News tagged with billion years
Moon geology could solve three mysteries of early Earth
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Dec 08, 2008 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Not much is known about the Earth before 4 billion years ago, the earliest period in the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history. Because Earth has lost almost all geological records of this era ...
Life got bigger in two, million-fold leaps, scientists say
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Dec 22, 2008 |
4.6 / 5 (13) |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Extremes are exciting. Does anyone really think dinosaurs would capture our imagination the way they do if they hadn't been so huge? You don't see natural history museums vying for fossil skeletons ...
Reconnaissance Orbiter Reveals Details of a Wetter Mars
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Oct 28, 2008 |
4.3 / 5 (39) |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has observed a new category of minerals spread across large regions of Mars. This discovery suggests that liquid water remained on the planet's surface a ...
Without enzyme, biological reaction essential to life takes 2.3 billion years
Biology /
Nov 11, 2008 |
4.4 / 5 (44) |
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All biological reactions within human cells depend on enzymes. Their power as catalysts enables biological reactions to occur usually in milliseconds. But how slowly would these reactions proceed spontaneously, in the absence ...
Plate tectonics started over 4 billion years ago, geochemists report
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Nov 26, 2008 |
4.6 / 5 (23) |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- A new picture of the early Earth is emerging, including the surprising finding that plate tectonics may have started more than 4 billion years ago — much earlier than scientists had believed, ...
Colossal black holes common in early universe
Oct 16, 2008 |
4.4 / 5 (34) |
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Astronomers think that many - perhaps all - galaxies in the universe contain massive black holes at their centers. New observations with the Submillimeter Array now suggest that such colossal black holes were ...
Mineral kingdom has co-evolved with life
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Nov 13, 2008 |
4.6 / 5 (17) |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Evolution isn't just for living organisms. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have found that the mineral kingdom co-evolved with life, and that up to two thirds of the more than 4,000 ...
Immigrant Sun: Our star could be far from where it started in Milky Way
Sep 15, 2008 |
4.3 / 5 (20) |
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A long-standing scientific belief holds that stars tend to hang out in the same general part of a galaxy where they originally formed. Some astrophysicists have recently questioned whether that is true, and ...
Researchers find oldest rocks on Earth
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Sep 25, 2008 |
4.2 / 5 (18) |
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Canadian bedrock more than four billion years old may be the oldest known section of the Earth's early crust. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution used geochemical methods to obtain an age of 4.28 billion ...
A 'Genetic Study' of the Galaxy
Sep 11, 2008 |
4.6 / 5 (5) |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Looking in detail at the composition of stars with ESO's VLT, astronomers are providing a fresh look at the history of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. They reveal that the central part of ...
How Do Galaxies Grow?
Aug 26, 2008 |
4.4 / 5 (14) |
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How do galaxies form? The most widely accepted answer to this fundamental question is the model of 'hierarchical formation', a step-wise process in which small galaxies merge to build larger ones. One can ...
Ancient Galactic Magnetic Fields Stronger than Expected
Jul 23, 2008 |
4.5 / 5 (27) |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Mining the far reaches of the universe for clues about its past, a team of scientists including Philipp Kronberg of Los Alamos National Laboratory has proposed that magnetic fields of ancient galaxies like ...
Rare 'Star-Making Machine' Found in Distant Universe
Jul 10, 2008 |
4.5 / 5 (26) |
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Astronomers have uncovered an extreme stellar machine -- a galaxy in the very remote universe pumping out stars at a surprising rate of up to 4,000 per year. In comparison, our own Milky Way galaxy turns out ...
What's My Age? Mystery Star Cluster Has 3 Different Birthdays
Jul 10, 2008 |
4 / 5 (11) |
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Imagine having three clocks in your house, each chiming at a different time. Astronomers have found the equivalent of three out-of-sync "clocks" in the ancient open star cluster NGC 6791. The dilemma may fundamentally ...
