tall slope called Witch Hazel Hill, which scientists hope will provide clues aboutMars' past climate.
On April 11, Perseverance paused at a visually distinct geological boundary where light and dark rock outcrops meet. Here, one particular rock, which scientists nicknamed "Skull Hill," stood out against the surrounding light-toned, rock-riddled surface due to its dark color, angular shape and pitted texture, according to a NASA blog post.
The region, called Port Anson, contains several such rocks that may have been transported from elsewhere, scientists said. Known as "floats," these loose rocks likely traveled vast distances billions of years ago when Mars possessed a warmer, wetter environment with rivers, lakes and potentially even oceans. As the water receded and softer surrounding material eroded over eons, the more resilient rocks remained perched on the Martian soil.
"We've found a few of these dark-toned floats in the Port Anson region," the post noted. "The team is working to better understand where these rocks came from and how they got here."
The mystery of Skull Hill
According to the post, the pits on Skull Hill may have formed in a couple of ways. Small pieces within Skull Hill itself might have become loose and eroded away, leaving the holes. Another possibility is that Martian winds, carrying tiny dust and rock particles, could have acted like sandpaper, slowly wearing away the rock's surface and creating the pits.
The dark tone of Skull Hill and similar rocks could suggest they are meteorites, but recent analysis of their chemical data from Perseverance's SuperCam instrument indicates their composition doesn't match that of a typical meteorite.
Alternatively, these dark rocks could have a volcanic origin. On both Earth and Mars, minerals like olivine, pyroxene and biotite are known to give igneous rocks their dark color. If these rocks are indeed igneous, they might have come from nearby volcanic rock formations that have eroded away, or they could have been blasted out of the ground by an impact crater that excavated deeper volcanic layers.
"Luckily for us, the rover has instruments that can measure the chemical composition of rocks on Mars," according to the post. "Understanding the composition of these darker-toned floats will help the team to interpret the origin of this unique rock."
In the past few months, Perseverance has collected samples of five rocks, analyzed seven others in detail and zapped 83 more with its laser for remote study — the robotic explorer's fastest pace of scientific data collection since landing on Mars four years ago, representatives of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in another statement.
Mission scientists noted that it often takes months of searching the crater to find a scientifically unique rock worth sampling. On the crater rim, however, Perseverance is encountering new and intriguing rocks at every turn, according to the statement.
"Crater rims — you gotta love 'em," Katie Morgan, Perseverance's project scientist at JPL, said in the statement. "The last four months have been a whirlwind for the science team, and we still feel that Witch Hazel Hill has more to tell us — it has been all we had hoped for and more."
Scientists are keen to get the samples Perseverance has collected back to Earth to determine if life ever existed on Mars. However, NASA's Mars Sample Return mission is facing significant challenges with budget, timelines and technical complexities, leaving its future uncertain.
A vast network of inverted channels, formed of sediment laid by ancient rivers, implies Mars was once a much rainier place than we thought.
A HiRISE image of the heavily eroded ridge of an inverted channel left behind by a dried up river billions of years ago.
(Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)
Marswas a rainier, wetter place than planetary scientists previously thought, according to a new study of ancient, inverted river channels that span more than 9,000 miles (14,484 kilometers) in the Red Planet's southern Noachis Terra region.
"Our work is a new piece of evidence that suggests that Mars was once a much more complex and active planet than it is now, which is such an exciting thing to be involved in," study leader Adam Losekoot of the U.K.'s Open University said in a statement.
We've known Mars was once a wet planet ever since the Mariner 9 orbiter mission from the '70s photographed a surface covered in dried-up river channels. These channels were dated back to over 3.5 billion years ago. However, channels cut into the ground are not the only evidence for running water on Mars.
When that water ran-off, or evaporated, it left sedimentary deposits. Sometimes we see these in craters that were once lakes filled with water: NASA's Curiosity rover is exploring Gale Crater, which has a central three-mile-tall (five-kilometer-tall) peak covered in sediment.
Other times, these sediments were laid down on river beds. Over the eons, the sediments would have hardened, while the river channels and the land around them would have weathered and eroded away. That left the sediments, which are more resistant to erosion, sticking out as tall ridges. Geologists today call them fluvial sinuous ridges, or, more plainly, inverted channels.
Now, Losekoot, who is a Ph.D. student, has led the discovery of a vast network of these channels in Noachis Terra based on images and data taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera and the Context Camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the defunct Mars Global Surveyor mission.
Previously, Noachis Terra had not been given due attention because it lacked the more classical river channels that form more obvious evidence of water. However, by mapping the network of inverted channels, Losekoot realized there was lots of evidence there had once been plentiful water in the region.
"Studying Mars, particularly an under-explored region like Noachis Terra, is really exciting because it's an environment which has been largely unchanged for billions of years," said Losekoot. "It's a time capsule that records fundamental geological processes in a way that just isn't possible here on Earth."
Some of the inverted channels appear as isolated segments that have survived the elements for billions of years. Others are more intact, forming systems that run for hundreds of miles and stand tens of yards tall.
This double inverted ridge signifies where an ancient river split into two before reconnecting downstream. Between the two ridges we can see a mesa, which may be the harder material that caused the river to diverge to get around it. (Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)
Such a widespread network of inverted channels does not suggest these channels were caused by flash floods, argues Losekoot. Rather, they seem to have formed in stable climatic conditions over a geologically significant period of time during the Noachian–Hesperian transition, which was the shift from one geological era into the next around 3.7 billion years ago.
What's particularly intriguing is the most likely source of water to have formed these inverted channels is precipitation — be it rain, hail or snow. Indeed, given the size of the inverted channel network in Noachis Terra, this region of Mars may have experienced lots of rainy days in a warm and wet climate.
It's more evidence that Mars was once more like Earth than the cold and barren desert it is today.
Losekoot presented his findings at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting held at the University of Durham in the U.K., which ran between July 7 and July 11.
This article was originally published onSpace.com.
A report published in June found that the world only has three years before it crosses the 1.5 C climate target. So what should we do now?
There is a way to reverse temperature rise, but it will be challenging and there are great uncertainties.
(Image credit: chuchart duangdaw via Getty Images)
In June, more than 60 climate scientists warned that the remaining "carbon budget" to stay below a dire warming threshold will be exhausted in as little as three yearsat the current rate of emissions.
But if we pass that critical 1.5-degree-Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming threshold, is a climate catastrophe inevitable? And can we do anything to reverse that temperature rise?
Although crossing the 1.5 C threshold will lead to problems, particularly for island nations, and raise the risk of ecosystems permanently transforming, the planet won't nosedive into an apocalypse. And once we rein in emissions, there are ways to slowly bring temperatures down if we wind up crossing that 1.5 C threshold, experts told Live Science.
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Still, that doesn't mean we should stop trying to curb emissions now, which is cheaper, easier and more effective than reversing a temperature rise that has already happened, Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, told Live Science in an email.
"Every fraction of a degree of warming that we prevent makes us better off," Mann said.
Delayed response
A report released June 19 found that the world has only 143 billion tons (130 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide (CO2) left to emit before we likely cross the 1.5 C target set in the Paris Agreement, which was signed by 195 countries to tackle climate change. We currently emit around 46 billion tons (42 billion metric tons) of CO2 per year, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
The world is currently 1.2 C (2.2 F) warmer than the preindustrial average, with almost all of this increase in temperature due to human activities, according to the report. But our emissions may have had an even bigger warming impact that has so far been masked, because the ocean has soaked up a lot of excess heat.
The ocean will release this extra heat over the next few decades via evaporation and direct heat transfer regardless of whether we curb emissions, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
This means that even if carbon emissions dropped to zero today, global temperatures would continue to rise for a few decades, with experts predicting an extra 0.5 C (0.9 F) of warming from oceans alone.
