Posts Tagged planets

For the first time, researchers at Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) have found a way to turn a liquid metal into a plasma and to observe the temperature where a liquid under high-density conditions crosses over to a plasma state.

Rochester researchers have gathered the first field data that show the Earth’s inner core is only about 565 million years old—relatively young compared to the age of our 4.5-billion-year-old planet.

Liquid metallic hydrogen is not present naturally on Earth and has only been created in a handful of places, including the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics. LLE scientists are researching the properties of liquid metallic hyrdrogen to understand how planets both inside and outside our solar system form magnetic shields.

In Light of the Stars, astrophysicist Adam Frank poses big questions about alien civilizations, climate change, and what life on other worlds tells us about our own fate.

Does the universe contain planets with truly sustainable civilizations? Or does every civilization that may have arisen in the cosmos last only a few centuries before it falls to the climate change it triggers? Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank and his collaborators have developed a mathematical model to illustrate how a technologically advanced population and its planet might develop together, putting climate change in a cosmic context.

Imagine if, many millions of years ago, dinosaurs drove cars through cities of mile-high buildings. A preposterous idea, right? In a compelling thought experiment, professor of physics and astronomy Adam Frank and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Gavin Schmidt wonder how we would truly know if there were a past civilization so advanced that it left little or no trace of its impact on the planet.

Using new data gathered from sites in southern Africa, researchers have extended their record of Earth’s magnetic field back thousands of years to the first millennium.

Unlike typical observatories that are positioned on the ground or in space, the telescope Dan Watson is working on is situated in between — on a Boeing 747SP jet airliner.

The assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences has been selected as the recipient of the 2017 Mineralogical Society of America Award, a major honor in the field.

Institutions including Cornell, Michigan, Princeton, and Stanford will join Rochester in developing an instrument to produce and study matter that exists under pressures far higher than either on or inside Earth.