#molten-lava-planet

#molten-lava-planet

The new work was less notable for showing that we had found these bases in Ryugu than for solving a previous mystery: earlier studies had failed to detect them there, despite their presence in many other asteroid samples.

Land is one of those things that can disappear even as you see it. It falls away beneath you, becoming merely the ground under your feet, because you're thinking about where you're going, or a place slowly blurring out of focus from the airplane window. Land is a primal word, primordial even, like lava. And it is a loaded word if, say, you're Indigenous or descend from a people whose land was taken from them.

The eruption generated significant heat and ash, USGS said, with some six inches of tephrabits of volcanic material, ranging from glasslike particles to rocks and ashaccumulating on a nearby golf course. Some glassy material, called Pele's hair for its strandlike structure, traveled as far as the city of Hilosome 30 miles away by car, USGS said.

Such an event, if it transpired on Earth today, would see kilometres-thick ice sheets gouging their way from the Arctic to the Bahamas. Once-diverse ecosystems and climate zones would merge into a single, uniform condition, seemingly destined to be barren. Scientists once argued that such a 'snowball' state could never have existed on Earth since global glaciation could not be reversed. Moreover, on such a world, all life, including our own ancestors, would surely have been extinguished.

The fragile-looking filaments of cooled lava known as Pele's hair can form when pockets of bubble-rich lava pull apart rapidly, experiments suggest.

We found that life is more likely to survive an asteroid impact, so it's definitely still a real possibility that life on Earth could have come from Mars. Maybe we're Martians! The idea that life could have spread through the solar system or even the universe on rocks is known as the lithopanspermia hypothesis.

Our new study suggests that the Apollo samples are biased to extremely rare events that lasted a few thousand years - but up to now, these have been interpreted as representing 0.5 billion years of lunar history. It now seems that a sampling bias prevented us from realizing how short and rare these strong magnetism events were.

The population of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes, and the origin of the radius valley that separates these two classes of planets, is best explained by cores that are made of an Earth-like composition without a substantial amount of accreted ice8,9,10,11. For sub-Neptunes, the hydrogen-rich envelope overlies the rocky core for billions of years, whereas for super-Earths, the envelope may be retained for about 100 Myr (refs. ).

Remembering the life and work of the geologist George Poulett Scrope, and salmon stories in this week's pick from the Nature archive.

I think the first thing to remember is: We are right at the beginning of this adventure. There's so much excitement that every little signal - every "wiggle" in a spectrum - gets people saying, "Oh! That might be life!" And then, on the other side, other people respond with, "I don't see enough wiggles, so there's probably not even an atmosphere. Dead planet. Move on." Both reactions are too fast.

V1298 Tau is a young (10-30 Myr), approximately solar-mass star (1.10 ± 0.05  M⊙ ) in the Taurus star-forming region2,4,5,6,7,8. Observations by NASA's Kepler space telescope in its extended K2 mission9 revealed transits of the star by four different planets, each larger than Neptune2,3. The V1298 Tau planets occupy a sparsely populated region of the observed exoplanet period versus radius plane. As a young system of large planets, it provides a crucial snapshot of planetary architecture

A global research team has analyzed the prospects for biomineralization on Mars, a process in which bacteria, fungi, and microalgae can create minerals as part of their metabolism, offering a byproduct that could be useful to prospective Martian explorers by providing the raw materials needed to produce aggregates such as concrete. With an extremely thin and mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere, air pressure less than 1 percent of Earth's,

It's a plant! It's a fungus! It's... an entirely new type of lifeform hitherto unknown to science? That appears to be the case for a puzzling, spire-shaped organism that lived over 400 million years ago, according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances. After analyzing its internal structures, the authors argue that the mystifying ancient beings known as prototaxites don't belong to any of the existing biological kingdoms.

A dead star 730 light years away appears to be forming a powerful structure around itself - and despite their best efforts, astronomers aren't sure how. The cosmic corpse, designated RXJ0528+2838, is an incredibly dense stellar remnant known as a white dwarf, with a Sun-like star orbiting around it. This binary arrangement isn't uncommon throughout the universe, but what is strange is the structure surrounding the former body: a highly energetic and luminescent cloud known as a nebula,

A team of geologists has found for the first time evidence that two ancient, continent-sized, ultrahot structures hidden beneath the Earth have shaped the planet's magnetic field for the past 265 million years. These two masses, known as large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs), are part of the catalog of the planet's most enormous and enigmatic objects. Current estimates calculate that each one is comparable in size to the African continent, although they remain buried at a depth of 2,900 kilometers.

How the most massive objects in the universe first formed is one of the biggest headscratchers in astrophysics. With more advanced telescopes, astronomers have found fully formed galaxies and colossal black holes earlier and earlier in the cosmos, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. This shouldn't be enough time for these structures to reach their incredible size; to astronomers, it's like stumbling on a fully-grown oak tree that's only a year old.

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