Earth’s inner core may be filled with a weird substance that is neither solid nor liquid, according to a new study. For more than half a century, scientists believed that Earth’s deepest recesses consist of a molten outer core surrounding a densely compressed ball of solid iron alloy. But new research, published Feb. 9 in … Read more
The Ark of the Covenant is a chest that is supposed to have held tablets engraved with the Ten Commandments, engraved by God for Moses on Mount Sinai, according to the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and Christian Old Testament. According to the Hebrew Bible, the Ark was constructed by the Israelites while they were camping out … Read more
Corkscrewing through the cosmos, three distant galaxies collide in a stunning new image captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This cosmic crash is known as a triple galaxy merger, when three galaxies slowly draw each other nearer and tear each other apart with their competing gravitational forces. Mergers like these are common throughout the universe, … Read more
The solar system contains eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, all of which circle the sun due to its intense gravitational pull. But is this the maximum number of planets that can orbit the sun? Or is there room for more? Compared with other known planetary systems, the solar system … Read more
Stunning images snapped by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe have given the very first visible light glimpse of Venus’ red-hot surface, revealing continents, plains and plateaus on the inhospitable volcanic world. Peering beneath the thick and toxic Venusian clouds with the Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument, NASA scientists spotted a bevy of geological … Read more
Astronomers have finally seen the remnants of a dead planet as it tumbled onto the surface of a dead star – and in doing so, they confirmed decades of speculation about what happens to solar systems that reach the end of their lives. These explosive observations — which were taken with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory … Read more
Observations by a long-running Mars mission suggest that liquid water may have flowed on the Red Planet as little as 2 billion years ago, much later than scientists once thought. Scientists charted the presence of chloride salt deposits left behind by flowing water using years of data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has … Read more
Ancient trees, the venerable sentinels of forests, may preserve genetic diversity that helps woodlands thrive for thousands of years, a new study suggests. In a typical deciduous forest, the oldest of the old trees — many of which were standing during the First Crusade — can act almost like time-travelers, representing the forest as it … Read more
Welcome to the latest installment of “Writer Fuel – cool real-world stories that might inspire your little writer heart. Check out our Writer Fuel page on the LimFic blog for more inspiration. Today: An extremely powerful solar storm pummeled our planet 9,200 years ago, leaving permanent scars on the ice buried deep below Greenland and … Read more
Welcome to the latest installment of “Writer Fuel – cool real-world stories that might inspire your little writer heart. Check out our Writer Fuel page on the LimFic blog for more inspiration. Today: Crop circles — strange patterns that appear mysteriously overnight in farmers’ fields and often attributed to aliens or UFOs — are not … Read more