However, temperatures would eventually stabilize as heat radiated out to space. And over several thousand years, Earth would dial temperatures back down to preindustrial levels via natural carbon sinks, such as trees and soils absorbing CO2, according to NOAA.
Why 1.5 C?
Climate scientists see 1.5 C as a critical threshold: Beyond this limit, levels of warming are unsafe for people living in economically developing countries, and particularly in island nations, said Kirsten Zickfeld, a professor of climate science at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
The 1.5 C limit is "an indicator of a state of the climate system where we feel we can still manage the consequences," Zickfeld told Live Science.
A huge amount of additional heat could be baked into the ocean and later released if we exceed 1.5 C, which is another reason why scientists are worried about crossing this threshold.
Although it's best to reduce emissions as quickly as we can, it may still be possible to reverse a temperature rise of 1.5 C or more if we pass that critical threshold. The technology needed isn't quite developed yet, so there is a lot of uncertainty about what is feasible.
If we do start to bring temperatures down again, it would not undo the effects of passing climate tipping points. For example, it would not refreeze ice sheets or cause sea levels to fall after they've already risen. But it would significantly reduce risks for ecosystems that respond more quickly to temperature change, such as permafrost-covered tundras.
Permafrost-covered tundras can melt and refreeze within decades, so dialing down temperatures could restore these ecosystems. (Image credit: Stockdonkey via Shutterstock)
Reversing temperature rise requires not just net zero emissions, but net negative emissions, Zickfeld said. Net zero would mean we sequester as much CO2 via natural carbon sinks and negative emissions technologies as we emit. Negative emissions would require systems that suck carbon out of the atmosphere and then bury it underground — often known as carbon capture and storage.
Net zero may halt warming. But if we want to reverse warming, we must remove more carbon from the atmosphere than we emit, Zickfield said.
Scientists estimate that 0.1 C (0.2 F) of warming is equivalent to 243 billion tons (220 billion metric tons) of CO2, which is a "massive amount," Zickfeld said. "Let's say if we go to 1.6 C [2.9 F] and we want to drop down to 1.5 C — we need to remove around 220 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide."
Currently, nature-based carbon-removal techniques, such as planting trees, sequester around 2.2 billion tons (2 billion metric tons) of CO2 each year. "So we need to scale that up by a factor of 100 to drop us down by 0.1 C" in one year, Zickfeld said.
Due to competing demands for land, it is highly unlikely that we could plant enough forests or restore enough peatland to meaningfully reverse temperature change, Zickfeld said.
This means we will definitely need negative emissions technologies, she said. However, most negative emissions technologies are still being tested, so it's difficult to say how effective they would be, Zickfeld said.
These technologies are also extremely expensive and will likely remain so for a long time, Robin Lamboll, a climate researcher at Imperial College London and a co-author of the recent report, told Live Science in an email.
"In practice we will be doing quite well if we find that the rollout of these technologies does any more than bring us to net zero," Lamboll said. There is some uncertainty about how Earth might respond to net zero, and it's possible that the planet might cool at that point. "If we cool at all, we do so very slowly. In a very optimistic case we might go down by 0.3 C [0.5 F] in 50 years," Lamboll said.
There is no requirement under the Paris Agreement for countries to roll out negative emissions technologies. But the goal of the agreement to stay well below 2 C (3.6 F) means that governments may decide to ramp up these technologies once we pass 1.5 C, Lamboll said.
Figures from the recent report indicate that at the current rate of emissions, the remaining carbon budgets to stay below 1.6 C, 1.7 C (3.1 F) and 2 C could be used up within seven, 12 and 25 years, respectively.
"If we do pass 1.5 C, 1.6 C is a whole lot better than 1.7 C, and 1.7 C is a whole lot better than 1.8 C [3.2 F]," Mann said in an interview with BBC World News America in June. "At this point, the challenge is to reduce carbon emissions as quickly as we can to avert ever-worse impacts."
It's worth noting that the world is making progress with emission cuts, Mann added in the interview. "Let's recognize that we're starting to turn the corner," he said.
The road ahead will be even more scientifically intriguing, and probably somewhat easier-going, now that the six-wheeler has completed its long climb to the top.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has crested the top of Jezero Crater’s rim at a location the science team calls “Lookout Hill” and rolling toward its first science stop after the monthslong climb. The rover made the ascent in order to explore a region of Mars unlike anywhere it has investigated before.
Taking about 3½ months and ascending 1,640 vertical feet (500 vertical meters), the rover climbed 20% grades, making stops along the way for science observations. Perseverance’s science team shared some of their work and future plans at a media briefing held Thursday, Dec. 12, in Washington at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, the country’s largest gathering of Earth and space scientists.
“During the Jezero Crater rim climb, our rover drivers have done an amazing job negotiating some of the toughest terrain we’ve encountered since landing,” said Steven Lee, deputy project manager for Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “They developed innovative approaches to overcome these challenges — even tried driving backward to see if it would help — and the rover has come through it all like a champ. Perseverance is ‘go’ for everything the science team wants to throw at it during this next science campaign.”
A scan across a panorama captured by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover shows the steepness of the terrain leading to the rim of Jezero Crater. The rover’s Mastcam-Z camera system took the images that make up this view on Dec. 5. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
Since landing at Jezero in February 2021, Perseverance has completed four science campaigns: the “Crater Floor,” “Fan Front,” “Upper Fan,” and “Margin Unit.” The science team is calling Perseverance’s fifth campaign the “Northern Rim” because its route covers the northern part of the southwestern section of Jezero’s rim. Over the first year of the Northern Rim campaign, the rover is expected to visit as many as four sites of geologic interest, take several samples, and drive about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers).
“The Northern Rim campaign brings us completely new scientific riches as Perseverance roves into fundamentally new geology,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for Perseverance at Caltech in Pasadena. “It marks our transition from rocks that partially filled Jezero Crater when it was formed by a massive impact about 3.9 billion years ago to rocks from deep down inside Mars that were thrown upward to form the crater rim after impact.”
This animation shows the position of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover as of Dec. 4, 2024, the 1,347th Martian day, or sol, of the mission, along with the proposed route of the mission’s fifth science campaign, dubbed Northern Rim, over the next several years. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/University of Arizona
“These rocks represent pieces of early Martian crust and are among the oldest rocks found anywhere in the solar system. Investigating them could help us understand what Mars — and our own planet — may have looked like in the beginning,” Farley added.
First Stop: ‘Witch Hazel Hill’
With Lookout Hill in its rearview mirror, Perseverance is headed to a scientifically significant rocky outcrop about 1,500 feet (450 meters) down the other side of the rim that the science team calls “Witch Hazel Hill.”
“The campaign starts off with a bang because Witch Hazel Hill represents over 330 feet of layered outcrop, where each layer is like a page in the book of Martian history. As we drive down the hill, we will be going back in time, investigating the ancient environments of Mars recorded in the crater rim,” said Candice Bedford, a Perseverance scientist from Purdue University in West Layfette, Indiana. “Then, after a steep descent, we take our first turns of the wheel away from the crater rim toward ‘Lac de Charmes,’ about 2 miles south.”
Lac de Charmes intrigues the science team because, being located on the plains beyond the rim, it is less likely to have been significantly affected by the formation of Jezero Crater.
After leaving Lac de Charmes, the rover will traverse about a mile (1.6 kilometers) back to the rim to investigate a stunning outcrop of large blocks known as megabreccia. These blocks may represent ancient bedrock broken up during the Isidis impact, a planet-altering event that likely excavated deep into the Martian crust as it created an impact basin some 745 miles (1,200 kilometers) wide, 3.9 billion years in the past.
More About Perseverance
A key objective of Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including caching samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, to help pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet and as the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.
