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Home / News / Tags / impact
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By observing vast masses of dust accompanying a distant binary star system, US scientists concluded that it's possible that 2 planets similar to Earth violently collided 300 million light years away from us. Benjamin Zuckerman, an astronomer at the University of California in Los Angeles, who worked on the... |
22 September 2008
05:56 GMT |
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Mars had liquid water on the surface in its distant past and quite a lot of it too, according to the high-resolution spectrometry images relayed back to Earth by the CRISM instrument on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. CRISM revealed that there is a great abundance of clay minerals, which usually form i... |
17 July 2008
05:10 GMT |
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Yet another reminder of the dangers to which the Earth is subjected every day has been brought to our attention by the Arecibo Radio Observatory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's LINEAR search program which discovered earlier this year an asteroid expected to make a fly-by around Earth sometime tod... |
14 July 2008
02:38 GMT |
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Soil samples returned from the Moon during the Apollo missions were for the first time proven to contain trace amounts of water, although they cannot indicate how much water is currently present there nor can they be used to predict a method through which water could be extracted in the near future. The long expected... |
10 July 2008
03:18 GMT |
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Asteroid and comet collisions usually bring havoc to Earth, often provoking mass extinctions, but they can also seed life. In fact, we're most likely the product of such an event that took place several hundred million years ago. The last large impact that occurred is dated about 65 million years in the past and... |
15 May 2008
10:02 GMT |
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According to researchers from the Oxford and Aberdeen universities, about 1.2 billion years ago, a relatively large object entered Earth's atmosphere and fell towards the regions of north-west Scotland, to create the biggest meteorite impact on the territories of the United Kingdom. The exact location of the cra... |
26 March 2008
07:49 GMT |
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You might not know this, but in September 2007 a meteorite entered the Earth's atmosphere and eventually reached the ground in a countryside area in Peru, where it formed a small crater, right in front of the eyes of the people living nearby. And this occurred although most of the space rocks hitting our planet ... |
12 March 2008
03:49 GMT |
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On the evening of March 5, Wednesday, the Physics and Astronomy Department at Western Ontario University received a number of calls and e-mails from people claiming to have been a bright streak of light crossing the sky sometime around 10:59 p.m. EST. Luckily, the astronomy department is equipped with a network of al... |
8 March 2008
03:36 GMT |
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The Saturn system is well known for its unique configuration. Being the second largest planet in the solar system, Saturn distinguishes itself from the other gas giants through a large ring of debris orbiting around it and the large number of moons - over 60 moons. Now Cassini promises to add yet another unique featu... |
7 March 2008
02:45 GMT |
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A pretty small prize, one would say, especially considering the implications of a large asteroid hitting the Earth in the near future. We may at least stay calm until the day of 13. April 2036, that is. This is the date when the largest asteroid orbiting through the close vicinity of the Earth may execute a fly-by ar... |
27 February 2008
07:01 GMT |
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All of a sudden, it started raining with asteroids! No wonder, astronomers estimate that there are about 7,000 such rocks, discovered and undiscovered, orbiting around the Sun and periodically coming through the vicinity of the Earth. Because they are so small in size, many less than 150 meters in diameter, astronome... |
25 January 2008
02:49 GMT |
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After nearly two months of observations on the trajectory of asteroid 2007 WD5, astronomers finally succeeded in calculating the exact trajectory of the object which only a few days ago had a chance of 1 in 28 to hit the Red Planet. Asteroid 2007 WD5, discovered on November 30 last year, is now expected to pass thro... |
9 January 2008
02:34 GMT |
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If an asteroid hits the Red Planet, it could be the second time in history when humanity witnesses a collision between a celestial body and a planet in the solar system, other than the Earth, since the event in 2004 when the broken comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 intersected the orbit of Jupiter, creating giant fireballs in i... |
21 December 2007
02:29 GMT |
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No one is sure yet if it really was a meteorite, but hundreds of Peruvians have required treatment after Saturday night, an object from space crashed on Earth, in a remote area, leaving a deep crater near the town of Carancas (Andes), in the Puno area (south Peru, near the Bolivian border), some 1,300km (800 mi) sout... |
