Earth Formation : How the Earth is a the byproduct of a local supernova via Earth Formation | Cosmology and Astronomy | Khan Academy. The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by … Continue reading
On April 22, more than one billion people around the globe will participate in Earth Day 2012 and help Mobilize the Earth™. People of all nationalities and backgrounds will voice their appreciation for the planet and demand its protection. Together … Continue reading
The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has a useful introduction to geological time. Geologic Time: The Story of a Changing Earth. … Continue reading
Most spiral galaxies in the Universe have a bar structure in their centre, and Hubble’s image of NGC 1073 offers a particularly clear view of one of these. Galaxies’ star-filled bars are thought to emerge as gravitational density waves funnel … Continue reading
Early galaxies, flowering with dramatic starbursts in the early Universe, saw the birth of new stars abruptly cut short, leaving them as massive galaxies of aging stars in the present day. The likely culprit for the sudden end to the … Continue reading
The oldest terranes, with ages ranging from 3.8 Ga to 4.0 Ga, have been identified in Canada, while Australian zircon crystals dated at 4.4 Ga represent the oldest dated minerals on Earth. The exceptional resistance of zircon grains to repeated … Continue reading
Animal embryo-like fossils from the Ediacaran Doushantuo Formation, South China, have been interpreted as the earliest metazoan fossils, significantly predating the radiation of biomineralizing animals and macroscopic bilaterians during the Ediacaran–Cambrian transition. This article discusses the fossilization process of these … Continue reading
Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have uncovered a cluster of galaxies in the initial stages of development, making it the most distant such grouping ever observed in the early Universe. In a sky survey made in near-infrared light … Continue reading
Although an African origin of the modern human species is generally accepted, the evolutionary processes involved in the speciation, geographical spread, and eventual extinction of archaic humans outside of Africa are much debated. An additional complexity has been the recent … Continue reading
Recent results from the Herschel Space Observatory show that gas-rich galaxies in the early universe were able to create stars at an intense rate. In the recent universe, we only see such high rates of star formation when galaxies collide. However, … Continue reading