NASA’s Mars Sample Return Program, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), is designed to send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
With advanced observatories coming online like the Vera Rubin Telescope, scientists are looking to plan for the discovery of alien intelligence and how humanity should prepare for the news.
Just imagine it, the news stories are all over your phone when you wake! The day will surely come that we will discover that we are not alone in the Universe! What happens the day after though? A new research paper from the SETI Post Detection Hub at the University of St Andrews tackles this question, outlining how NASA and the global scientific community should prepare for the moment humanity detects signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
The paper, written by 14 researchers representing institutions from York University to the University of Cambridge, emphasises that "a technosignature detection will trigger a complex global process shaped by uncertainty, misinformation, and multiple ideological stakeholders." Unlike searching for simple microbial life, discovering technological signatures from alien civilizations would fundamentally reshape our understanding of our place in the universe and create unprecedented challenges.
The Arecibo Radio Telescope was one of the first to be used for the search for alien intelligence.
(Credit : H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF)
The researchers led by Kate Genevieve from the Astro Ecologies Institution argue that past preparation efforts, including guidelines from 1989, are woefully outdated for our internet age. Early protocols predate the internet and could not account for the complexity of rapid global media dissemination. In an era of viral misinformation and instant global communication, the discovery of alien technology would likely create a media firestorm unlike anything humanity has experienced.
The team proposes six critical areas where NASA should invest now, before any discovery occurs. These range from advancing detection technologies to studying how different cultures might interpret the news of extraterrestrial discovery.
One fascinating aspect of the research involves developing "Other Minds" paradigms, essentially preparing to recognise intelligence that doesn't think like us. The paper suggests that techniques from bioacoustics, machine learning and quantum computing offer significant insights, including studying whale songs and bird navigation to understand non human communication patterns.
Researchers suggest that studying whale song can help understand non-human forms of communication such as those that may be experienced from alien intelligence!
This approach challenges researchers to move beyond Earth centric assumptions. If aliens communicate through methods we've never imagined, perhaps using quantum entanglement or patterns we haven't recognised, then our current detection methods might miss them entirely.
Surprisingly, much of the preparation work focuses not on alien technology but on human psychology and interaction. The researchers emphasise integrating humanities and social sciences, recognising that the biggest challenges might come from how people react to the news rather than from the aliens themselves.
The paper recommends funding research on the psychological, social, and global dynamics of post detection scenarios and even suggests analyzing science fiction stories to understand how different cultures envision first contact. These fictional scenarios, the researchers argue, provide valuable insights into human expectations and fears.
Perhaps most practically, the team calls for creating robust international coordination systems before they're needed. They warn that without a Post Detection SETI Hub, NASA risks a gap in the system, akin to a Moon landing without astronaut retrieval. Just as NASA developed detailed protocols for Apollo missions, including quarantine procedures, the space agency needs comprehensive plans for managing a SETI discovery.
NASA implemented significant safety protocols during the Apollo era. Buzz Aldrin shown on the surface of the Moon captured by Neil Armstrong.
(Credit : NASA)
The researchers don't claim that discovering extraterrestrial intelligence is imminent however, but they argue that preparation now is essential. With advanced telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope already operational and instruments like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory coming online, a technosignature discovery could emerge in any realm of astronomy research.
Their message is clear: the question isn't whether we'll ever detect signs of alien technology, but whether we'll be ready when we do. By investing in research, international cooperation, and communication strategies now, NASA can help ensure that humanity's greatest discovery becomes a moment of unity and wonder rather than chaos and confusion.
Multiple Area 51 staff have died from same disease after exposure to 'top secret' project
Multiple Area 51 staff have died from same disease after exposure to 'top secret' project
They have also been denied healthcare due to a lack of record that they ever worked there
James Moorhouse
Multiple staff at Area 51 have reportedly died or suffered from the same deadly disease after being exposed to a 'top secret' project.
Area 51, the highly classified US Air Force facility located in the Nevada desert, has long been linked with controversy and strange goings on, with manyaliens and UFO sightings reported close to the base over the years.
Even people on Google Maps think that they've spotted some otherworldly sights close to the facility, with alien technology supposedly kept there if you believe in the conspiracy theories.
Whatever truly happens there, it often remains top secret, and now some US Air Force veterans and security guards are claiming that they were handed a death sentence by the government due to the presence of an invisible killer at the facility.
Former Air Force Sergeant David Crete, who worked at the Nevada Training and Testing Range (NTTR) between 1983 and 1987, said that the left side of his brain was ‘dying’ due to atrophy while speaking at the House Veterans Affairs Committee earlier this year.
David Crete says he has severe health consequences from working in Area 51 (NewsNation)
Area 51 (Satellite image
(c) 2023 Maxar Technologies)
He is lobbying for better support for Area 51 veterans, many of whom have been denied healthcare in the US because none of the surviving veterans can prove they were exposed to radiation near Area 51, as their work there was so 'top secret' there are no records of them ever being there.
Sergeant Crete claims that as many as 490 of his former colleagues have died of severe illnesses including cancer since serving at the former nuclear site, with the radiation risks also seemingly a huge risk to the servicemen's families.
"My wife had three miscarriages. One of the guys that I worked with, his wife had seven," he added.
Area 51 has become linked with conspiracy theories
(Bernard Friel/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
"All four of my children were born with birth defects or significant health problems. It’s not their fault. I’m not saying it’s mine, but I brought it home."
Sergeant Crete claimed that the only acknowledgement of his service came from the late US Senator John McCain, who told him that his unit ‘ended the cold war'.
Air Force technician Mark Ely also worked at the base in the 1980s and is suffering from life-threatening conditions he feels were brought on due to the radiation he was exposed to.
He said: "Upholding the national interest was more important than my own life. It scarred my lungs. I got cysts on my liver. I started having lipomas, tumours inside my body I had to remove. My lining in my bladder was shed."LADbible Group has approached the US Air Force for comment.
In our daily life, we measure space with yardsticks and time with clocks. This gives us the illusion that space and time are absolute. With that mindset, Isaac Newton, the son of a farmer who stayed at home during a bubonic plague,ponderedwhy apples in his family’s orchard fell straight to the ground and suggested in1687 that gravity is a force between any two objects.
A century before Newton’s realization, Galileo Galilei concluded that the gravitational acceleration of a body would be independent of its mass, contrary to Aristotle’s assertion that heavy objects fall faster than the lighter ones. Indeed, during the Apollo 15 mission to the Moon in 1971, the astronaut David Scott dropped a feather and a hammer from his hands and the two hit the ground at the same time because of the lack of a lunar atmosphere
Three centuries after Galileo, Albert Einstein came up with the thought experiment that people in a free-falling elevator would have no sense of gravity because their feet would not press against the floor of the elevator, since their feet and the floor are falling at the same rate. This led him to recognize in 1907 that gravity is not a force but rather an acceleration of the reference frame shared by all objects, irrespective of mass or composition – the so-called equivalence principle. If so, Einstein reasoned, gravity must be a distortion of space and time, shared by all objects.
In November 1915, Einstein formulated the equations that describe how spacetime is curved by matter and how the curvature of spacetime dictates the motion of matter. The curvature of a surface can be inferred from the sum of the angles of a triangle on it. Whereas 180 degrees is the sum of the three triangle angles on a flat surface, this is the sum of just the two base angles for a triangle drawn on the surface of a sphere, like the Earth, with the base lying on the equator and the two sides meeting at the north pole.
A simple way to visualize the curvature of spacetime is to consider a two-dimensional analog to the three-dimensional space we inhabit. Consider a bowling bowl resting at the center of a trampoline made of rubber and curving its flexible surface. If we kick a marble at the right speed around the center, it will follow a circle because of the curvature of the trampoline surface. But if we were to remove the bowling bowl and give the marble the same kick, it would move along a straight line on the flat surface. For the same reason, if we were to remove the Sun instantly from the Solar system, the Earth would fly out along a straight line because the local spacetime would become flat.
