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Curtin University professor Phil Bland told CNN it was "almost certainly" a chunk of asteroid coming through the atmosphere, an event which he said occurs only a couple of times a year. Bland is the founder of the Desert Fireball Network, a group of scientists working to track the path of meteors and asteroids across the night sky, with a goal to building a "geological map of the solar system." He called for anyone who finds an unusual lump of rock to give him a call, saying he'd be "chuffed" to find it. One witness told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation...

More than 200 people across Missouri and seven other states spotted a fireball meteor last night light as it lit up the Midwestern sky, KMOV reports. The American Meteor Society posted observer accounts and several videos of the sighting to its website Tuesday. "It was super bright..." said Lisa B. in Ellisville, Missouri, who filed a report with the group. "We said, what IS that?!? Omg it's a fireball, I have to get my camera. Then tried to open my camera and the trail was all that was left." Some observers said the meteor appeared to break up into several...

Earth is set for another spooky encounter with a 700 metre asteroid that looks uncannily like a skull. The space rock first passed ‘close’ to our planet at 78,000mph (125,500km/h) at a distance of 310,000 miles (499,000km) on October 31, 2015, just in time for Halloween. Now, it’s set to make a return in November 2018. This fall, the space rock, known as 2015 TB145, will flyby at a less dramatic distance than the last one. The asteroid will zoom past the planet at about 105 Earth-moon distances, compared to just under 1.3 lunar distances last time around. Astronomers analysing...

More than a dozen “hunger stones” have been found in the Elbe River. The stones recorded low water levels dating back to the 1600s and warn of impending hardships. Due to scorching temperatures, the water in the Czech river has dropped, revealing boulders that were once used to record low water levels. The rocks are etched with dates going back to the 1600s — the Maunder Minimum. In centuries gone by, if you saw carved rocks emerge from the Elbe River you had a very tough time ahead of you. They have reappeared once again this summer.

An initial inspection of the ceramics found in the tomb allowed it to be dated to the late Minoan period, or 1400 to 1200 BC Archaeologists in Crete have discovered an intact Minoan-era tomb containing a well-preserved adult skeleton along with funerary vessels. An initial inspection of the ceramics found in the tomb allowed it to be dated to the late Minoan period, or 1400 to 1200 BC, a statement from the Ministry of Culture noted. The tomb was discovered during an emergency excavation in an olive grove outside the village of Kentri, in the eastern prefecture of Ierapetra, the...

A research team led by scientists in Taiwan and [Red] China announced on August 21, 2018, that Earth’s protective magnetic field has undergone relatively rapid shifts in the past, including one lasting just two centuries. That’s fast in contrast to the thousands of years thought to be needed for a magnetic pole reversal, an event whereby magnetic south becomes magnetic north and vice versa. Such an event might leave Earth with a substantially reduced magnetic field for some unknown period of time, exposing our world to dangerous effects from the sun. If it occurred in today’s world of ubiquitous electric...

The space agency said the 2016 NF23 is hurtling rapidly at a speed of around 20,000mph. At that speed, it is around 15 times faster than the 1,354mph the retired Concorde travelled at. The 2016 NF23 also measures up to a jaw-dropping 160metres. At that size, it is bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt which measures 139m. It is listed on NASA's Earth Close Approaches page, despite whizzing by at a distance of 3million miles away. But in space terms, it is considered close enough that it will pay attention to it. At 160m, it is considered...

Animal fat on ancient pottery reveals a nearly catastrophic period of human prehistory -- A bit more than 8000 years ago, the world suddenly cooled, leading to much drier summers for much of the Northern Hemisphere. The impact on early farmers must have been extreme, yet archaeologists know little about how they endured. Now, the remains of animal fat on broken pottery from one of the world’s oldest and most unusual protocities -- known as Çatalhöyük -- is finally giving scientists a window into these ancient peoples’ close call with catastrophe... Today, Çatalhöyük is just a series of dusty, sun-baked...

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft began its final approach toward the big near-Earth asteroid Bennu on Friday (Aug. 17), NASA officials said. The milestone also marks the official start of OSIRIS-REx's "asteroid operations" mission phase, they added. OSIRIS-REx is still about 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Bennu and won't arrive in orbit around the 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) space rock until Dec. 3. The $800 million OSIRIS-REx mission — whose name is short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer — launched on Sept. 8, 2016, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. If all goes according to...

Scientists say the 'skyglows' represent an entirely new celestial phenomenon Scientists began studying mysterious ribbons of light dubbed 'Steve' in 2016 While they were thought to be auroras, study shows they form differently Experts now say they're a distinct phenomenon that was previously unknown Mysterious purple and white ribbons of light seen dancing across the sky may represent a never-before-identified type of ‘skyglow.’ While amateur photographers have been documenting the phenomenon for decades, scientists only began to study it back in 2016. Initial research suggested the lights, which have come to be known as STEVE, may be a type of...

