1/7/2024 0 Comments Ancient space patch![]() Some researchers have posited that the glass resulted from ancient grass fires, as the region wasn’t always desert. There’s no evidence that the glasses could have been created by volcanic activity, Schultz says, so their origin has been a mystery. Fields of dark green or black glass occur within a corridor stretching about 75 kilometers. The glasses are concentrated in patches across the Atacama Desert east of Pampa del Tamarugal, a plateau in northern Chile nestled between the Andes Mountains to the east and the Chilean Coastal Range to the west. Lots of us have seen bolide fireballs streaking across the sky, but those are tiny blips compared to this.” ![]() “To have such a dramatic effect on such a large area, this was a truly massive explosion. “This is the first time we have clear evidence of glasses on Earth that were created by the thermal radiation and winds from a fireball exploding just above the surface,” said Pete Schultz, a professor emeritus in Brown University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. The team concludes that those mineral assemblages are likely the remains of an extraterrestrial object - most likely a comet with a composition similar to Wild 2 - that streamed down after the explosion that melted the sandy surface below. Those minerals closely match the composition of material returned to Earth by NASA’s Stardust mission, which sampled the particles from a comet called Wild 2. In a study published in the journal Geology, researchers show that samples of the desert glass contain tiny fragments with minerals often found in rocks of extraterrestrial origin. Now, a research team studying the distribution and composition of those glasses has come to a conclusion about what caused the inferno. Heat from a comet exploding just above the ground fused the sandy soil into patches of glass stretching 75 kilometers, a study led by Brown University researchers found.Īround 12,000 years ago, something scorched a vast swath of the Atacama Desert in Chile with heat so intense that it turned the sandy soil into widespread slabs of silicate glass. New research shows that those glasses were likely formed by the heat of an ancient comet exploding above the surface. In their tests, however, the team from the Delft University of Technology discovered that it was impossible to recreate the reddish hues of the Cthulhu Macula region using the chemical composition observed by New Horizons - showing that there's still much we don't know about the distant dwarf planet, even nearly a hundred years after its discovery.Deposits of dark silicate glass are strewn across a 75-kilometer corridor in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. ![]() ![]() The theory goes that the radiation causes these compounds to turn a dark and muddy red, creating the blobs observed by New Horizons. Scientists' best guess is that the reddish spots are the result of tholins, organic compounds created in the atmosphere when ultraviolet or cosmic radiation heats up carbon, methane, and carbon dioxide-containing compounds, which then precipitate onto the planet's surface. The largest, which has been ominously dubbed the Cthulhu Macula, is a drawn out dark region near the dwarf planet's equator. Their goal was to investigate a strange phenomenon on the surface of the dwarf planet, first spotted by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft back in 2015, New Scientist reports: huge reddish patches that dot the planet's surface. Red SpotsĪ team of researchers from the Netherlands have recreated the conditions observed in Pluto's atmosphere in a laboratory chamber, and then shot it with plasma to simulate space radiation.
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