It crashed into Earth in 1969, ending an epic journey that had lasted for billions of years, and maybe even much longer than that.
Inside this mysterious space rock – the Allende meteorite , which rained down over Mexican desert in a hail of fiery fragments a half-century ago – scientists have now identified interstellar material that pre-dates our Solar System, and it exists in a form that we didn't know was even possible.
Finding such incredibly ancient matter – traces of stardust from interstellar space, called presolar grains – is rare, but not unheard of.
Many things are taking place:
There's a 'Great Divide' in Our Solar System, And We Might Finally Know How It Formed
Shortly after the Solar System formed, astronomers think it went through what's known as the Great Divide – a splitting up of the planets into two distinct groups. We weren't around to experience this cosmic schism, but a new study has put forward an intriguing hypothesis on how it would have occurred.
Put simply, the Great Divide left our Solar System with the smaller terrestrial planets closest to the Sun (including Earth and Mars), and the larger gas giant - or 'Jovian' - planets farther out (including Jupiter and Saturn).
Cataclysmic bashing from giant planets occurred early in our Solar System's history | Science |
An early maelstrom shaped our Solar System. Sometime after the planets took shape from primordial gas and dust, resonant tugs between the giant planets threw their orbits out of kilter. The gravity of the errant giants blasted Pluto and its many icy neighbors into the far-out Kuiper belt. The instability also scattered oddball moons and asteroids and triggered smaller bodies to pummel the inner planets.
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Two decades ago, scientists recognized that planets must have migrated to create the modern Solar System. A group including Alessandro Morbidelli, a planetary scientist at the University of Côte d'Azur, gathered in Nice, France, for 1 year to hash out the idea, creating what's known as the Nice model .
New Jersey town keeps its water clean with the country's largest floating solar system
Installing a floating solar system in the United States is still a novel effort. The first "floatovoltaic" array in the world was installed a decade ago at a California winery , but solar systems that reside atop stagnant water still haven't claimed a significant share of the U.S. solar market.
NREL released a study in 2018 that claimed if solar was installed on just a quarter of the manmade bodies of water in the United States, it would account for 10% of the country's electricity needs.
In case you are keeping track:
10 Things Spitzer Taught Us About Our Solar System – NASA Solar System Exploration
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, designed to reveal the far, cold and dusty side of the universe, made discoveries its designers never even imagined, including quite a few in our own solar system. Here are 10 Spitzer science accomplishments in our own cosmic backyard:
Everyone knows Saturn has distinctive rings, but did you know its largest ring was only discovered in 2009, thanks to Spitzer?
Because this outer ring doesn’t reflect much visible light, Earth-based telescopes would have a hard time seeing it. But Spitzer saw the infrared glow from the cool dust in the ring.
Jupiter and Saturn may leave marks on the sun's corpse | Space
Alien scientists billions of years from now may detect traces of Jupiter , Saturn, Neptune and Uranus in our sun's corpse.
That's because the outer layers of superdense stellar remnants known as white dwarfs may often possess the remains of giant planets, a new study suggests.
White dwarfs are the Earth-size cores left behind after average-size stars have exhausted their fuel and shed their outer layers. Our sun will one day end up as a white dwarf, as will more than 90% of all stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
The Closest Solar System to Earth is Even Weirder Than We Thought | Daily Planet | Air
Since 2016, astronomers have known that the solar system next door to ours—a triple-sun system—has one planet, Proxima b, located in the so-called habitable zone. Now a group of researchers led by Mario Damasso from the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy claims to have discovered a second planet called Proxima c , a super-Earth with nearly two times the mass of Earth.
The newly detected planet completes one orbit around its host star Proxima Centauri every 5.2 years, and is located well beyond the snow line —the distance from the star where it is cold enough for gaseous compounds such as water, ammonia, carbon dioxide and methane to condense into solid ice grains.
Happening on Twitter
Some people say that we should study to become climate scientists so that we can "solve the climate crisis" But the… https://t.co/2CdPlPp5np MikeHudema (from Unceded Squamish Territory) Wed Jan 29 05:22:45 +0000 2020
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