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-snip- The researchers found that the real division between planets and other celestial bodies, such as asteroids, occurred in the early 1950s when Gerard Kuiper published a paper that made the distinction based on how they were formed.However, this reason is no longer considered a factor that determines if a celestial body is a planet.“The IAU’s definition was erroneous since the literature review showed that clearing orbit is not a standard that is used for distinguishing asteroids from planets, as the IAU claimed when crafting the 2006 definition of planets,” said Dr. Kirby Runyon, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied...

August 24, 2006 was a dark day for Pluto enthusiasts. It was on that day that the International Astronomical Union established three conditions a celestial body must meet in order to be considered a planet. A planet must orbit around the sun, it must be massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, and it must have “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit, which means, simply put, that it must have a certain amount of gravitational pull. Pluto does not meet the third condition, so once those rules were put in place, Pluto was demoted to “dwarf planet,” 75...

At last, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is sending back images of Pluto that look (slightly) better than brown blobs or pixel art. The probe has delivered a new batch of images from between 7.8 million to 9.2 million miles away, or close enough that the dwarf planet is starting to reveal some meaningful detail. There's still no explanation for those giant spots, but it's evident that there's a "continuous swath" of dark ground near the equator. And if you'd like pictures that are better than fuzzy, you might not have to hold out for too much longer. New Horizons...

Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, and NASA's Dawn spacecraft will arrive there on March 6. Pluto is the largest object in the Kuiper belt, and NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will arrive there on July 15... The efforts of a very small clique of Pluto-haters within the International Astronomical Union (IAU) plutoed Pluto in 2006. Of the approximately 10,000 internationally registered members of the IAU in 2006, only 237 voted in favor of the resolution redefining Pluto as a "dwarf planet" while 157 voted against; the other 9,500 members were not present... Unlike the larger planets, however,...

Ancient ruins found in the Israeli wilderness could solve the biblical mystery of the Exodus, archaeologists claim. According to the Bible, Moses liberated the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and led them through the wilderness of Sinai, before they crossed the River Jordan into the promised land of Canaan. Yet no historical basis for the legend exists, and experts generally agree the Israelites were in fact native to Canaan - an ancient region covering modern day Israel. However, scientists are now analysing whether ruins near the River Jordan are proof of a nomadic Israelite people crossing into the ancient land...

Moore’s Law: Life is Older than Earth Itself — “A Process that Began Billions of Years Before the Formation of Our Solar System” Posted on Sep 24, 2018  As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The regression suggests that if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with homo sapiens, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilization in the Milky Way, negating Drakes Equation.Our Solar...

It took less than 30,000 years and maybe only thousands, to kill more than 90% of sea creatures and most land species, according to the most precise study ever published about the mass extinction marking the end of the Permian Period. Earth's greatest mass extinction, also known as the "Great Dying," occurred about 252 million years ago. By some estimates, over 90% of sea creatures and most land-dwelling reptiles disappeared. Even usually resilient plants and insects suffered near annihilation... Scientists from China, the USA and Canada combined new high-resolution radiometric dating of seven closely spaced layers of volcanic material from...

Ear Spring went from being dormant on Saturday to spewing steam and water between 20 and 30 feet high, a height not recorded since 1957, said park spokesman Neal Herbert. On Saturday tourists and surveillance cameras captured the rare eruption around 4:50 p.m. Ear Spring contains permanently seething water at or above boiling point. The ear-shaped pool has been known to erupt to a height of around 2 feet, but officials say that only happens one or two times each decade. Geyser Hill lies across the Firehole River from Old Faithful and features dozens of hot springs, geysers and fumaroles...

Archeologists at Adana's Sirkeli Mound have uncovered a double-skin wall dating back to the Iron Age. Located in the city's Ceyhan district, the wall bears the traces of a war... The defensive wall and waterways were discovered at the lower city part of the mound... they have also discovered stores and seeds on the upper part of the mound. They date back to the Iron and Early Bronze Ages... Novak said they found the wall after geophysical and surface researches that were conducted in the lower city of the mound. Excavation works have started in the light of that data....

Scientists delight in devising explanations for the great dinosaur extinctions. But there are several questions which they have failed to even ask, much less tried to answer. Why, for instance, in all of the time claimed to have passed since the dinosaur extinctions, has nothing ever re-evolved to the sizes of the large dinosaurs? If such sizes worked for creatures which ruled the Earth for tens of millions of years, then why would not some species of elephant or rhinoceros have evolved to such a size again? What kinds of problems, if any, would sauropod sizes entail in our world...

