Sentences with phrase «rocky material»

Rocky moons, as the name suggests, are moons made mostly of rocky material like our own moon.

Building on past observations of the white dwarf called SDSSJ1043 +0855 (the dead core of a star that originally was a few times the mass of the Sun), which has been known to be gobbling up rocky material in its orbit for almost a decade, the team used Keck Observatory's HIRES instrument fitted to the 10 - meter Keck I telescope as well as data from the Hubble Space Telescope to measure and characterize the material being accreted by the star.

What little rocky material occurs in today's ring system probably is the debris of collisions between icy ring particles and asteroids and comets swept up by the planet's huge gravitational field, says Canup.

In a similar vein, researchers studying how planets form around other stars call icy compounds (including water and frozen gases) volatiles to distinguish them from high - temperature rocky materials.

Agee found strong experimental support for a theory that the infant Earth completely melted to a depth of hundreds of miles, allowing heavy metals to separate rapidly from lighter rocky materials — like oil fleeing from water.

Earth's moon is thought to have formed when a Mars - sized object smacked into the infant Earth and shot hot rocky material out into space.

With much of the gas siphoned off by the developing star, rocky material collects in the inner part of the disk, forming miniature planets that over time meld together into larger rocky planets.

Until then, all the known exoplanets (planets circling other stars) were big and gaseous, but this one is probably made of rocky materials — the first world like ours found in an alien solar system.

Kristi Wallace of the USGS Alaska Volcano Observatory in Anchorage radiocarbon dates past tephra deposits — the rocky material ejected in an eruption — to predict what the volcano might do in the future.

The researchers also found that, compared with today's rocky material, the ancient crust was composed of much denser stuff, enriched in iron and magnesium.

This water dissolves some constituents of the rocky material.

What are the rocky materials in Ceres» crust?

Models say that Jupiter should have captured about 70 million gigatonnes of rocky material, but less than half that amount remains as irregular moons.

Models of Jupiter's interior suggest it has a solid core of up to 18 Earth - masses» worth of rocky material — just about 6 percent of Jupiter's total mass.

The implication is that the gases in the mantle came not from the sun but from the early accretion of rocky material.

In a protoplanetary cloud around a young star there would be tiny grains of rocky material that would provide a surface on which chemicals could react.

They estimate that approximately 30 percent of the minor planet's mass was water and other ices, and approximately 70 percent was rocky material.

In addition to extending a relatively new method of determining the chemical composition of planets to examine their internal structure, the team found that the rocky material being accreted by the star could be comprised of minerals that are typically associated with marine life processes here on Earth.

«Spectroscopic observations of the white dwarf allowed us to measure the abundances of the rocky material as it is being accreted and filtered through the star's atmosphere in real time,» Melis said.

The Saturn - mass planets are presumably gas giants, made mostly of primordial hydrogen and helium, rather than the rocky material Earth is made of.