October 12, 2011
Good Morning,
Scientists explore how life could hang on in the case of a global freeze using fossil evidence as their harbor. Check out all the fascinating details on this study in the third article.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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Comet left its mark on Saturn's ringsNANTES, France - A comet colliding with Saturn six centuries ago left "footprints" on the planet's rings still visible today, a U.S. researcher told a scientific conference. Essam Marouf, from San Jose State University, says the disintegrating comet dropped dusty clouds of debris on the giant planet's iconic rings, creating rippled footprints detected by the orbiting Cassini spacecraft, ScienceNews.org reported. Marouf discussed the findings during a joint meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Nantes, France. Marouf, a member of the Cassini science team, told how the probe sent radio waves back to Earth through a part of Saturn's innermost ring system, revealing a "very unusual kind of addition" to the normal ring structure. "There were highly regular little wiggles that rippled over hundreds of kilometers in a very specific pattern," Marouf said. A similar structure in Jupiter's rings detected by the Galileo probe orbiting that planet were traced to debris littered by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it crashed into the planet in 1994. Data gathered from the ripples in Saturn's rings allowed astronomers to date the comet impact. "They date back to about the late 1300s," Marouf said. "And there is very clear evidence for two events, not one, separated by about 50 years."
Solar radiation climate effect studiedLONDON - Recent nasty winters in the United States and northern Europe may be partly caused by changes in ultraviolet radiation from the sun, researchers say. Fluctuations in the amount of ultraviolet light reaching the Earth could change winter weather patterns across the Northern Hemisphere, a climate simulation run by the British Met Office showed. There has long been anecdotal evidence linking low solar activity, such as the number and frequency of sunspots, and cold European winters, ScienceNews.org reported. From 2004 to 2007, during low points of the last solar activity cycle, scientists at the Met Office recorded a significant drop-off in the amount of ultraviolet radiation coming from the sun. "I thought, if that's true, that's going to do something interesting to the climate system," climate modeler Adam Scaife said. The scientists fed the data on the decline into their climate model, and found with ultraviolet radiation falling, parts of the upper atmosphere cooled more than usual, allowing cold weather to form over northern Europe and the United States. "We hope this will open the door to improving ultralong-range predictions," Scaife said, and that researchers hope to start incorporating solar variability into long-term weather predictions. "It's changing the odds of what kind of winter you're going to get by a significant amount."
'Snowball Earth' almost wiped out lifeSEATTLE - A global freeze dubbed "snowball Earth" almost wiped out all life on Earth eons ago, but life may have survived in narrow bodies of water, U.S researchers say. Scientists at the University of Washington say simple life such as photosynthetic algae could have survived in a narrow body of water with characteristics similar to those of the Red Sea. A long, narrow body of water about 6.5 times longer than it is wide would create enough physical resistance to advancing glacial ice that the ice sheet likely could not make it all the way to the end of the sea, leaving a small expanse of open water where the algae could survive, a university release said Monday. "Under those frigid conditions, there are not a lot of places where you would expect liquid water and light to occur in the same area, and you need both of those things for photosynthetic algae to survive," researcher Adam Campbell said. Photosynthetic plankton turn up in the fossil record before and after "snowball Earth" events, leading scientists to wonder how that could happen if Earth's oceans were completely encased in ice. Campbell's research shows narrow bodies of water could have provided a refuge for life to hang on. "The initial results have shown pretty well that these kinds of channels could remain relatively free of thick glacial ice during a "snowball Earth" event," he said.
Underwater Greek city brought to lifeNOTTINGHAM, England - Computer technology is being used to digitally recreate a submerged ancient Greek city from the era portrayed in Homer's Iliad, British researchers say. Combining underwater survey equipment with reconstruction software, scientists have created a photo-realistic 3-D version of a Bronze Age port that sank into the sea 3,000 years ago, The Independent reported. Researchers from the University of Nottingham said they surveyed the 20-acre site in ultra-high definition, with error margins of about 1 inch. The original name and political affiliation of the site is a mystery, scientists say, but the evidence suggests that it flourished between 2000 and 1100 B.C. and may have been connected with the Minoan Civilization on the island of Crete 80 miles to the south across the Mediterranean. An earthquake in the first millennium B.C. is thought to have lowered the land and pulled the city under the sea. "Surveying the city has been a unique operation," Jon Henderson of Nottingham's Underwater Archaeology Research Center said. Buildings, including religious shrines and tombs, along with half a dozen major streets, have been surveyed so far, he said. "It's one of the few places on earth where, as a marine archaeologist, you can quite literally swim along a drowned street of an ancient city or look inside a submerged tomb."
Clusters of 'failed stars' detectedTORONTO - Canadian astronomers say they've discovered a cluster of more than two dozen brown dwarf stars, sometimes described as "failed stars," floating free in space. Brown dwarfs are not quite stars but are more than planets, glowing brightly when young from the heat of formation but cooling down over time, often ending up with atmospheres with planet-like characteristics. Scientists say they believe most brown dwarfs may have formed like stars in contracting gas clouds, but some of the smallest free-floating examples may have formed like planets around a star and later been ejected. "Our findings suggest once again that objects not much bigger than Jupiter could form the same way as stars do," University of Toronto astrophysicist Ray Jayawardhana said. "In other words, nature appears to have more than one trick up its sleeve for producing planetary mass objects." One of the discovered brown dwarfs is one of the least-massive ever observed, astronomers said. "Its mass is comparable to those of giant planets, yet it doesn't circle a star. How it formed is a mystery," said Aleks Scholz of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies in Ireland, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto.
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