Gizmorama - December 26, 2012

Good Morning,

Learn about what the Hubble Space Telescope discovered and another interesting story from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

P.S. EVTV1 is back and better than ever! This video portal was created to weed through the online clutter to bring you the best animal video clips...funniest videos...most popular...PLUS the most unusual. New videos are added daily! It's the future of entertainment available today, all in one place.

Visit and Enjoy: EVTV1.com

***
*-- Hubble spots some of the earliest galaxies --*
PASADENA, Calif. - U.S. astronomers say they've discovered primitive galaxies formed more than 13 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 4 percent of its current age. The Hubble Space Telescope, in its deepest images to date, has captured a robust sample of seven galaxies that tells how abundant they already were shortly after the era when galaxies first formed, a NASA release said Thursday. A team of astronomers led by Richard Ellis of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 to peer deeper into space in near-infrared light than any previous Hubble observation. The newly observed galaxies are seen as they looked 350 to 600 million years after the Big Bang, with their light just arriving at Earth now, they said. Astronomers said the Hubble images have provided the first reliable census of this epoch. A major goal of the study, scientists said, was to determine how rapidly the number of galaxies increases over time in the early universe, a measure that can provide key evidence for how quickly galaxies build up their constituent stars.


*-- Ocean source of Earth life questioned --*
EUGENE, Ore. - The long-held assumption that complex life on Earth evolved in the sea then crawled onto land may be exactly backwards, a University of Oregon researcher says. Paleontologist Greg Retallack says he believes the earliest large life forms may have appeared on land long before the oceans filled with creatures that swam and crawled and burrowed in the mud, National Public Radio reported Wednesday. Paleontologists have found fossil evidence for mysterious organisms called Ediacarans that predate the period about 530 million years ago when complex life suddenly burst forth and filled the seas with a wide range of life forms. Many scientists have considered Ediacarans as marine creatures, predecessors of jellyfish, worms and other invertebrates. Retallack, writing in the journal Nature, argues Ediacarans weren't living in the sea, and the ancient Australian rocks where they're found are ancient soil, not marine mud. These early life forms were landlubbers, he said. "What I'm saying for the Ediacaran is that the big [life] forms were on land and life was actually quite a bit simpler in the ocean," he said. Asked if that suggests life evolved on land and later moved into the ocean, he says, "Yes, in a nutshell." Other scientists say they've had the same thoughts. "I don't have any problem with early evolution being primarily on land," Paul Knauth in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University said. "I think you can make a pretty good argument for that, and that it came into the sea later. It's kind of a radical idea, but the fact is we don't know."

***
Missed an Issue? Visit the Gizmorama Archives