Now imagine moving the bowling ball back and forth periodically. This would inevitably produce ripples in the rubber surface of the trampoline, propagating out like a wave generated by a stick moved back and forth on the surface of a pond. In the same way, a companion star moving the Sun back and forth, would generate ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. These waves interact so weakly with matter that they cannot be damped anywhere in the Universe, as I had shown in a recent paper.
In August 2015, a century minus two months after Einstein’s equations were formulated, the LIGO experiment detected the first signal from gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes at the edge of the Universe. This opened a new window for observing the Universe.
By now, seven years and nearly a hundred additional event signals after LIGO’s pioneering discovery, astronomers celebrate a new frontier of gravitational wave astrophysics. On the one hand, our ability to explain all the signals as mergers of black holes or neutron stars is rewarding. But at the same time, the lack of unexpected sources is disappointing.
For example, we could have identified bursts of gravitational waves from topological defects of spacetime, called cosmic strings, which are hypothesized to be generated by symmetry-breaking phase transitions in the early universe. We could have also detected artificially-produced bursts of gravitational waves, used for communication among advanced technological civilizations.
But perhaps we will find these unusual signals with the future generations of gravitational wave detectors. A novel detection scheme, the Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs), uses pulsars as distributed clocks to detect the passage of a low-frequency gravitational wave from the mergers of massive black holes at the centers of galaxies.
With my former postdoc, Dan D’Orazio, we showed in a recent paper that PTAs could potentially be used as a new method for calibrating cosmological distances and measuring the Hubble expansion rate through gravitational-wave parallax. The principle is familiar. Darwinian survival selected animals with two eyes since they were able to assess the distance of threatening objects by viewing them from two directions. For the same reason, having an array of pulsars allows us to identify the distance of a cosmological source of gravitational waves.
In an even more recent paper with Hamsa Padmanabhan, we showed that PTAs can unravel the formation history of the first supermassive black holes in the first billion years after the Big Bang. This data will complement the deep images of galaxies during that epoch, obtained by the Webb telescope.
Webb’s images are artificially colored, since the corresponding infrared wavelengths are invisible to the human eye. What we cannot see with our eyes, we detect with infrared sensors, and what we cannot detect through light, we detect through gravitational waves.
The latest advances in our understanding of the cosmos stem from developing technologies that make the invisible more easily detectable. Humanity follows a steady progression towards extending the limits of our biological senses with technological devices that probe our cosmic neighborhood more effectively. Technological extensions of our body make the invisible detectable.
This work is not done. We still have to find the nature of dark matter and dark energy as well as the nature of singularities, like those in black holes and the Big Bang. Singularities are points where the curvature of spacetime diverges and Einstein’s equations break down.
A brilliant scientist has yet to formulate an extension of Einstein’s equations that incorporates quantum mechanics and explains away the singularity of the Big Bang. Thought experiments might not be sufficient. Here’s hoping that the clues for how to move forward will be encoded in gravitational waves from the early universe, the equivalent of the falling apples in Newton’s orchard.
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s – Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011-2020). He chairs the advisory board for the Breakthrough Starshot project, and is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors onScience and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial:The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021.
Artifacts from the Iron Age have revealed an intense historical magnetic anomaly in the Middle East. Could using a similar approach elsewhere help us unravel the mysteries of Earth's magnetic field?
Gemini North Sees Brightening Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS in Detail
Gemini North Sees Brightening Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS in Detail
Comet 3I/ATLAS crosses a packed star field, as seen using Gemini North's GMOS-N spectrograph. Credit: NOIRLab/AURA/Gemini North/IfA University of Hawaii.
One of the world’s most powerful instruments reveals interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it heads towards perihelion.
We’re getting better views of interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS, as it makes its speedy passage through the inner solar system. This week, astronomers at the Gemini North observatory located on Mauna Kea in Hawai’i turned the facility’s enormous 8.1-meter telescope on the object, with amazing results.
You can definitely see the dusty coma forming around the comet’s nucleus in the images as it approaches the inner solar system. The multi-colored hues of the images are thanks to Gemini’s Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS-N) which will probe 3I/ATLAS across infrared and visible wavelengths.
Comet 3I/ATLAS crossing the dense galactic plane. The colors are due to the separate filters used on the GMOS-N spectrograph instrument.
Credit: NOIRLab/AURA/Gemini North/IfA University of Hawaii.
“3I/ATLAS is currently passing in front of the very dense star fields near the galactic center in Sagittarius,” astronomer Karen Meech (University of Hawai’i Institute for Astronomy) told Universe Today. This makes it very challenging to find windows of time where we can get a good observation of the interstellar object that is not contaminated by passing over stars.”
The resulting combined image of 3I/ATLAS, revealing the teardrop shaped coma, characteristic of a comet.
Credit: NOIRLab/AURA/Gemini North/IfA University of Hawaii.
As is always the case in modern astronomy, observing time comes at a premium. “Gemini is a ‘queue scheduled’ telescope, meaning observers prepare the observing sequence and the staff at the telescope execute the observations based on priority, best match to observing conditions etc,” says Meech. “For a high priority observation, this ensures you get the data. Using telescopes in the classical mode where an astronomer is assigned a night might mean you lose the night because of bad weather or instrument problems. The Gemini staff were fantastic and really went above and beyond what is expected in order to ensure these observations were successful.”
Star trails over the Gemini North Observatory.
Credit: International Gemini Observatory.
3I/ATLAS also seems to be a very red object, reminiscent of KBOs such as 486958 Arrokoth, one of the only KBOs seen up close during New Horizons’ 2019 flyby.
This effort will help answer the main question currently on astronomer’s minds: how big is 3I/ATLAS? Current size estimates for the nucleus span a range from just under a kilometer to over 20 kilometers across—definitely larger than the other two known interstellar objects: 1I/’Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.
“All small bodies rotate, so we interleaved images in the blue filter in between all the other filters so that we could get accurate colors of the object,” says Meech. “The brightness we see through the filter depends on how reflective the surface is at that wavelength, and the area of the surface reflecting sunlight. If it is rotating and you don’t have the same filter repeated in between each observation, then you can’t tell what is a change because of the color area. These images showed that 3I/ATLAS is ‘red’—meaning it reflects red light more strongly than blue light. This is what we usually see for comets in our solar system. The ‘red’ color is due to organic compounds on the surface for solar system comets.”
Currently just under 4 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun, 3I/ATLAS will pass perihelion 1.356 AU from the Sun on October 29th. Closest Earth passage is set for December 19th, at 1.8 AU distant. Mars actually gets the best seat in the solar system, on the 0.2 AU pass on October 3rd. We recently wrote about observing prospects for amateur astronomers leading up to and after perihelion here.
Where is interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS headed—and how close will it come to Earth? ☄️Using the latest data from @NASAJPL, we mapped the path of this rare visitor with Ansys STK as it speeds through our solar system.Watch the full trajectory in the model below. 🌌 pic.twitter.com/p64YChCZdL— Ansys (@ANSYS) July 11, 2025
Discovered by the Deep Random Survey in Chile as part of the worldwide ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) on the night of July 1st 2025, 3I/ATLAS has already displayed a ‘personality’ of its own. The comet skims our ecliptic like a stone skipping water, and seems to be the first ever denizen of the thick galactic disk seen up close.
This source means that 3I/ATLAS may be a very old object indeed, perhaps pre-dating our own solar system by billions of years.