Boston - It was a normal Friday morning in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. Adults were on their way to work, and children were in school. But that ordinary day was about to become extraordinary. Suddenly, a fireball shot across the clear morning sky leaving a thick trail of smoke, accompanied by the sound of a huge explosion. The shock wave knocked people over, shattered glass, and collapsed a factory roof. As many as 1,200 people were injured. A global network of infrasound sensors designed to pick up nuclear explosions calculated that the boom was 30 to 40 times...

Scientists have shown that water is likely to be a major component of those exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) which are between two to four times the size of Earth. It will have implications for the search of life in our Galaxy. The work is presented at the Goldschmidt Conference in Boston. The 1992 discovery of exoplanets orbiting other stars has sparked interest in understanding the composition of these planets to determine, among other goals, whether they are suitable for the development of life. Now a new evaluation of data from the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope and the Gaia mission...

There's a sort of radio wave that bangs its way around Earth, knocking around electrons in the plasma fields of loose ions surrounding our planet and sending strange tones to radio detectors. It's called a "whistler." And now, scientists have observed bursts like this in more detail than ever before. Whistlers, typically created during certain lightning strikes, usually travel along Earth's magnetic-field lines. Humans first detected them more than a century ago, thanks to their ability to make a "whistling" sound (really more like a ghostly recording of laser blasts in a "Star Wars" movie) when picked up by a...

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center says numerous people saw a very bright streak early Friday. A statement and video posted on Facebook says an analysis shows the meteor was first seen at an altitude of about 58 miles (93 kilometers) above rural Turkeytown, which is about 80 miles (129 kilometers) northeast of Birmingham. The office estimates a small asteroid about 6 feet (1.8 meters) in diameter then broke apart about 18 miles (29 kilometers) above the town of Oak Grove. It was at least 40 times as bright as the full moon at one point.

It's been nearly a century since scientists first theorized that the Universe was expanding, and that the farther away a galaxy was from us, the faster it appears to recede. This isn't because galaxies are physically moving away from us, but rather because the Universe is full of gravitationally-bound objects, and the fabric of space that those objects reside in is expanding. But this picture, which held sway from the 1920s onward, has been recently revised. It's been only 20 years since we first realized that this expansion was speeding up, and that as time goes on, individual galaxies will...

...by resolving discrepancies between archeological and radiocarbon methods of dating the eruption, according to new University of Arizona-led research... "It's about tying together a timeline of ancient Egypt, Greece, Turkey and the rest of the Mediterranean at this critical point in the ancient world -- that's what dating Thera can do," said lead author Charlotte Pearson, an assistant professor of dendrochronology at the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research... Archeologists have estimated the eruption as occurring sometime between 1570 and 1500 BC by using human artifacts such as written records from Egypt and pottery retrieved from digs. Other researchers estimated the...

UNSW scientists have shown -- for the first time -- that a series of high-profile burial sites in the Pacific, Mediterranean and northern Scotland were likely related to catastrophic tsunamis... Honorary Professor James Goff from the PANGEA Research Centre at UNSW Sydney, who co-authored the paper, says the research provides new insights into past human-environment interactions and a new perspective on past catastrophic events... The researchers looked at coastal mass burial sites in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu as well as in Orkney and Shetland. The mass graves cover a long timeframe of human history -- they are from about...

“We think we may have found the answer. Increased circulation in the Southern Ocean allowed carbon dioxide to leak into the atmosphere, working to warm the planet,” said Princeton University’s Professor Daniel Sigman, co-author of the study. For years, researchers have known that growth and sinking of phytoplankton pumps carbon dioxide deep into the ocean, a process often referred to as the ‘biological pump.’ “The biological pump is driven mostly by the low latitude ocean but is undone closer to the poles, where carbon dioxide is vented back to the atmosphere by the rapid exposure of deep waters to the...

It had been thought that aftershocks — smaller magnitude quakes that occur in the same region as the initial quake as the surrounding crust adjusts after the fault perturbation — were the only seismic activity an earthquake could lead to. But the team’s analysis of seismic data from 1973 through 2016 provided the first discernible evidence that in the three days following one large quake, other earthquakes were more likely to occur. Each test case in the study represented a single three-day window ‘injected’ with a large-magnitude (6.5 or greater) earthquake suspected of inducing other quakes, and accompanying each case...

...But Keller doesn’t buy any of it. “It’s like a fairy tale: ‘Big rock from sky hits the dinosaurs, and boom they go.’ And it has all the aspects of a really nice story,” she said. “It’s just not true.” ...Keller’s resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous and longest-running controversies in science. “It’s like the Thirty Years’ War,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and...