NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn's rings. These observations make Saturn's rings the only location besides Earth, the moon and Jupiter where scientists and amateur astronomers have been able to observe impacts as they occur. Studying the impact rate of meteoroids from outside the Saturnian system helps scientists understand how different planet systems in our solar system formed.
Evidence is has been found proving that the only known natural form of an odd type of crystal known as a quasicrystal originated in outer space. Like standard crystals, the atoms of a quasicrystal are ordered, but their arrangement lacks translational symmetry: a shifted copy won't ever quite match its original.
Ever since their discovery in 1984, quasicrystals have posed a puzzle: "Why do the atoms form a complex, quasiperiodic pattern rather than a regularly-repeating, crystal arrangement?"
"If every habitable world in the universe is unique, and the precise chemical conditions of a planet helps shape the life that evolves there, then avatars could allow aliens to visit other worlds from the safety of their spaceship. Could it be that all the stories of alien encounters on Earth were really encounters with alien avatars? Maybe aliens don't actually look like grey humanoids with large eyes and no noses. Instead, that haunting image may simply be what we look like to them."
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn's rings. These observations make Saturn's rings the only location besides Earth, the moon and Jupiter where scientists and amateur astronomers have been able to observe impacts as they occur. Studying the impact rate of meteoroids from outside the Saturnian system helps scientists understand how different planet systems in our solar system formed.
Evidence is has been found proving that the only known natural form of an odd type of crystal known as a quasicrystal originated in outer space. Like standard crystals, the atoms of a quasicrystal are ordered, but their arrangement lacks translational symmetry: a shifted copy won't ever quite match its original.
Ever since their discovery in 1984, quasicrystals have posed a puzzle: "Why do the atoms form a complex, quasiperiodic pattern rather than a regularly-repeating, crystal arrangement?"
"If every habitable world in the universe is unique, and the precise chemical conditions of a planet helps shape the life that evolves there, then avatars could allow aliens to visit other worlds from the safety of their spaceship. Could it be that all the stories of alien encounters on Earth were really encounters with alien avatars? Maybe aliens don't actually look like grey humanoids with large eyes and no noses. Instead, that haunting image may simply be what we look like to them."
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