“At the moment, with what we know about 3I/ATLAS it is not an unusual comet,” astronomer “Rosemary Dorsey (University of Helsinki) told Universe Today. “3I is larger than an average comet, but it is not usually large—one of the largest comets, C/2014 UN271, has been measured with a diameter of ~100 kilometers! It is also common for comets to have very low activity at the current distance of 3I, as the activity of most comets is due to water ice sublimating near 3-4 AU from the Sun. We are still waiting to see how 3I will react when it reaches this distance to better put it into context with our solar system comets.”
More observations of Comet 3I/ATLAS are in store using both ground- and space-assets, in what promises to be a frenzied next few months of activity.
“We will be getting more images to see how the comet is brightening, and see if there is any color change,” says Meech. “Another colleague at IfA (Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy) will be triggering his program to get a good spectrum—to complement the spectrum we got at Gemini South, to confirm some features we saw, and to see if there are changes as the comet becomes more active.”
Next on deck is the Hubble Space Telescope, which has scheduled time to image 3I/ATLAS on July 21st. It’s highly likely that JWST and Vera Rubin will also get their turn as well.
Astronomer Bryce Bolin also captured the comet from Apache Point, New Mexico in an effort to pin down the colors and spectrum of the nucleus.
The +17th magnitude comet is currently tricky to pick out as it crosses the star rich fields of Ophiuchus, but that’s about to change. This weekend, 3I/ATLAS threads its way between the globular clusters NGC 6356 and Messier 9, making for a fine photographic opportunity.
Expect more great shots of Comet 3I/ATLAS to come!
The find brings researchers closer to answering the question about whether Mars was ever capable of supporting life.
Scientists are working to understand climate transitions and habitability on ancient Mars as Curiosity explores Gale CraterThe latest findings, published in the journal Science, reveal that data from three of Curiosity’s drill sites had siderite, an iron carbonate material, within sulphate-rich layers of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater.
Study lead author Dr. Ben Tutolo, of the University of Calgary in Canada, said: “The discovery of large carbon deposits in Gale Crater represents both a surprising and important breakthrough in our understanding of the geologic and atmospheric evolution of Mars."
He said: “The abundance of highly soluble salts in these rocks and similar deposits mapped over much of Mars has been used as evidence of the ‘great drying' of Mars during its dramatic shift from a warm and wet early Mars to its current, cold and dry state."
Sedimentary carbonate has long been predicted to have formed under the carbon dioxide-rich ancient Martian atmosphere, but Dr. Tutolo says identifications had previously been sparse.
NASA’s Curiosity Rover landed on Mars in August 2012, and has since travelled more than 20 miles (34 km) across the planet's surface.
Scientists say the discovery of carbonate suggests that the atmosphere contained enough carbon dioxide to support liquid water existing on the planet’s surface.
As the atmosphere thinned, the carbon dioxide transformed into rock form.
Illustration of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech via SWNS)
NASA says future missions and analysis of other sulphate-rich areas on Mars could confirm the findings and help to better understand the planet’s early history and how it transformed as its atmosphere was lost.
Dr. Tutolo says scientists are ultimately trying to determine whether Mars was ever capable of supporting life, and the latest paper brings them closer to an answer
He said: “It tells us that the planet was habitable and that the models for habitability are correct.
“The broader implications are the planet was habitable up until this time, but then, as the CO2 that had been warming the planet started to precipitate as siderite, it likely impacted Mars’ ability to stay warm.
“The question looking forward is how much of this CO2 from the atmosphere was actually sequestered?
"Was that potentially a reason we began to lose habitability?”
Dr. Tutolo says the latest research tie in with his ongoing work on Earth, trying to turn anthropogenic CO2 into carbonates as a climate change solution.
He said: “Learning about the mechanisms of making these minerals on Mars helps us to better understand how we can do it here.“Studying the collapse of Mars’ warm and wet early days also tells us that habitability is a very fragile thing.”
Dr. Tutolo says it’s clear that small changes in atmospheric CO2 can lead to "huge changes" in the ability of the planet to harbour life.
He added: “The most remarkable thing about Earth is that it’s habitable and it has been for at least four billion years.
Now, scientists in Australia have identified a possible cause of gigantic volcanic eruptions – mysterious 'blobs' about 1,200 miles under our feet.
Blobs are three-dimensional regions that span the length of continents and stretch 100 times higher than Mount Everest.
They sit at the bottom of Earth’s rocky mantle above the molten outer core – a place so deep that Earth’s elements are squeezed beyond recognition.
And they're a starting point for plumes of hot molten rock which flow upwards towards the Earth's surface.
There they erupt as lava, gases and rock fragments – with the capability of wiping out life as we know it.
The authors warn that giant, large-scale eruptions can have serious impacts, such as sudden climate change and mass extinction events.
Giant, large-scale volcanic eruptions can have serious impacts, from mass extinction events to sudden climate change. Pictured, glowing lava from a volcano eruption in Iceland
Earth is made up of three layers - the crust, the mantle and the core, which was later separated into 'inner' and 'outer'. A recent study suggested the existence of an 'innermost core' too
Volcanic eruptions can intensify global warming by adding greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere.
Giant volcanoes also triggered events that led to the largest mass dying on Earth, the Permian-Triassic extinction 252 million years ago.
'These blobs have possibly existed for hundreds of millions of years,' say the researchers from the University of Wollongong near Sydney.
According to the team, blobs are at the bottom of Earth’s mantle, about 1,200 miles and 1,800 miles (2,000km and 3,000km) below our feet.
The mantle, the planet's thickest layer, is predominantly a solid rock – but blobs may be different compared with the surrounding mantle rocks.
Blobs are made of rock just like the rest of the mantle, but they're thought to be hotter and heavier.
For their study, the team used computer modeling to simulate 'mantle convection' – the movement of material in Earth's mantle powered by heat – over one billion years.
Connection between the deep mantle and Earth’s surface showing the relationship between Blobs, mantle plumes and giant volcanic eruptions (not drawn to scale)
Blobs, which are some 1,200 miles below Earth’s surface, move over time and are connected to Earth’s surface by 'mantle plumes' that create giant eruptions
How do scientists know about Earth's interior?
No one can see inside the Earth, nor can drill deep enough to take rock samples from the mantle, the layer between Earth's core and crust.
So geophysicists use indirect methods to see what's going on deep beneath our feet.
For example, they use seismograms, or earthquake recordings, to determine the speed at which earthquake waves propagate.
They then use this information to calculate the internal structure of the Earth - similar to how doctors use ultrasound to see inside the body.
Their findings suggest that mantle plumes – columns of hot molten rock in the mantle – rise up from the continent-sized blobs.
Mantle plumes are shaped a bit like a lollipop sticking upwards – with the 'stick' the plume tail and the 'candy' nearer Earth's surface the plume head.
The researchers found that locations of volcanic eruption fall either onto (or close to) the location of blobs, as predicted by their models.
This suggests that blobs – an acronym standing for Big LOwer-mantle Basal Structures – are essentially the deep-Earth origin of volcanic eruptions.
Typically, deep Earth motions are in the order of 0.4-inch (1 cm) per year, so they only become significant over tens of millions of years.
Blobs probably shift in a year at roughly the rate at which human hair grows each month, the team say.
Although they have possibly existed for hundreds of millions of years, it's unclear what causes their movement.
Mantle plumes rise very slowly from blobs through the mantle because they transport hot solid rock, not melt or lava.
Cotopaxi, one of the highest active volcano in the world, stands at 19,347 feet (5,897 metres). Historically, its activity started in 1534 when the Spanish conquistadors began to venture into the territories that are now Ecuador
At lower pressures in the uppermost 125 miles (200 km) of Earth’s mantle, the solid rock melts, leading to volcanic eruptions.
