It is hard to believe, but the eruption on the lower East Rift Zone of KÄ«lauea shows no signs of stopping. The lava erupting from Fissure 8 just keeps coming, adding more to the big island of Hawai'i as the lava snakes its way to the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, up at the summit of the volcano, the Halema'uma'u Caldera continues to see dramatic changes as the whole surface slowly collapses with the daily explosions and earthquakes. The eruption itself is now the largest known historic e ...read more
On Thursday, researchers announced that they’d caught a single, tiny, high-energy particle called a neutrino that had rained down on Earth from a supermassive black hole some 4 billion light-years away.
Astrophysicists are excited because this is only the third identified cosmic object they’ve managed to collect the elusive particles from — first the Sun, then a supernova that went off in a neighboring galaxy in 1987, and now a blazar.
S ...read more
Back in 1938, physicist Hans Bethe figured out that the Sun and other stars generate energy by fusing hydrogen into helium. With that mystery solved, solar scientists thought they had a pretty good understanding of what was going on at the heart of the sun.
But an experiment that started in 1967 made astronomers just a tad uneasy.
While it takes sunlight just eight minutes to travel to Earth, the energy generated in our star’s core needs tens or hundreds of thousands of ye ...read more
Only 4 countries left in the 2018 Geology World Cup! Vote in the semifinal matches!
Game 1: Perú vs. Colombia
In what is likely a massive upset, Perú snuck by Russia by only a few percentage points. So, now the match for the finals is two South American teams. There isn't a lot that sets Colombia and Perú apart: they both have active volcanoes, they both experience earthquakes, they both host parts of the Andes and parts of the Amazon Basin. Most people li ...read more
Astronomers generally agree that planets form out of the dusty debris disks that surround most newborn stars. When one of these so-called protoplanetary disks rotates around a nascent star, globs of material clump together. Over the course of a few million years, these clumps (called planetesimals) grow larger and larger, forming a protoplanet that eventually clears out its orbital path within the disk. And when a protoplanet gets massive enough, gravity forces it into a spherical shape, fin ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine