INFORMATION

A chip of zircon found in Western Australian rocks at a place called North Pole Dome revealed the age of Earth's oldest known impact crater. The team that found it was working on age-dating the crater, which is located in a region called the Pilbara Craton. They used mineral dating to pinpoint the exact time it was dug out by an impactor. Team lead Chris Kirkland from the Timescales of Minerals Systems Group within Curtin University's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the findings help resolve a longstanding question about the timing of the impact. The results of the team's analysis of several minerals at the site, along with zircon, indicated that the North Pole Dome impact occurred at 3.024 billion years ago (plus or minus a few million years). from Universe Today https://ift.tt/zeZLOf5 via IFTTT

Welcome to the final installment in the Fermi series, where we look at the impact that making contact with extraterrestrials could have and the rules governing how such an event should be treated. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/PERfLuK via IFTTT

Stars form inside molecular clouds where cold gas collapses gravitationally on itself. But there's more to this process than gravity. New research shows how magnetic field lines funnel gas through sub-filaments into star formation sites. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/jiPyG0p via IFTTT

Twelve million light years away, a galaxy is living fast and burning bright, forging new stars ten times quicker than our own Milky Way in a frenzy that cannot possibly last. Now the James Webb Space Telescope has cut clean through its veil of dust to count an astonishing 16.5 million of its stars, one by one. So what is driving the Cigar Galaxy to burn so furiously? from Universe Today https://ift.tt/Y5EjbwL via IFTTT

Found in 2013, Pink Planet was too faint to study with ground-based telescopes. In new study, scientists used JWST and advanced processing methods to obtain its spectrum for the first time. Observations provided some of the first direct evidence for salt clouds in a cold object atmosphere. Pink Planet could be a giant planet or brown dwarf, so astronomers refer to it as a ‘planetary-mass companion’. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/FWz0Gdf via IFTTT

The JWST looked back in time and saw 6 galaxies merging into one. At the heart of the assembly, a supermassive black hole is lurking. It all happened when the Universe was only about 1.5 billion years old, and the red-shifted light is just reaching us now. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/ifrCKLR via IFTTT