'We used statistics to show that the locations of past giant volcanic eruptions are significantly related to the mantle plumes predicted by our models,' explain the authors in a piece for The Conversation.
'This is encouraging, as it suggests that the simulations predict mantle plumes in places and at times generally consistent with the geologic record.'
According to Eric Dunham, an associate professor of Stanford University's School of Earth, energy and Environmental Sciences, 'Volcanoes are complicated and there is currently no universally applicable means of predicting eruption. In all likelihood, there never will be.'
However, there are indicators of increased volcanic activity, which researchers can use to help predict volcanic eruptions.
Researchers can track indicators such as:
- Volcanic infrasound:When the lava lake rises up in the crater of an open vent volcano, a sign of a potential eruption, the pitch or frequency of the sounds generated by the magma tends to increase.
- Seismic activity: Ahead of an eruption, seismic activity in the form of small earthquakes and tremors almost always increases as magma moves through the volcano's 'plumbing system'.
- Gas emissions: As magma nears the surface and pressure decreases, gases escape. Sulfur dioxide is one of the main components of volcanic gases, and increasing amounts of it are a sign of increasing amounts of magma near the surface of a volcano.
- Ground deformation: Changes to a volcano's ground surface (volcano deformation) appear as swelling, sinking, or cracking, which can be caused by magma, gas, or other fluids (usually water) moving underground or by movements in the Earth's crust due to motion along fault lines. Swelling of a volcano cans signal that magma has accumulated near the surface.
Every 200,000-300,000 years, Earth's magnetic poles do something extraordinary.
They completely flip, meaning the North pole becomes the South, and vice-versa.
The last full reversal took place approximately 780,000 years ago – leaving some experts to predict another flip is imminent.
Now, researchers have created a terrifying soundscape to represent the chaos of this event.
Using paleomagnetic data – the record of Earth's ancient magnetic field preserved in rocks – from around the globe, scientists have constructed a model of the magnetic field before, during and after this historic reversal.
They also created a musical piece – a 'soundscape' – to represent the haunting sounds of the flip, called the Matuyama-Brunhes reversal.
The team, from the Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany, used three violins and three cellos to create a 'disharmonic cacophony' that mirrors the complex dynamics of a flip.
The clip starts off as melodic and makes for pleasant listening as it represents the poles while stable. However, it sounds more erratic and eerie as the magnetic fields begin to flux and change.
Researchers have created a terrifying soundscape to represent the chaos of this event. The left part of the animation represents the magnetic field is a relatively stable state, however, the right represents it in a total state of flux, with the poles completely scrambled
Earth is surrounded by a system of magnetic fields called the magnetosphere. This shields our home planet from harmful solar and cosmic particle radiation, but it can change shape in response to incoming space weather from the Sun. Pictured: an artist's impression
Earth's magnetic field is generated by the roiling liquid metals deep beneath the crust.
It extends from the Earth's interior into space, acting like a protective shield by diverting harmful charged particles from the Sun away from our planet.
A flip doesn't happen overnight but takes place gradually, over centuries to thousands of years.
If a magnetic flip were to happen again, some experts claim it could render parts of Earth 'uninhabitable' by knocking out power grids.
Communication systems could be seriously disrupted, and compasses would point south – meaning Greenland would be in the southern hemisphere and Antarctica in the North.
While it sounds terrifying, and would leave life on our planet exposed to higher amounts of solar radiation, it's unlikely to cause catastrophic events or mass extinctions.
Last year, researchers also transformed readings of an epic upheaval of Earth's magnetic field that took place some 41,000 years ago.
The Laschamp event saw our planet's magnetic North and South poles weaken, with the magnetic field tilting on its axis.
During a pole reversal, Earth's magnetic North and South poles swap locations. While that may sound like a big deal, pole reversals are common in Earth's geologic history. Pictured: an artist's impression of Earth with its magnetosphere
What is Earth's magnetic field?
Earth's magnetic field is a layer of electrical charge that surrounds our planet. The field protects life on Earth because it deflects charged particles fired from the sun known as 'solar wind'.
Without this protective layer, these particles would likely strip away the Ozone layer, our only line of defence against harmful UV radiation.
Scientists believe the Earth's core is responsible for creating its magnetic field. As molten iron in the Earth's outer core escapes it creates convection currents. These currents generate electric currents which create the magnetic field.
The soundscape was captured using data from a constellation of European Space Agency satellites.
Researchers mapped the movement of Earth's magnetic field lines during the event and produced a stereo sound version using natural noises including wood creaking and rocks falling.
The noises in the video represent a time when the Earth's magnetic field was at just five per cent of its current strength.
While the Earth's magnetic field did return to normal – over the course of around 2,000 years – its strength has decreased again by 10 per cent over the past 180 years, experts have found.
However, a mysterious area in the South Atlantic has emerged where the geomagnetic field strength is decreasing even more rapidly.
The area is called the South Atlantic Anomaly and has seen satellites malfunctioning over it several times due to exposure to highly charged particles from the sun.
This has led to speculation that Earth is heading towards a magnetic pole flip.
However, some experts have provide reassurance that the poles aren't going to flip anytime soon.
A comparison between the present day geomagnetic field (top) and a potential ancient analogue at 600 BCE (bottom)
Researchers previously pieced together data on Earth's geomagnetic field strength stretching back 9,000 years and say there's no evidence a reversal is on the cards.
'We have mapped changes in the Earth's magnetic field over the past 9,000 years, and anomalies like the one in the South Atlantic are probably recurring phenomena linked to corresponding variations in the strength of the Earth's magnetic field', said Andreas Nilsson, a geologist at Lund University.
The team analysed burnt archaeological artefacts, volcanic samples and sediment drill cores – all of which carry information about Earth's magnetic field.
Reassuringly, the team's model suggests that the South Atlantic Anomaly will recover of its own accord and is unlikely to trigger the reversal that some have anticipated.
'Based on similarities with the recreated anomalies, we predict that the South Atlantic Anomaly will probably disappear within the next 300 years, and that Earth is not heading towards a polarity reversal', Mr Nilsson said.
The Earth’s magnetic field is in a permanent state of change.
Magnetic north drifts around and every few hundred thousand years the polarity flips so a compass would point south instead of north.
The strength of the magnetic field also constantly changes and currently it is showing signs of significant weakening.
Life has existed on the Earth for billions of years, during which there have been many reversals.
There is no obvious correlation between animal extinctions and those reversals. Likewise, reversal patterns do not have any correlation with human development and evolution.
It appears that some animals, such as whales and some birds use Earth's magnetic field for migration and direction finding.
Since geomagnetic reversal takes a number of thousands of years, they could well adapt to the changing magnetic environment or develop different methods of navigation.
Radiation at ground level would increase, however, with some estimates suggesting that overall exposure to cosmic radiation would double causing more deaths from cancer. ‘But only slightly,’ said Professor Richard Holme.
‘And much less than lying on the beach in Florida for a day. So if it happened, the protection method would probably be to wear a big floppy hat.’
The movement of the Earth's magnetic poles are shown in this animation at 10-year intervals from 1970 to 2020. The red and blue lines sjpw the difference between magnetic north and true north depending on where you are standing. On the green line, a compass would point to true north. Credit: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information
Electric grid collapse from severe solar storms is a major risk. As the magnetic field continues to weaken, scientists are highlighting the importance off-the grid energy systems using renewable energy sources to protect the Earth against a black out.
'The very highly charged particles can have a deleterious effect on the satellites and astronauts,' added Dr Mona Kessel, a Magnetosphere discipline scientist at Nasa.
In one area, there is evidence that a flip is already occurring. ‘The increasing strength of the South Atlantic anomaly, an area of weak field over Brazil, is already a problem,’ said Professor Richard Holme.
The Earth's climate could also change. A recent Danish study has found that the earth's weather has been significantly affected by the planet's magnetic field.
