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Posts by
Deborah Byrd
Small asteroid paid a heavy price for almost striking Earth Thursday
Earth's gravity bent the trajectory of asteroid C0PPEV1 - also known as 2019 UN13 - as it swept only 3,852 miles (6,200 km) above Africa. As a result, its farthest point from the sun has now shifted out to the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars.
November 1, 2019
Mist over an Antarctic research station
A photo of mist above an Antarctic research station. Sunlight returned to this part of the world in August, after 4 months of continuous night. Now the station is getting ready for an influx of summer visitors.
November 1, 2019
Putting the ‘bang’ in Big Bang
Physicists have pondered how the cold, uniform matter of the inflationary early universe became the ultrahot, complex mixture of matter, space and time that led to the universe we know. New work simulates a bridge between cosmic inflation and ... everything else.
October 29, 2019
Deep-sea nightmares and other ocean spookiness
Eerie denizens of the ocean depths star in this video from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
October 29, 2019
Is Earth on fire?
The European Space Agency was asking this question late last week, as multiple fires burned across the globe. Read more about 2019 fires, and fire-tracking via satellite, here.
October 27, 2019
When exoplanets collide
Ten years ago, scientists speculated that warm dust in the exoplanet system BD +20 307 - located 300 light years away - had resulted from a planet-to-planet collision. Now astronomers see 10% more warm dust in this system, further supporting the idea of a collision between worlds.
October 24, 2019
Ice cliffs in Antarctica might not contribute to extreme sea-level rise in this century
A 2016 study suggested tall ice cliffs along Antarctica's coast might collapse rapidly under their own weight and contribute to more than 6 feet of sea-level rise by 2100. Now, MIT researchers have found this prediction may be overestimated.
October 23, 2019
New cracks in Pine Island Glacier are getting longer
The new rifts appeared soon after last year’s major calving of iceberg B46, which is about 3 times the size of New York's Manhattan island. Satellite monitoring suggests a new iceberg of similar proportions will soon be calved.
October 21, 2019
Update on the 2nd interstellar visitor
Astronomers in Poland have just published the 1st peer-reviewed paper on the 2nd interstellar visitor, now officially labeled as a comet, 2I/Borisov. Plus check out the new Hubble Space Telescope image of this object.
October 18, 2019
It’s been 20 years since the Day of 6 Billion
Our global human population was estimated to reach 6 billion on today's date in 1999. Eleven years later, in 2011, Earth had gained another billion people. Today - October 12, 2019 - it stands at about 7.7 billion, according to United Nations estimates.
October 12, 2019
