According to the most widely accepted theory of planet formation (the Nebular Hypothesis), the Solar System began roughly 4.6 billion years ago from a massive cloud of dust and gas (aka. a nebula). After the cloud experienced gravitational collapse at the center, forming the Sun, the remaining gas and dust fell into a disk that orbited it. The planets gradually accreted from this disk over time, creating the system we know today.
However, until now, scientists have wondered how dust could come together in microgravity to form everything from stars and planets to asteroids. However, a new study by a team of German researchers (and co-authored by Rutgers University) found that matter in microgravity spontaneously develops strong electrical charges and stick together. These findings could resolve the long mystery of how planets formed.
In case you are keeping track:
Interview: 'Strange Planet' Creator Nathan Pyle : NPR
Pyle was inspired to create the series one day as he and his wife were preparing to have guests over — and they began hiding their possessions to make their small New York City apartment appear as clean as possible. "I realized this would make an excellent comic. I drew this one based on the experience, and the series was born," he says. He began posting the comics on social media in February, and in less than a year, the series has amassed over 4.7 million followers on Instagram.
Research group confirm planet-mass objects in extragalactic systems
"The detection of planet- mass objects, either free-floating planets or primordial black holes, are extremely valuable for modeling of star/planet formation or early universe," said Dai. "Even without decomposing the two populations, our limit on the primordial black hole population are already a few orders of magnitude below previous limits in this mass range."
The research group has identified a novel technique that uses quasar microlensing to probe the planet population within distant extragalactic systems. They have been able to constrain the fraction of these planet-mass objects with respect to the galactic halo by studying their microlensing signatures in the spectrum of the lensed images of distant bright Active Galactic Nuclei.
If the planet is warming up, why is it so darned cold outside? | TheHill
Global warming can seem like an abstract concept when the thermometer is dropping and the ice is building up on your car windshield. But the counterintuitive fact is that they are connected. Weather models show that our increasingly warm planet is causing unstable day-to-day anomalies across the globe, and some of those are causing colder temperatures.
Global warming is well documented by four international weather research stations across the globe. July of 2019 was the hottest month on record in the 140 years we've been monitoring temperatures, and 9 of the 10 hottest Julys have been recorded just since 2005. The global temperature has increased overall 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since we started burning fossil fuels.
In case you are keeping track:
Natural gas surges climate change after carbon emissions record in 2019
The planet's average temperature has warmed over 1 degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution, and is on pace to heat up by 1.5 degrees more within 20 years. The 2015 Paris Agreement to keep global temperature increases under 2 degree C during this century is now seen as unattainable.
At the close of this decade, global carbon dioxide emissions are now projected to hit 37 billion tons in 2019. That sets another record for a third consecutive year and veers countries further off course from combating global warming.
Scientists map a planet's global wind patterns for the first time, and it's not Earth |
Today, a paper published in Science documents for the first time the global wind circulation patterns in the upper atmosphere of a planet, 120 to 300 kilometers above the surface. The findings are based on local observations, rather than indirect measurements, unlike many prior measurements taken on Earth's upper atmosphere. But it didn't happen on Earth: it happened on Mars.
In 2016, Mehdi Benna and his colleagues proposed to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) project team that they remotely reprogram the MAVEN spacecraft and its Natural Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) instrument to do a unique experiment. They wanted to see if parts of the instrument that were normally stationary could "swing back and forth like a windshield wiper fast enough," to enable the tool to gather a new kind of data.
Free-Floating Planet-Mass Objects are Common in Galaxies | Astronomy | Sci-News.com
X-ray image of the gravitational lens system SDSS J1004+4112 taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory; the central red extended emission is from the hot gas in the foreground lens galaxy cluster and the four blue point sources are the lensed images of the background quasar. Image credit: University of Oklahoma.
Q J0158-4325 is a galaxy-quasar lensing system, where a background quasar at a distance of 8.8 billion light-years is gravitationally lensed by a foreground galaxy at a distance of 3.6 billion light-years.
Overtourism Is Destroying the Planet - The Atlantic
Last year, 1.4 billion people traveled the world. That's up from just 25 million in 1950. In China alone, overseas trips have risen from 10 million to 150 million in less than two decades.
"Tourists can alter the experience of visiting something such that they ruin the very experience that they've been trying to have," Lowrey says in the video. "That's the essential definition of overtourism."
Happening on Twitter
Planets Started Out From Dust Clumping Together. Here's How - Universe Today https://t.co/nH4NXHYocj @universetoday… https://t.co/CQwkBNSI8n universetoday (from Courtenay, British Columbia) Sat Dec 14 20:17:02 +0000 2019
When Anne Dattilo started learning programming in high school, she had no idea she would end up using those skills… https://t.co/vMlNiaSOiE Google (from Mountain View, CA) Thu Dec 12 18:00:00 +0000 2019
China has started preliminary research on a space program scheduled for 2030 to search for potentially habitable pl… https://t.co/9AtL5E4cSx PDChina (from Beijing, China) Fri Dec 13 01:30:00 +0000 2019
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