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Saturn - March 11 2006
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CCI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill
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The Moon, Venus and Mercury at Dawn 1 - Feb 7, 2016
image credit: Joseph Brimacombe
Star-forming regions amid gas and dust taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. (NGC 2467, NGC 3603, Star forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), N11, N90 and NGC 2174)
Image credit: NASA/ESA & Hubble
“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.
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Waiting for autumn leaves to start falling down again. 🍁
My ambition is handicapped by laziness. -C. Bukowski Me gustan las personas desesperadas con mentes rotas y destinos rotos. Están llenos de sorpresas y explosiones. -C. Bukowski. I love cats. Born in the early 80's, raised in the 90's. I like Nature, Autumn, books, landscapes, cold days, cloudy Windy days, space, Science, Paleontology, Biology, Astronomy, History, Social Sciences, Drawing, spending the night watching at the stars, Rick & Morty. I'm a lazy ass.
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