They claimed that fluctuations in the number of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere directly alter the amount of cloud covering the planet.
Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist at the Danish National Space Centre who led the team behind the research, believes that the planet is experiencing a natural period of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere.
Astronomers have discovered a new world circling the outer edges of our solar system.
Researchers using the Subaru Telescope, located inHawaii, spotted a small, distant object called 2023 KQ14 far beyond Pluto. They've given it the nickname Ammonite.
2023 KQ14 is a rare type of object called a 'sednoid,' a small, icy body in the outer solar system, similar to the icy rocks floating in the Kuiper Belt or dwarf planets like Pluto.
So far, there are only four known objects like it in our solar system. 2023 KQ14 is about 71 times farther from the sun than Earth is.
This object follows a unique, stretched-out orbit that has stayed stable for about 4.5 billion years.
Scientists found that 2023 KQ14's orbit was similar to the other sednoids in the solar system for billions of years, but that has mysteriously changed over time, suggesting the outer solar system is a more complex space than we thought.
This discovery also makes the possible existence of 'Planet Nine' less likely, as 2023 KQ14's orbit doesn't quite fit with where scientists believe that world would be.
Dr Yukun Huang from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan said: 'It is possible that a planet once existed in the solar system but was later ejected, causing the unusual orbits we see today.'
Researchers using the Subaru Telescope, located in Hawaii, spotted a small, distant object far beyond Pluto and have named it 2023 KQ14
Planetary scientist Fumi Yoshida added that Ammonite was found in a region of space far beyond the influence of Neptune's gravity
'The presence of objects with elongated orbits and large perihelion distances in this area implies that something extraordinary occurred during the ancient era when 2023 KQ14 formed,' Yoshida explained in a statement.
Scientists are calling Ammonite a cosmic 'fossil' from the beginnings of the solar system.
The discovery was part of the Formation of the Outer Solar System: An Icy Legacy (FOSSIL) survey project.
The project's name itself reflected the goal of finding objects like Ammonite that act as 'icy fossils,' preserving information about the outer solar system's formation and evolution.
'I would be happy if the FOSSIL team could make many more discoveries like this one and help draw a complete picture of the history of the solar system,' Yoshida said.
Until now, astronomers had been focused on proving the existence of the fabled Planet Nine (or Planet X as NASA calls it), a mysterious ninth planet believed to be hiding far beyond Pluto at the edge of the solar system.
A recent study had whittled a list of 13 candidates down to just one potential object slowly moving around our sun approximately 46.5 billion to 65.1 billion miles away.
2023 KQ14 is a rare type of object called a 'sednoid,' a small, icy body in the outer solar system. So far, there are only four known objects like it in our solar system
Beyond Neptune is a region of the solar system called the Kuiper Belt, where Pluto and other ice fragments sit. All 4 sednoids sit in this region as well
To put that in perspective, that hypothetical planet would be almost 20 times farther away from the sun than Pluto is.
However, the Japanese team’s discovery of Ammonite (2023 KQ14) challenges the Planet Nine theory, as its unique orbit suggests that Planet Nine, if it exists, would need to be even farther from the sun than previously thought.
This has led the researchers who discovered Ammonite to hypothesize that a mystery planet (possibly Planet Nine) was somehow thrown out of its orbit around the sun long ago.
Scientists had been using the Planet Nine theory to explain some of the unsolved mysteries still surrounding our tiny corner of the Milky Way galaxy.
In a breakdown of Planet Nine, NASA said: 'It could also make our solar system seem a little more 'normal.'
'Surveys of planets around other stars in our galaxy have found the most common types to be 'super Earths' and their cousins — bigger than Earth, but smaller than Neptune,' NASA researchers continued.
'Yet none of this kind exist in our solar system. Planet Nine would help fill that gap.'
If astronomers had found a giant planet at the rim of the solar system, it could explain why objects in the Kuiper Belt are tilted by about 20 degrees with respect to the plane the planets sit on as they orbit the sun.
Planet Nine's gravity would be pulling on these objects over long periods of time, tilting their orbits so the entire ice belt would be out of line with the planets.
The existence of Planet Nine and its strong gravity would also explain why all these comets and tiny dwarf planets like Pluto all cluster together and move in the same direction without floating away.
Yellowstone is one of the world's largest active volcanoes - and if it erupted, it would cover up to two-thirds of the US with ash.
Entire states could become uninhabitable as toxic air sweeps through it, grounding thousands of flights and forcing millions to leave their homes.
The new thermal pool at Yellowstone National Park (pictured) likely formed in a series of mildly explosive events between late December 2024 and early February 2025. The rocks and white material (silica mud) surrounding the pool were probably ejected as the feature formed
The new thermal feature, discovered by geologists on April 10 but only revealed this week, is a 'blue water spring' – a natural exit point producing exceptionally pure, clear water.
The water is relatively warm (about 43°C/109°F), light blue in colour and reaches about one foot (30cm) below the rim of the pool.
In terms of the cause of its creation, the experts point to a 'hydrothermal explosion' – an eruption of such force that boiling water, mud and surrounding rocks are broken and flung through the air.
Satellite imagery suggests it happened as a series of mildly explosive events between late December 2024 and early February 2025 prior to discovery.
The imagery shows there was no feature present in the spot on December 19, but by January 6, a small depression had formed there.
Another image from February 13 shows the fully formed water pool, overall indicating that it did not form in a single major explosive event.
Rocks and pure white geothermal mud made of silica surrounding the pool were probably ejected during 'multiple small events'.
In contrast, other hydrothermal features at Yellowstone have formed during 'brief and violent episodes of change'.
This satellite imagery dated February 15 shows the new fully-formed thermal pool at Norris Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park. There is no indication of the pool in images from October 19 and December 19, 2024, but a small depression is visible in a January 6 image
The new hole in the ground is at Norris Geyser Basin (pictured), the hottest, oldest and most dynamic of Yellowstone's thermal areas
What is Yellowstone?
One of the most famous volcanos on Earth, Yellowstone is located beneath a national park spanning three states - Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.
There lies a magma chamber, pulsing with molten and superheated rock and toxic gases such as sulfur dioxide (SO2) and hydrogen sulfide (H2S).
Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park's famous geyser, which has erupted jets of boiling water every 44 to 125 minutes into the air continuously for the last 800 years.
Erupting an average of 130 feet into the air at 200°F the thermal attraction could prove fatal to anyone in close proximity when it blows.
When we think of volcanoes we tend to think of striking cone-shaped features that rise high into the sky, but Yellowstone volcano is largely underground.
Yellowstone volcano blew catastrophically 630,000 years ago and many fear it's getting ready for another eruption, but fortunately, the new hole doesn't necessarily indicate it is in any immediate danger of doing so.
Dr Craig Magee, geologist at the University of Leeds, stressed that Yellowstone has a 'long history of hydrothermal activity'.
'There are lots of small earthquakes and subtle changes in ground elevation regularly recorded there,' he told MailOnline.
'All these tell-tale signs, and others, indicate Yellowstone has an active magmatic and hydrothermal system beneath it.
'But the occurrence of one event, like this single hydrothermal explosion, is unlikely to represent increasing volcanic activity or a move closer to eruption; it is just a symptom.'
According to the academic, if Yellowstone had 'swarms' of hydrothermal explosions, plus increasing seismic activity and ground movement, it could suggest increased activity level.
However, volcanoes do not work in predictable ways and their eruptions do not follow predictable patterns or schedules.
This relief map shows the location of the new thermal feature - formed sometime during late December 2024 to early February 2025 - marked by an orange star
Hydrothermal explosions are caused by pressure changes that result from the transition of liquid water to steam, but even scientists know 'relatively little' about them, according to Dr Magee.
