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Category: asteroid/comet impacts

The discovery of a buried delta on Mars could boost the search for life

There’s more evidence that water once flowed on Mars with the discovery of an ancient river delta deep below the surface. NASA’s Perseverance rover found it more than 35 meters beneath Jezero Crater using ground-penetrating radar. Perseverance was launched in 2020 to search for signs of ancient life on the red planet. Since landing in February 2021, it has been exploring Jezero Crater and collecting rock samples.

The crater, which is approximately 45 kilometers (28 miles) in diameter, lies north of the Martian equator and was formed by an asteroid impact almost 4 billion years ago. NASA chose this spot to explore because numerous geological features suggest that water once flowed here and may have supported ancient life, specifically, a part of the crater called the Margin Unit. This area is packed with carbonates, which on Earth, usually form in stable aqueous environments, such as shallow seas or lakebeds.

The new research is published in the journal Science Advances and is based on data from 78 traverses of the area from September 2023 to February 2024.

The Moon Was Hit Again: NASA Scientists Discover a Newly Formed Crater

A bright new lunar crater detected in spacecraft images shows that asteroid impacts continue to reshape the Moon’s surface today. The Moon’s familiar surface tells a story of both ancient violence and ongoing change. While its vast dark basins formed during a period of intense bombardment billion

“At First, We Thought Something Was Wrong” — NASA DART Mission Reveals a Cosmic Snowball Fight

Images from NASA’s DART mission revealed the first direct evidence that asteroids in a binary system can exchange rocks and dust. Slow moving debris from the asteroid Didymos appears to have struck its moon Dimorphos, leaving distinctive streaks scientists describe as “cosmic snowballs.” Around 1

Microbes can survive asteroid impacts to “hop” planets

“Life might actually survive being ejected from one planet and moving to another,” said Dr. K.T. Ramesh. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30268/microbes-survi…-planets-2](https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30268/microbes-survi…-planets-2)

Can life transport between planets from impacts? This is what a recent study published in PNAS Nexus hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated how microbes could have come to Earth via asteroid impacts on planets like Mars. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand how life started on Earth and other worlds throughout the cosmos.

For the study, the researchers conducted a series of laboratory experiments where they subjected microorganisms to space-like conditions, specifically extreme pressure changes. The goal of the study was to ascertain the survival rate and overall response to the extreme environment, which could help determine if microorganisms could survive the extreme vacuum of space during a journey from Mars to Earth. This is because meteorites on Earth have been discovered to have originated from large impacts Mars, flinging chunks of rocks into deep space for millions of years, and crashing on Earth.

In the end, the researchers were surprised to find that the microorganisms in their experiments could survive the harshness of outer space, potentially even being able to travel from planet-to-planet. Potentially, if a large impact occurred on Mars, any microorganisms that existed there could survive the long and harsh journey to Earth.

How worried should you be about an asteroid smashing into Earth?

Somewhere, out in the cold depths of space, there is a space rock that could destroy a large chunk of life on Earth. Is this fate inevitable? Could we find a way to stop it, or will we eventually suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs? And should this existential threat be keeping you up at night? Here’s what we know.

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was at least 10 kilometres across, big enough to cause megatsunamis, ignite enormous forest fires and darken the skies the world over. Asteroids of that size are estimated to hit Earth about every 60 million years, based on the planet’s crater record. For the next size class down, asteroids about 1 kilometre across, estimates suggest they hit Earth about every million years, and the most recent one was about 900,000 years ago. Those numbers are enough to make you nervous.

But one of the things that sets humanity apart from the dinosaurs is our ability to look out into space and interpret what we see there. Naturally, researchers around the world have used this ability to attempt to learn how many asteroids are out there and what proportion of them are on trajectories that could be dangerous.

Image: angel_nt/Getty Images.

The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid, but does that mean we risk suffering the same fate — and should you be worried about the possibility? Leah Crane sets the matter straight.

By Leah Crane

Continue reading “How worried should you be about an asteroid smashing into Earth?” | >

From deer to chickadees: How fewer social encounters could raise extinction risk

Imagine an asteroid striking Earth and wiping out most of the human population. Even if some lucky people survived the impact, Homo sapiens might still face extinction, because the social networks humans rely on would collapse.

This dynamic also plays out in the wild.

Social interactions are essential for many animals, helping them to locate food, spot predators and raise offspring. Without such connections, individuals can struggle to survive.

Evidence of ‘lightning-fast’ evolution found after Chicxulub impact

The asteroid that struck the Earth 66 million years ago devastated life across the planet, wiping out the dinosaurs and other organisms in a hail of fire and catastrophic climate change. But new research shows that it also set the stage for life to rebound astonishingly quickly.

New species of plankton appeared fewer than 2,000 years after the world-altering event, according to research led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and published in Geology.

Lead author Chris Lowery, a research associate professor at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson School of Geosciences, said that it’s a remarkably quick evolutionary feat that has never been seen before in the fossil record. Typically, new species appear on roughly million-year time frames.

NASA supercomputer just predicted Earth’s hard limit for life

Scientists have used a NASA-grade supercomputer to push our planet to its limits, virtually fast‑forwarding the clock until complex organisms can no longer survive. The result is a hard upper bound on how long Earth can sustain breathable air and liquid oceans, and it is far less about sudden catastrophe than a slow suffocation driven by the Sun itself. The work turns a hazy, far‑future question into a specific timeline for the end of life as we know it.

Instead of fireballs or rogue asteroids, the simulations point to a world that quietly runs out of oxygen, with only hardy microbes clinging on before even they disappear. It is a stark reminder that Earth’s habitability is not permanent, yet it also stretches over such vast spans of time that our immediate crises still depend on choices made this century, not on the Sun’s distant evolution.

The new modeling effort starts from a simple premise: if I know how the Sun brightens over time and how Earth’s atmosphere responds, I can calculate when conditions for complex life finally fail. Researchers fed a high‑performance system with detailed physics of the atmosphere, oceans and carbon cycle, then let it run through hundreds of thousands of scenarios until the planet’s chemistry tipped past a critical point. One study describes a supercomputer simulation that projects life on Earth ending in roughly 1 billion years, once rising solar heat strips away most atmospheric oxygen.

Supernova immersion model suggests Earth-like planets are more common in the universe

Rocky planets like our Earth may be far more common than previously thought, according to new research published in the journal Science Advances. It suggests that when our solar system formed, a nearby supernova (the massive explosion of a star near the end of its life) bathed it in cosmic rays containing the radioactive ingredients to make rocky, dry worlds. This mechanism could be ubiquitous across the galaxy.

Earth-like planets are thought to form from planetesimals (objects made of rock and ice) that were dried out early in the solar system’s history. This process required a lot of heat, which came primarily from the radioactive decay of short-lived radionuclides (SLRs), such as aluminum-26. Previous analysis of meteorites, which are ancient records of the early solar system, confirmed the abundance of SLRs at this time.

Flaws in previous models However, models that explain supernovae as the sole source of these SLRs cannot accurately match the quantity of the nucleotides found in meteorites. To deliver enough radioactive material, the supernova would have to be so close to the early solar system that it would have destroyed the disk of dust and gas where the planets were forming.

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