Earth and Planetary Science

Physicists with the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) made the groundbreaking announcement that they have detected the gravitational waves. David Reitze, the executive director of the LIGO Laboratory, stated that after 10 years of efforts, the twin detectors in their laboratory “heard the gravitational 'ringing'” that is a result of collision of two black holes that are 1.3 billion years away from our planet. Read more about their research here.

The All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), a project that comprises small telescopes worldwide to observe the universe for any bright objects, has detected an extremely luminous body that is 3.8 billion light years away from the Earth. Read more about this here.

Climate scientists have proposed different ways of countering global warming that has warmed the planet – for instance, pumping water-based sulphate spray into the sky to reflect and scatter the Sun's energy – but most have been highly debated. Now a team of researchers from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have suggested that a safer way of dealing with global warming would be to use dusts of solid, nanometre-sized particles of diamond or aluminum oxide as it would be less damaging to the atmosphere. Read more about their research here.

The opinion of scientists is divided about the relation between mass extinctions and impact craters caused by asteroid and comet showers on Earth. Now two researchers, Michael Rampino, a New York University geologist, and Ken Caldeira, a scientist in the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, have concluded through their observations that the age of impact craters is linked to mass extinctions of life on Earth, including the demise of the dinosaurs. Read more about their research here.

A team of researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, discovered evidence for an unanticipated role of electrons in creating the pulsating auroras. Read more about their research here.

Researchers at the Department of Geography at CU-Boulder published the findings of the longest and largest study of wildfires in Amazon, which is the world's largest rainforest. In this study lasting a decade, the researchers selected a 370-acre plot in the southeastern portion of the Amazon and tested the effects of controlled fires of different burn frequencies. Read on to know more about this study.

While studying Lake Fryxell, a frigid Antarctic lake, geoscientists at the University of California, Davis, discovered a thin layer of green bacteria that was generating a little oasis of oxygen. The scientists believe that this could be a replica of conditions on Earth two and a half billions ago when oxygen was not so common in the Earth’s atmosphere. Read more about their research here.

Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers from the U.S. have discovered a planet that they believe is significantly similar to Earth. This planet that has been dubbed as Kepler-452b is in the habitable zone of the star it circles. Read on to learn more about this.

An influential group of US astronomers have proposed the building of the High-Definition Space Telescope (HDST), the biggest and most advanced space telescope, according to the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) report published on July 6. The HDST would complement the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will be launched in 2018 and will observe the universe at infrared wavelengths. Read on to learn more about this.

Pluto, the dwarf planet, has five satellites out of which three satellites named Styx, Nix, and Hydra have become gravitationally locked and are moving together in an unusual orbit. Researchers observed that the three moons of Pluto have formed a peculiar pattern known as a three-body resonance. Read on to learn more about this.