19 September 2007
05:31 GMT |
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We have barely escaped from an Armageddon. Next time we may not be that lucky. That's why some see the moon as our possible escape in case such a scenario happens. NASA is already planning a permanent lunar outpost by 2024. "But that plan should be expanded to include a way to preserve humanity's learning, ... |
15 August 2007
03:57 GMT |
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At least five mass extinctions may have occurred in the history of our planet, meaning that in a relatively short period of time, a large number of species have disappeared. Probably the most famous one took place 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaur domination reached its end.... |
28 July 2007
07:01 GMT |
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This comet is one of the few that really spawned some controversy regarding the possibility of a collision with Earth and was even classified as having "a non-zero possibility of impact." This means it could hit our planet or the Moon, sometime around 3044, or at least that is what astronomers thought about four dec... |
17 July 2007
06:31 GMT |
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From time to time, scientists get a little bit of help from Lady Luck and when this happens, they discover something amazing. This is exactly what happened after a forest fire more than 450 miles away at Sudbury, Ontario.A group of geologists were forced to find alternative routes for their field trip, since the fir... |
16 July 2007
10:20 GMT |
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Scientists performed a new study to evaluate what countries are most at risk of what they call "small" asteroid impact. The term small must not be taken literally, since a 1-kilometer-wide asteroid may not be large in astronomical terms, but it still can produce a disaster.Using a new computer software, called NEOim... |
10 July 2007
02:48 GMT |
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Hyperion, a satellite of Saturn, is one of the strangest moons in our solar system, whose behavior and composition has puzzled astronomers for many years. This moon really looks like a giant cosmic sponge, but there are many more weird properties that have just recently been explained.A highly irregular body in the ... |
5 July 2007
03:34 GMT |
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Presently, the widely accepted theory about the formation process of the Moon is a giant impact between the early Earth and a celestial body the size of Mars, that threw out enough material in orbit that accreted in time to form our only natural satellite.However this hypothesis is not accepted by all the scientific... |
28 June 2007
04:16 GMT |
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The impact force has the greatest effect when it's applied over a short time period and it is equal to the mass of the hitting object times the acceleration. This means that a stone weighing one kilogram (2.2 pounds) moving at 50 m/s (1600 ft/s) will have the same impact force as a 10 grams rock moving at 500 ... |
26 June 2007
05:50 GMT |
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This week, two Russian cosmonauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) walked out into space and climbed on the station to install deflector shields, in fact protective panels designed to shield the orbiting station from dangerous space debris and small meteorites. During this spacewalk, the two astronauts... |
7 June 2007
08:55 GMT |
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New images of a recent landslide in the Martian crater Zunil show astonishing blue streaks on the walls. This image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars reconnaissance orbiter. There's a catch, though. This is a false color picture and its purpose i... |
6 June 2007
16:16 GMT |
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NASA's internal procedure for tracking potentially dangerous asteroids that could hit Earth and for countermeasures designed to deflect the space objects is deeply flawed and heavily criticized because it exaggerates the cost and difficulty of the program.The agency had one year to prepare plans for a survey th... |
22 May 2007
12:06 GMT |
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A group of scientists discovered new compelling evidence of a cataclysmic event that took place 13,000 years ago on Earth. A large comet exploded over the Earth and created a hail of fireballs that set most of the Northern Hemisphere on fire.After analyzing 26 different sites in Europe and North America, they found ... |
21 May 2007
08:42 GMT |
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The space rock, dubbed 2006 VV2, came within 2.1million miles of hitting us - which is a near miss in space terms, even though that's about nine times farther away than the moon.The asteroid was flying past Earth on Friday night, at 11 p.m. (PDT), and on Saturday 7 a.m. GMT for Europe.There was no danger of col... |
2 April 2007
03:35 GMT |
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Scientists have noticed a long time ago that Mars' northern and southern hemispheres are very different. While the northern hemisphere is much flatter, it is also lower than the southern hemisphere, with an elevation difference between the two of about 5 km (3 mi).In the 1980s, researchers supposed that the coll... |
16 March 2007
04:22 GMT |
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