#meteor

#meteor

Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2021Winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2021 competition have just been announced. The annual astronomy photography competition, now in its 13th year, is hosted by the Royal Observatory Greenwich and drew more than 4,500 entries, including many featuring images of distant galaxies that require the use of powerful telescopes.The overall winner of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2021 was Shuchang Dong who took this deceptively simple photo of a solar eclipse titled "The Golden Ring" shown above. Dong took the photo in the Ali region of Tibet on June 21, 2020."This place has year-round sunny weather, but in front of the annular eclipse, I saw dark clouds all over the sky," Dong said, "We were waiting with anxious minds but we were lucky. Within a minute of the annular eclipse, the sunshine penetrated through the clouds and afterwards the Sun was sucked into the thick clouds.""This image demonstrates both the beauty and simplicity of an eclipse, but also the science behind this astronomical event," noted competition judge Emily Drabek-Maunder, "Our sun can still be seen as a ring circling the Moon as it passes in front of the Sun, and mountains on the lunar surface can be seen hiding some of this light on the lower righthand portion of the image. This is a stunning achievement!"View more of the fantastic photos of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition below.#astronomy #photography #AstronomyPhotographeroftheYear #ShuchangDong #sun #solareclipse

Early Earth was Regularly Hit by City-Sized AsteroidsScientists know that early Earth was bombarded by meteor strikes, but new analysis revealed that the number of those impacts were actually much, much higher than originally thought.The size of the meteor was also much larger - some are city-sized asteroid, with estimated size of more than 10-km wide."We have developed a new impact flux model and compared with a statistical analysis of ancient spherule layer data. With this approach, we found that current models of Earth’s early bombardment severely underestimate the number of known impacts, as recorded by spherule layers", said Physicist Simone Marchi of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado."The true impact flux could have been up to a factor of 10 times higher than previously thought in the period between 3.5 and 2.5 billion years ago. This means that in that early period, we were probably being hit by a Chicxulub-sized impact on average every 15 million years. Quite a spectacle!"The Chicxulub impact was caused by a 10 km (6.2 miles) diameter asteroid, and was thought to cause a mass extinction of 75% of plant and animal species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs.Via EurekAlertImage: Meteor Crater in Arizona, which was the result of an impact of a 50 meter (164 feet) meteor, by Dr Dale Nations/AZGS.#meteor #asteroid #massextinction #meteorite #EarlyEarth #ChicxulubImpact