'In Yellowstone, hydrothermal explosions are one of the main hazards the numerous tourists who visit may come across,' he told MailOnline.
The unusually light blue water in this one 'could be very salty or even acidic', so visitors wouldn't want to fall in, he added.
Despite its potency, Yellowstone National Park's famous volcanic activity draws about 4 million tourists per year from around the world.
One of the park's most famous geothermal features, the Old Faithful geyser, spews jets of boiling water every 44-125 minutes.
According to a recent study, Yellowstone's magma chamber is just 2.3 miles (3.8km) or about 12,500 feet below Earth's surface.
This marginal distance is about the same as between Buckingham Palace and St Paul's Cathedral in London, but the study authors also did not consider an eruption to be imminent.
Recent research found a small magma chamber, known as the upper-crustal magma reservoir, beneath the surface
Nasa believes drilling up to six miles (10km) down into the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park to pump in water at high pressure could cool it.
Despite the fact that the mission would cost $3.46 billion (£2.63 billion), Nasa considers it 'the most viable solution.'
Using the heat as a resource also poses an opportunity to pay for plan - it could be used to create a geothermal plant, which generates electric power at extremely competitive prices of around $0.10 (£0.08) per kWh.
But this method of subduing a supervolcano has the potential to backfire and trigger the supervolcanic eruption Nasa is trying to prevent.
'Drilling into the top of the magma chamber 'would be very risky;' however, carefully drilling from the lower sides could work.
This USGS graphic shows how a 'super eruption' of the molten lava under Yellowstone National Park would spread ash across the United States
Even besides the potential devastating risks, the plan to cool Yellowstone with drilling is not simple.
Doing so would be an excruciatingly slow process that one happen at the rate of one metre a year, meaning it would take tens of thousands of years to cool it completely.
And still, there wouldn't be a guarantee it would be successful for at least hundreds or possibly thousands of years.
A massive explosion of solar plasma erupted from the sun on Wednesday, and scientists say this may be just the beginning.
NASAsatellites caught the dramatic moment when a blazing arc of superheated material burst from the Sun's northeastern edge, large enough to stretch across 30 Earths.
The eruption was caused by a solar filament, a thick ribbon of solar material, which snapped and collapsed, firing off a giant cloud of particles known as a coronal mass ejection (CME).
While this CME isn't expected to hit Earth, experts are warning that the sun is becoming more active, and future eruptions could strike our planet head-on.
If one does, it could unleash a geomagnetic storm, a powerful solar disturbance that has the potential to knock out power grids, satellites, and GPS systems.
It was triggered by a solar filament, a dense, rope-like ribbon of solar material, that suddenly snapped and collapsed and shoot a coronal mass ejection (CME)
NASA satellites captured the colossal explosion as it exploded off the sun's northeastern edge, blasting a glowing arc of superheated material enough to stretch across 30 Earths
While astronomers feared the violent burst of energy could hit Earth, the space weather forecast shows our planet is in the clear of a geomagnetic storm.
The latest eruption was caused by a solar filament, a massive ribbon of dense material that floats above the sun's surface.
These filaments are held in place by invisible magnetic forces, but when those break down, the entire structure can collapse and explode.
Tony Phillips, an astronomer who manages Spaceweather.com, said: 'Debris from the filament flew through the sun's atmosphere, carving a 'canyon of fire' more than 248,548 miles long.
'The walls of the canyon are at least 32,186 miles high--a grand canyon, indeed.'
CMEs like this are massive clouds of solar material hurled into space when the Sun's magnetic fields shift violently
Phillips also noted that the eruption hurled a CME into space, but at the time, astronomers feared it was on a direct path toward Earth.
'We don't yet know if there is an Earth-directed component. Confirmation awaits additional images from [NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)].
SOHO is a project of international cooperation between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA to study the sun, from its deep core to the outer corona, and the solar wind.
Another massive solar eruption occurred in May, but this one measured about 600,000 miles wide, making it more than twice as long as the distance from the Earth to the moon.
Stunning video recorded by NASA's solar observation satellites shows the moment that filaments of plasma 75 times larger than Earth peeled away from the sun in a pair of sweeping 'wings.'
Researchers have found a link between two geological events in iconic locations of the U.S. Southwest that scientists previously didn't think had anything to do with each other.
A massive landslide in the Grand Canyon 56,000 years ago blocked the Colorado River.
(Image credit: kjetilporsboll / 500px via Getty Images)
The ancient meteor impact that formed Arizona's Barringer Crater sent shock waves through the Grand Canyon — likely triggering a landslide that dammed the Colorado River, a new study suggests.
Barringer Crater, also called Meteor Crater, formed between 53,000 and 63,000 years ago, when a giant cosmic "curveball" punched a hole in Earth's surface. The force of the impact traveled more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the Grand Canyon, which may have caused an entire cliff face to collapse into the river, scientists have found.
The discovery, described July 15 in the journal Geology, has linked two major events that were thought to be completely unrelated.
"There are other possibilities, such as a random rockfall or local earthquake within a thousand years of the Meteor Crater impact that could have happened independently," Karl Karlstrom, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of New Mexico and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
But the events described are extraordinary, Karlstrom said — and they happened within a suspiciously small time frame, suggesting that they were related.
Researchers already knew that the Colorado River flooded the Grand Canyon sometime in the Late Pleistocene (129,000 to 11,700 years ago). They determined this by analyzing animal figurines carved out of driftwood, which Karlstom's father and colleagues unearthed in a cavern called Stanton's Cave in the 1960s, according to the statement. With techniques available at the time, the researchers dated the driftwood and found it was more than 35,000 years
Pieces of driftwood in several caves in the Grand Canyon pointed to a flooding event.
(Image credit: University of New Mexico)
Stanton's Cave sits 150 feet (46 meters) above river level, so the water must have risen to deposit driftwood there — but the reason remained unknown. "It would have required a ten-times bigger flood level than any flood that has happened in the past several thousand years," Karlstrom said.
"Rare and unusual occurrences"
Subsequent analyses using more advanced techniques suggested the driftwood was 43,500 years old, and the new study pushed the date back even further, to 56,000 years ago. Dating the driftwood was a crucial step in figuring out how it got to Stanton's Cave in the first place, Karlstrom said.
But the researchers needed more evidence to complete the puzzle, so they searched similar caves in the area. "From numerous research trips, Karl and I knew of other high-accessible caves that had both driftwood and sediment that could be dated," study co-author Laura Crossey, also a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of New Mexico, said in the statement.
Several labs examined the additional driftwood samples, and all came back with dates consistent with a flooding event 56,000 years ago. The locations of the caves pointed to this event being a landslide near Nankoweap Canyon, which is downstream of Stanton's Cave. The landslide may have been so big that it created a dam on the Colorado River, forming a lake that stretched for miles upstream. As a result, water levels may have risen high enough to deposit driftwood in the caves, according to the statement.
A conceptualization of the landslide near Nankoweap Canyon (Image credit: University of New Mexico)
Around the same time as these results appeared, study co-author David Kring, principal scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, was recalculating the age of the Barringer Crater. Kring's work showed that the meteor impact occurred around 56,000 years ago, according to the statement.
Kring had previously calculated that the Barringer meteor impact unleashed a magnitude 5.4 earthquake, and when the researchers came together to work on the new study, he determined that the residual effect at the Grand Canyon would have been the same as a 3.5 magnitude earthquake. This could have been enough to disintegrate a cliff face, according to the statement.
"The team put together these arguments without claiming we have final proof," Karlstrom said. "Nevertheless, the meteorite impact, the massive landslide, the lake deposits, and the driftwood high above river level are all rare and unusual occurrences."
With dates that all converge around 56,000 years ago, it seems credible for the events to be related, he said.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
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