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9 months ago
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An explosion on the sun sent energetic particles traveling at 900,000 miles per hour through space, causing power outages near Australia and South Asia.
Reports spread about the incident on Tuesday morning, indicating that the sailors' radio and devices had malfunctioned.
The long-lasting flare began on Monday, as the solar storm reached our planet yesterday. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center shows there is a 45% chance of more communications outages in the coming days.
Physicists noted that the explosion was an M-class flare, which can cause small (R1) to medium (R2) radio interruptions on the day side of the Earth.
The event affects frequencies used in aviation communications, government time stations, weather stations, amateur radio, and others.
Powerful M-class flares can release coronal mass ejections (CEM), which are large clouds of plasma and the Sun's magnetic field.
CEMs can produce a geomagnetic storm that temporarily disrupts the Earth's magnetosphere and the satellites orbiting it.
Analysis reveals the source of the first samples of the asteroid "Bennu" that may provide clues about the origin of life!
A previous preliminary analysis revealed that the asteroid Bennu contains large amounts of water and carbon, and scientists believe that such asteroids may have laid the building blocks of life to Earth.
Now, scientists at the University of Arizona believe that Bennu was part of a water-rich planet that existed billions of years ago.
The research team said that some of the dark rocks on the asteroid are covered by a thin crust of brighter material observed on Saturn's moon Enceladus, which is believed to contain a global ocean of liquid salt water.
"The asteroid sample contains structures that could provide clues about the origin of life," the mission's principal investigator, Dante Lauretta, of the University of Arizona, told NewScientist.
Lauretta has not yet published his hypothesis or results, but he said his analysis of the material over the past few months has shown that most of the rocks are made of clay, including minerals called serpentites.
These materials form on Earth when rocks are pushed to the sea floor and exposed to water, leading to an exothermic reaction.
“There are indeed similarities between Bennu minerals and what was found on Enceladus,” Fabian Kleiner, of the University of Washington in Seattle, told NewScientist.
NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission transported samples from the asteroid "Bennu" in 2023, after launching it to the space rock in 2016.
The mission returned debris that NASA believes contains the building blocks of life from the dawn of our solar system, and could provide clues to understanding how life formed on Earth.
NASA chose to take a sample from Bennu because it is believed to be rich in organic compounds.
Bennu is a remnant of the formation of the solar system, and NASA believes that the mission could provide insight into the history of the Earth, because weather, erosion, and tectonic plates have eliminated all evidence of how the Earth was formed.
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