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Astronomers Find Oldest Known Asteroids
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sunday March 23, @01:11PM
from the peaceful-and-benevolent-doomrocks dept.
from the peaceful-and-benevolent-doomrocks dept.
Researchers from the University of Maryland have recently discovered three asteroids that appear to be roughly 4.55 billion years old, dating back to the formation of the Solar System. The scientists say that the asteroids have survived relatively unchanged since that time, and make good candidates for future space missions.
"'The fall of the Allende meteorite in 1969 initiated a revolution in the study of the early Solar System,' said Tim McCoy, curator of the national meteorite collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. 'I find it amazing that it took us nearly 40 years to collect spectra of these [CAI-rich] objects and that those spectra would now initiate another revolution, pointing us to the asteroids that record this earliest stage in the history of our Solar System.'"
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Exploding Robots May Scout Hazardous Asteroids 120 comments
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Wow that's almost 6000 biblical years! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow that's almost 6000 biblical years! (Score:4, Interesting)
I know I know, I'm daring to distrust the gods of research. I get it. Flamebait me now for my insurrection.
Who is more credible? (Score:5, Insightful)
But your point about the "gods of research" is disingenuous... that is unless you believe that one is better off putting their faith in intelligent designers and corporate-science-sophistry. It's true that science could be *more* conservative with declaring findings, but really it's a question of who is more credible with the facts, and more pliable when it comes to standing corrected.
Re:Wow that's almost 6000 biblical years! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not a negative connotation, this is the whole point. If someone refuses to revise their opinion regardless of new data (whether the data is for or against or not), that is faith imo. It is also the antithesis of the scientific method.
The upshot is, to the open minded, science and spirituality are not mutually exclusive until such a time that we can observe _everything_, in which case there would be no more mysteries anyways and life would be quite boring.
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Oh, you're so tough. So daring. Such a rebel, speaking truth to power.
GMAFB. If you've got something to say (even if it's something which, like your post, is BS) just say it. Don't brag about it.
scientists disagree all the damn time (Score:2)
Thi
Insightful !? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Wow that's almost 6000 biblical years! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Name one. That's all I want to se
Itemized refutation (Score:4, Informative)
this sort of impossibility twaddle is easily discredited. For example, tall buildings or arched/suspended bridges could not be erected without a scaffold or crane. But once erected those are removed. Just because there is no evidence to be found that they were there does not mean the buildings sprung into existence fully formed.
Same with sophisticated organisms.
Recently Behe's claim that the flagella motor protein could not have evolved because it's inoperable without one of it's many parts and thus has no function was shown to be wrong. SPikes used by some bacteria to penetrate others turn out to be almost identical to the motor protein assembly but with a few proteins removed. it's not a motor it's a syringe.
Bombadier beetle.
Oxidative enzymes and fizzy action are good ways to digest something in your mouth cavity. It would be no surprise if the bombadier's enzymes were developed for digestion and then later recruited for defense. Many animals regurgitate or spray digestive juices as defensive or offensive weapons. Even single celled organisms secrete highly indesructable proteases to destroy the competition. Others, like the Spike bearing ones have cannons they can shoot this from. If single celled organisms can evolve this its not a stretch to imagine a beetle pulling it off.
Giraffe.
Many animals, like diving douplhins, seals, whales pull off similar stunts at orders of magnitude greater pressure differentials. Thus not only had such mechanisms evolved while we were all sea-bred creatures, and vestigal mechanisms potentialially latent in our DNA, but the specific machanism in Giraffes is not the only way to skin the pressure cat. For example, airplane pilots who work at High-Gs know that clenching muscles can prevent vaso-dialiation consequently fainting. It's not hard to imagine that early long necked creatures could survive without this adaptation, and the means to re-evolve it was possible in DNA
Woodpeckers:
this one can be dismissed. There are lots of birds that eat tree bugs by whatever means they can dig them out. trees come in all denisities. You don't need to evolve to be a wood pecker in one go.
Rapid Canyon formation.
I happen to live on the base of a caldera. My house is perched 200 feet over a straight drop to the steep walled canyon bottom. This was carved by a combination of massive floods and slow erosion. Simmilar examples abound around the area. But the origin of the massive floods is well known too. The caldera would periodically block it's outflows and then fill with water. when these dams burst torential fllods would scour the soft volcanic ash and aleufial sands into canons that would harden to rock. Similar stories can be said about the hells canyon area.
I've seen it happen in a small way in my own life time when forest fires glazed the mountain soils turning run-off trickles into 40 mile per hour flash floods digging 10 foot channels.
You really need to not assume the first silliness someone pours in your brain is the truth.
And then, (Score:3, Funny)
So its the same age as Precambrian Rock! (Score:3, Interesting)
http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precambrian [wikipedia.org]
I am guessing that most of the rocky Asteroids are from the same formation time period. I had thought the Earth was mostly still being formed by asteroids and comets prior to 4.5 billion years ago? It is likely to be a part of the Earth from ~4.5 Billion years ago when the Moon is said to have formed via the giant impact hypothesis by planetoid Theia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet) [wikipedia.org]
Unimpressive (Score:4, Funny)
early asteroids and rings round the sun (Score:5, Insightful)
- dust to lumps
- dust to rings
- lumps to sun
- lumps to planets
- rings to planets
- rings to sun
Depending on the speed of each of these factors you get different scenarios. Rings could never happen, they could disappear before the sun is created, they could be be created before , during or after planet creation. Planet creation could also start before the sun. You get the idea.
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[pun threshhold met]
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