Two wayward space rocks, which separately crashed to Earth in 1998 after circulating in our solar system’s asteroid belt for billions of years, share something else in common: the ingredients for life. They are the first meteorites found to contain both liquid water and a mix of complex organic compounds such as hydrocarbons and amino acids.
The Big Bang Theory with its early period of exponential growth known as inflation is the prevailing scientific model for our universe, in which the entirety of space and time ballooned out from a very hot, very dense point into a homogeneous and ever-expanding vastness. This theory accounts for many of the physical phenomena we observe, but what if that’s not all there was to it?
Among the most feared events in space physics are solar eruptions — massive explosions that hurl millions of tons of plasma, gas and radiation into space. These outbursts can be deadly to astronauts and when these eruptions reach the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth, the contact can create geomagnetic storms that disrupt cell ‘phone service, damage satellites and knock out power grids.
Researchers are sifting through an avalanche of data produced by one of the largest cosmological simulations ever performed. The simulation, run on the Titan supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, modelled the evolution of the universe from just 50 million years after the Big Bang to the present day.
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