About 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was little more than a tenuous disk of gas and dust. In the span of merely 10 million years, this soup evolved to form today's massive, complex planets. In the intervening period, ...
Space Exploration
Oct 11, 2012
16
0
New evidence from an ancient lunar rock suggests that the moon once harbored a long-lived dynamo — a molten, convecting core of liquid metal that generated a strong magnetic field 3.7 billion years ago. The findings, ...
Space Exploration
Jan 27, 2012
3
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- Mercury, the smallest of the eight planets with a diameter of 4900 kilometres and the closest to the Sun, looks more like the Moon than the Earth from the outside. It is the only rocky planet that has a global ...
Space Exploration
Dec 23, 2011
27
2
The presence of magnetized rocks on the surface of the moon, which has no global magnetic field, has been a mystery since the days of the Apollo program. Now a team of scientists has proposed a novel mechanism that could ...
Space Exploration
Nov 9, 2011
9
2
At the heart of most celestial objects is a dynamo. The Earth's dynamo, spun to life in the molten metal core of our planet, generates a magnetic field that helps us find north and, perhaps more critically, shields us from ...
Plasma Physics
Jul 21, 2011
4
0
Some 50 miles up in the sky begins a dynamic region of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere. The region is filled with charged particles created by extreme ultraviolet radiation from the sun. At the base of the ionosphere, ...
Space Exploration
Jul 5, 2011
1
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- A University of California, Berkeley, geophysicist has made the first-ever measurement of the strength of the magnetic field inside Earth's core, 1,800 miles underground.
Earth Sciences
Dec 16, 2010
10
0
(AP) -- Want to talk more? Keep pedaling, says Nokia.
Consumer & Gadgets
Jun 3, 2010
0
0
The Earth's global magnetic field is generated in its metallic core, located nearly 3,000 kilometers beneath the planet’s surface. The field has existed on Earth for at least 3.5 billion years and offers clues about how ...
Space Exploration
Mar 25, 2010
4
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- In the cosmos, all celestial objects - planets, stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies - have magnetic fields. On Earth, the magnetic field of our home planet is most easily observed in a compass where ...
Earth Sciences
Oct 9, 2009
0
0
