Bruce Dorminey
Senior Contributor at Forbes
@Forbes senior contributor. Author Distant Wanderers: The Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System. Opinions my own.
Articles
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1 week ago |
forbes.com | Bruce Dorminey
In one fell swoop, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has largely revolutionized much of what astronomers know about the formation and assembly of the earliest galaxies in the cosmos. Webb has not only pushed back the tape of galaxy formation, but even mainstream observational astronomers now realize that their models need updating to explain what Webb has been seeing only 300 million years after the big bang.
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1 week ago |
forbes.com | Bruce Dorminey
Old growth forests usually get a lion’s share of the credit for their role in sequestering Earth’s atmospheric carbon. But subsurface sea mud is finally coming into its own as the potential unsung hero in the climate change wars. Trouble is, oceanographers don’t really have a full handle on when and how these important mud deposits formed, much less how they can be fully protected.
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2 weeks ago |
forbesjapan.com | Bruce Dorminey
恐竜を死滅させたほどの地球衝突天体は、現在では遠い過去の遺物と見なされることが多い。実際に、地球への小惑星襲来の大半は、約6600万年前に地球に衝突したこのチクシュルーブ衝突天体よりも数十億年遡る時代に起きたものだ。 だが、天文学者は毎年、小惑星を新たに検出しており、小惑星の衝突はいまだに現実の脅威として存在する。国連は2029年を「小惑星認識と惑星防衛の国際年」と宣言しているほどだ。 オーストリア・ウィーン大学の惑星科学者クリスティアン・ケーベルは、同国で開催された欧州地球科学連合（EGU）2025年総会の席上で取材に応じ、たとえ直径50mの小型天体でも大都市に衝突すると100万人が犠牲になりかねないと語った。ケーベルによると、地球の公転軌道と交差する軌道を持つ地球横断小惑星や、地球に接近する軌道を持つ地球近傍小惑星が、現時点で4万個あることが知られている。これまでの10年間で検出された地球近傍小惑星は10万個に上る可能性があるという。...
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2 weeks ago |
forbes.com | Bruce Dorminey
The old adage that it's easier to prove a negative could play a crucial role in characterizing nearby exoplanets that could harbor life. The idea is that looking for earth-like planets is tough enough without wasting time on false positives. Yet the authors of a recent paper appearing in the journal Science Advances propose using the detection of sulfur dioxide in the atmospheres of extrasolar Venus-like planetary hellholes to serve as a negative chemical marker for water and life as we know it.
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3 weeks ago |
forbes.com | Bruce Dorminey
Earth impactors of the sort that brought down the dinosaurs are now usually looked upon as relics of the distant past. Indeed, most of Earth's asteroidal incursions took place hundreds of millions of years earlier than the Chicxulub impactor that hit Earth some 66 million years ago. But each year astronomers detect new asteroids, and their impact threat remains real.
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RT @bdorminey: Old growth forests get most of the credit for sequestering carbon from Earth’s atmosphere. But subsurface sea mud is arguab…
Old growth forests get most of the credit for sequestering carbon from Earth’s atmosphere. But subsurface sea mud is arguably just as important in the ongoing fight against climate change. https://t.co/bz0UCQz7LB
RT @bdorminey: Pleased to note that Forbes Japan has translated my latest Forbes article on Jupiter's moon of Io. Many thanks to the Tokyo…