Sentences with phrase «giant impact»

The phrase "giant impact" refers to a massive collision between celestial bodies, such as planets or moons, in outer space. Full definition
Support for the single impact hypothesis has grown in recent years, supported by computer simulations of giant impacts.
Understanding the destructive effects of such giant impacts is important.
«This is one of the major challenges for this really beautiful giant impact hypothesis,» Perets added.
The scars that remained after the series of giant impacts on Jupiter were more prominent even than its great red spot, and remained visible for months.
Five gaping holes, created by giant impacts, dominate one side of Mathilde, and the asteroid is so lightweight, says Bell, that it must be either full of ice (but there's no sign of water) or a loosely packed pile of rocks held together by their own weak gravity.
RAYS OF LIGHT Many light - colored, flat plains on the moon (shaded green) seem to have formed from debris spewed from an ancient giant impact in moon's southern hemisphere, this video, based on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images, shows.
Francis Nimmo, the lead author of the second study and an associate professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz, says that in the early solar system very large impacts were common: «Earth's moon is the result of a big impact, Mercury has one giant impact basin, and when you move to the outer solar system, Uranus's rotation axis is tilted because of an impact.
In its last stages of the growth, Earth experienced many giant impacts with other bodies.
However, if the measurements of the ancient ratios from SAM don't match up, this suggests that we may have to look at other ways the atmosphere could have been lost, such as giant impacts from asteroids,» says Mahaffy, who is Principal Investigator for SAM and Instrument Lead for the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer instrument on MAVEN.
Astronomers thought the dwarf planet should sport multiple giant impact craters, but the Dawn probe didn't see any.
«We believe Earth had many previous moons,» said Prof. Perets, who added that, «a previously formed moon could therefore already exist when another moon - forming giant impact occurs.»
These characteristics provide strong constraints for giant impact models that try to explain the Moon's formation.
In the original giant impact model, the impact melted a part of Earth and the entire impactor, flinging some of the melt outward, like clay from a potter's wheel.
«Studies on planetary formation suggest that planets like Earth form by multiple giant impacts, and the outcome of this highly random process is known to be very diverse.»
«We need to go back to the drawing board and discover more about what giant impacts do, and we also need a better handle on volatile inventories in the moon.»
«Stevenson and others are puzzling out how subtle differences in starting conditions such as distance from the sun, along with chance events like giant impacts early in the solar system history, can send planets down vastly different evolutionary paths.»
Prior to this discovery, the lack of a satellite for Makemake suggested that it had escaped a past giant impact.
Mass concentrations like this often accumulate when giant impacts from space pound the crust.
Professor Mukhopadhyay commented, «This implies that the last giant impact did not completely mix the mantle and there was not a whole mantle magma ocean.»
One theory to explain the matching isotopes was a scenario in which the proto - Earth was totally vaporized by one or more giant impacts, and both it and the moon formed out of the cloud.
The even lower quantities of these volatile elements found on the Moon has long been claimed as evidence that it must have formed following a high - temperature, catastrophic giant impact.
Some scientists believe giant impacts could have blasted significant amounts of the Martian atmosphere into space.
Giant impact hypothesis struggles to explain similarity between Earth and moon's composition
A team led by Dr. Simone Marchi, a Fellow of the NASA Lunar Science Institute located at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Boulder, Colo., office, collaborating with the MESSENGER team, including Dr. Clark Chapman of the SwRI Planetary Science Directorate, studied the surface to better understand if the plains were formed by volcanic flows or composed of material ejected from the planet's giant impact basins.
The red areas may show craters: the basalt there is of a type that cools below the surface and presumably could only have been exposed to the Hubble's view by giant impacts.
The idea that a very disruptive collision of Earth with another planet - sized body, the biggest event in Earth's geological history, did not completely melt and homogenize Earth challenges some of our notions on planet formation and the energetics of giant impacts.
Water delivery and giant impacts in the «Grand Tack» scenario.
In the original giant impact model, the impact melted a part of the Earth and the entire impactor, flinging some of the melt outward, like clay from a potter's wheel.
While many people have tried to become experts in their field, few ever make a giant impact.
Nuna has only been around for the last couple of years, but they have made a giant impact on moms and babies alike.
That finding led some scientists to suspect the plains, which cover about 9.5 percent of the lunar surface, came from giant impacts.
It is possible that the other form (or forms) was snuffed out by a giant impact in the early years of Earth.
Planetary scientists generally accept that a giant impact into the newly formed Earth ejected a huge cloud of material that became our moon.
The giant impact hypothesis, which explains many observations, such as the large size of the Moon relative to Earth and the rotation rates of Earth and Moon, eventually became the leading hypothesis for the Moon's origin.
The study looked at smaller craters within the larger SPA basin made by impacts that happened millions of years after the giant impact that formed the basin.
«So people decided to change the giant impact hypothesis,» Wang said.
The curvilinear nature of the scarps resembles those on the floor of Rheasilvia, the giant impact crater on protoplanet Vesta, which Dawn orbited from 2011 to 2012.
So the giant impact hypothesis had a major problem.
A moon may have existed at that location within the past hundred million years or so and was destroyed, perhaps by a giant impact.
This Giant Impact Hypothesis suggests that the outer layers of Earth and the object were flung into space and eventually formed the moon.
The differing mineral signatures could be reflective of the minerals dredged up at the time of the giant impact 4 billion years ago, the researchers say.
They realized that giant impacts would melt rocks and create distinctive glass spherules unlike anything created by a volcano or any other terrestrial process.
The giant impact «is a nice theory that explains a lot of things, but there was this problem».
Southwest Research Institute scientists posit a violent birth of the tiny Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, but on a much smaller scale than the giant impact thought to have resulted in the Earth - Moon system.
«The simplest explanation for what we found is that there was water on the proto - Earth at the time of the giant impact,» said Alberto Saal, a geochemist at Brown University and the study's lead author.
The chance of a giant impact producing a crater so precisely aligned with Charon is vanishingly slim, Keane says, so he and his team (as well as Nimmo's) went searching for another explanation.
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