A new analysis of thousands of very small earthquakes that have occurred in the San Bernardino basin near the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults suggests that the unusual deformation of some—they move in a different way than expected—may be due to "deep creep" 10 km below the Earth's surface... ... Michele Cooke say the enigmatic behavior is seen in about one third of the hundreds of tiny quakes recorded during the lull between big damaging quakes, and their possible significance had not been appreciated until now. ... Over the past 36 years... seismic stations have recorded the style of...

Explanation: What on Earth is that? The Richat Structure in the Sahara Desert of Mauritania is easily visible from space because it is nearly 50 kilometers across. Once thought to be an impact crater, the Richat Structure's flat middle and lack of shock-altered rock indicates otherwise. The possibility that the Richat Structure was formed by a volcanic eruption also seems improbable because of the lack of a dome of igneous or volcanic rock. Rather, the layered sedimentary rock of the Richat structure is now thought by many to have been caused by uplifted rock sculpted by erosion. The above image...

How Fast Is Earth Moving? As an Earthling, it's easy to believe that we're standing still. After all, we don't feel any movement in our surroundings. But when you look at the sky, you can see evidence that we are moving. Some of the earliest astronomers proposed that we live in a geocentric universe, which means that Earth is at the center of everything. They said the sun rotated around us, which caused sunrises and sunsets — same for the movements of the moon and the planets. But there were certain things that didn't work with this vision. Sometimes, a...

Light and dark markings swirl over the moon, looking like cream swirled into coffee or clouds against a slate gray sky. These lunar swirls may result from ancient, magnetic lava just below the moon's surface, according to one new study. A joint study between researchers at Rutgers University and the University of California, Berkeley, pointed to the moon's internally generated magnetic field and past volcanic activity to explain the lunar swirls. Researchers have known for some time that lunar swirls share space with localized magnetic fields and that when those fields deflect particles from solar wind, parts of the moon's...

Just because Jupiter's moon Europa is coated in ice doesn't mean all that ice is the same temperature. And now, scientists have mapped the hot and cold spots on the moon's surface using data gathered from Earth, with accuracy down to 125 miles (200 kilometers). While most of the temperature variations they measured can be explained by sunlight's influence on the ice, there's one unusually cold spot that is stumping the scientists behind the new research. That spot, which falls on the moon's northern hemisphere, stood out in images taken at different times of the day, which surprised the scientists....

will pass by Earth at about half the distance between us and the moon this weekend. There's no need to worry, though. While the newly discovered near-Earth Asteroid 2018 RC will make a relatively close pass by our planet, it will still safely clear the neighborhood with no chance of a collision. The University of Hawaii's Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) first spotted the asteroid on Monday, and it's estimated to measure up to 233 feet (71 meters) in diameter. That's the same height as the 17-story will pass by Earth at about half the distance between us and...

After last month's impressive G3 geomagnetic storm caused by a coronal mass ejection, it is time to welcome back a familiar solar feature on our nearest star today. We have a small coronal hole facing our planet today. The high speed solar wind stream flowing from this coronal hole will likely take about three days to arrive at Earth which means the solar wind stream should impact Earth somewhere this Friday, 7 September. Active geomagnetic conditions are likely which is great news for northern hemisphere high latitude sky watchers who finally enjoy proper dark nights again.

Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered a village with remains that predate the pharaohs by around 2,000 years. Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities said that the Neolithic site was discovered in Tell el-Samara, about 87 miles north of Cairo. Chief archaeologist Frederic Gio said his team found silos containing animal bones and food, indicating human habitation as early as 5,000 B.C. Pottery and stone tools were also found. The pharaonic era began around 3,000 B.C. and the Giza pyramids were built 500 years later. The village is one of the oldest found in the Nile Delta, according to a Facebook post by...

After a catastrophic fire blazed through the National Museum of Brazil on Sunday (Sept. 2), destroying many of the institution's 20 million artifacts, the museum's meteorites were some of the few relics left standing. Among the space rocks that survived the blaze is the Bendegó meteorite, which is the largest meteorite ever found on Brazilian soil. The iron-nickel meteorite is one of about a dozen meteorites housed at the museum. … Officials have not yet been able to tally the damages, as investigators have been instructed to hold off on their work until engineers declare the building safe to enter,...

Scientists now believe the earth is in for a big freeze due to the sun being totally void of sunspots for more than half of 2018. The sun has been completely free of sunspots for a total of 133 days this year, scientists are reporting.