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A meteorite older than Earth shows evidence of ancient volcanism (syfy.com)
66 points by sohkamyung on Sept 6, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments


Am i the only one pleasantly surprised to find out that syfy.com publish serious articles and not only little green men speculation?


In this case, the author is Phil 'BadAstronomer' Plait, an astronomer and skeptic.

If you have the time to check his previous posts on the Hubble Space Telescope at Syfy, you'll discover that he once worked on it and is proud of it.

For example, in this post [1], he talks about STIS, a camera on Hubble and the software he wrote to simulate using it to find stars accurately. He definitely knows his astronomy stuff.

[1] https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/a-juice-y-look-at-jupiter-from...


It's also worth mentioning that he did the Crash Course on Astronomy [1] and it's actually brillant. I highly recommend as I learned a lot watching this podcast.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtPAJr1ysd5y...


The beginning is annoying:

"Meteorites are bits of asteroids that fall to Earth"

Then it says "while true, that's not the whole story, There are many kinds of asteroids...", but near the end, acknowledges in passing that the initial statement was false, and meteorites come from various types of objects.

I interpret this as a clickbait/engagement technique, that may seem harmless to some, but it really irritates me.


Out of curiosity "This was not expected to occur that early on in the solar system, and it means we need to change some of the ways we think about that time." Why did the rock have to come from a volcano within our solar system. With the age of the rock, couldn't it have came from out of our solar system?


Could a planetesimal volcano have spewed rocks into space? Then there'd be no need to speculate on its fate.


A volcano wouldn't need to. The meteorites we have from Mars and the Moon came here when something big and fast hit them and sent fragments our way.




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