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Science Posters by Kelsey Oseid on Etsy

Was Earth Born With Life On It?

“By finding graphite deposits in zircons that are 4.1 billion years old, graphite deposits that show this carbon-12 enhancement, we now have evidence that life on Earth goes back at least 90% of Earth’s history, and possibly even longer! After all, finding the remnants of organic matter in a certain location means the organic matter is at least as old as the location it’s buried in, but it could still be even older. This is so early that it might make you think that perhaps this life didn’t originate here on Earth, but that Earth was born with life. And this could really, truly be the case.”

How old is life on Earth? If all you had to go on was the fossil record, you’d run into severe trouble once you went back more than one or two billion years, as all your rock would have metamorphosed, making examination and identification of fossils impossible. But recently, we’ve discovered another method: to measure the isotopic content of carbon deposits in ancient rock formations. The carbon-12 to carbon-13 ratio is a surefire signature of life, and tells us that life on Earth goes back at least 4.1 billion years: 90% of the age of our planet. Could this be the hint we’ve needed to conclude that life on Earth actually predates the Earth itself? It’s not quite certain, but the beauty of science is we can always test it and find out! Here’s how.

The Milky Way’s long-lost sibling finally found

Scientists at the University of Michigan have deduced that the Andromeda galaxy, our closest large galactic neighbor, shredded and cannibalized a massive galaxy two billion years ago.

Even though it was mostly shredded, this massive galaxy left behind a rich trail of evidence: an almost invisible halo of stars larger than the Andromeda galaxy itself, an elusive stream of stars and a separate enigmatic compact galaxy, M32. Discovering and studying this decimated galaxy will help astronomers understand how disk galaxies like the Milky Way evolve and survive large mergers.

This disrupted galaxy, named M32p, was the third-largest member of the Local Group of galaxies, after the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Using computer models, Richard D'Souza and Eric Bell of the University of Michigan’s Department of Astronomy were able to piece together this evidence, revealing this long-lost sibling of the Milky Way. Their findings were published in Nature Astronomy.

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mikkolagerstedt

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“If man had no eternal consciousness, if, at the bottom of everything, there were merely a wild seething force producing everything, both large and trifling, in the storm of dark passions, if the bottomless void that nothing can fill underlay all things, what would life be but despair?”

- Albert Camus, quoting Kierkegaard in “Sysiphos”

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Saturn’s atmosphere exhibits a banded pattern similar to Jupiter’s, but Saturn’s bands are much fainter and are much wider near the equator. The nomenclature used to describe these bands is the same as on Jupiter. Saturn’s finer cloud patterns were not observed until the flybys of the Voyager spacecraft during the 1980s. Since then, Earth-based telescopy has improved to the point where regular observations can be made. The composition of the clouds varies with depth and increasing pressure.

The winds on Saturn are the second fastest among the Solar System’s planets, after Neptune’s. Voyager data indicate peak easterly winds of 500 m/s (1,800 km/h).

Thermography has shown that Saturn’s south pole has a warm polar vortex, the only known example of such a phenomenon in the Solar System. Whereas temperatures on Saturn are normally −185 °C, temperatures on the vortex often reach as high as −122 °C, suspected to be the warmest spot on Saturn.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute and Kevin M. Gill

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