Tag: space

  • Explosions are not Creation

    Explosions are not Creation

    A new essay about an impact shower on the terrestrial planets that happened almost concomitant to the beginning of multicellular life on the Earth’s surface, about 800.000.000 years ago, comes at a very convenient time. 

    Recently, debris from a SpaceX rocket collided with the Moon’s surface, creating a new crater and blasting material into space. The incident has renewed concerns about the growing problem of space debris (as if space exploration didn’t already have enough challenges).

    What is interesting about all these recent “scientific” happenings is the zeitgeist that (after many years) is still alive and kicking – that violent explosions and collisions can be for the best, and in some cases even necessary as Life triggers. 

    Pop-science tropes often cling to the idea that explosions, collisions, and bombs do not necessarily signify destruction, chaos, sadness, or loss. Ironically, the underlying message is that these destructive events can somehow be restorative (??) and signify new beginnings. While this trope discourse is becoming increasingly tiresome—likely due to the saturation of cinematic storytelling—the barrier to empirical evidence still remains.

    To illustrate, around 66.000.000 years ago, the South Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea were already in existence. The rearrangement of the continents (along with the tectonic plates) triggered geological activity that triggered atmospheric changes, which, together with the dramatic lowering of sea levels, led to a powerful extinction event. Geological data also shows that a massive astronomical body struck Earth’s surface around the same time, causing acid rain, freezing temperatures, and releasing particles in the atmosphere that would block sunlight. 

    According to pop science, the astronomical body collision was, alone, responsible for the extinction of the Dinosaurs and triggered the rise of mammals; therefore, the bombing that came from space was, all in all, good, because without it, we, human mammals, could not exist.  

    However, recent studies state that the aftermath of the massive astronomical body collision was likely fleeting – freezing temperatures reversed after 3 years, acid rain probably dissipated after 10 years, and the dust blocking the sunlight lasted up to a year. In addition, the fossil data about this particular extinction event does not indicate any pattern that this event was any different from the previous ones in terms of time span (thousands to millions of years) and number of species (proportionally). Also, according to empirical evidence, mammals started to inhabit the Earth’s surface millions of years before.

    Therefore, a meteor did hit the Earth’s surface around 66.000.000 years ago, but it is unlikely that it was alone responsible for the extinction event that included the dinosaurs – or the rise of mammals.

    It should go without saying, yet it bears repeating – It is very important to stop glorifying explosions and big destructive events as the catalyst of anything. Explosions shatter existing systems; they do not construct new ones. 

    Science advances when empirical evidence leads the story – and, so far, the evidence shows that life builds itself through resilience and gradual adaptation, not sudden shocks, not raw destruction.

    As for 2026, perhaps humans don’t need cataclysmic drama to find wonder in their origins anymore. The story evidence-based science actually tells is infinitely richer – Life isn’t sparked by violent shocks, but woven through quiet patience, intricate balance, and amazing endurance. The slow, persistent magic is what humans might be now ready to embrace.

    All references for this article that are not linked to the content can be found here.


  • Water Is Not That Clear

    Water Is Not That Clear

    Around 4.500.000.000 years ago, 10.000.000 after the Moon-forming event, a day on Earth was about 6 hours long, and the Moon was way closer – 24.000 to 32.000 km away from Earth (today it is 383.000Km). The Sun was a fast-spinning baby star, taking 9 to 10 days per spin (today, it is 24 (equator) and 35 (poles) days). 

    The Moon-forming event increased Earth’s and Moon’s temperatures while making them intensely spin and rotate around each other. With such loaded energies, the initial tidal interactions between Earth and Moon were more violent, resulting in energies being dissipated at a faster pace, with both objects considerably slowing their rotation and spin within their first millions of years. At this point, the Sun was way more radioactive despite having lower temperatures (nuclear fusion was just starting). 

    A stream of charged particles, the solar wind, was reaching the terrestrial planets, making radioactivity at least 5 times higher than today. The solar wind and the intense tidal interactions between Earth and the Moon created a layer of charged particles early on, a combined magnetosphere around both objects. In turn, the magnetosphere enables a layer of gas to be trapped between the planet’s surface and space – the atmosphere.

    Still around 4.500.000.000 years ago (due to gravity, rotation, and tidal interactions), the densest materials (metals like iron and nickel) were sinking to form Earth’s metallic core at the same time that the less dense materials (silica-like) were accumulating in a layer around the core called the mantle. 

    Near the mantle surface, the pressure and temperatures caused the mantle minerals to split their chemical compositions, releasing gases and water molecules (roughly 7% of the mantle minerals have 2% of their composition made out of water molecules – which (due to the mantle proportions) is enough to fabricate several oceans like the ones we have at Earth’s surface today). The water molecules from the mantle outgassing could get trapped at the planet’s surface because of the atmosphere, making planet Earth (probably already) with water on its surface.

    This is a brief description of HOW and WHEN water appeared on Earth’s surface, according to scientific knowledge based exclusively on empirical evidence.

    Believe it or not, scientists are only recently (perhaps) beginning to understand WHAT water actually is.

    As commonly known, water behaves differently than any other liquid at Earth’s surface. It gets less dense (expands) at freezing temperatures, which is why ice floats on liquid water. It has a high boiling point compared to other liquids. And it has a high surface tension, creating a membrane-like outer layer that makes it more resistant and cohesive in its liquid form (which explains why insects can walk on water and why water droplets assume a spherical shape). These are just a few of the several “anomalous” features that water, as it is known at the Earth’s surface, presents.

    Over the past three decades, advancements in computational modeling have significantly improved the accuracy of molecular simulations. This progress has allowed for detailed studies of the behavior and structure of water molecules, particularly in conditions that cannot be found on the Earth’s surface.

    These studies provide evidence that water has two distinct states, that those two states are interconvertible, and that ice has at least 21 different forms – and the list continues to grow. 

    Under different pressures and temperatures, water solidifies into distinct crystalline structures, each with its own molecular arrangement and density. The familiar ice from a freezer is Ice Ih, a hexagonal structure found on Earth’s surface. But in the upper atmosphere, Ice Ic—a cubic form—can exist. Under high pressure, dozens of other phases emerge, from Ice II to Ice XXI, each with different properties.

    Under extreme pressures and temperatures, oxygen atoms remain fixed while hydrogen protons flow like a liquid, resulting in superionic ice, which is believed to exist in large amounts deep inside Uranus and Neptune, whose movement of protons generates the unusual magnetic fields observed around these planets.

    In addition to these forms, water can also freeze into a glassy, non-crystalline state called amorphous ice. There are at least three types (low-density, high-density, and very high-density amorphous ice), with the amorphous form believed to be the most common ice in the universe.

    From all these data, one thing is safe to say – the water molecule H₂O is remarkably adaptable and can assume many different designs, always reacting to temperature and pressure (together or in isolation) to determine its state and, consequently, its molecular structure.

    Curiously, like many other things in “science”, researchers often take for granted that what humans experience at Earth’s surface is “normal” or “standard”, only to become disappointed with the results of their experiments.

    What happens at Earth’s surface is not universal or common. The acknowledgment that the ice found on Earth’s surface (ice I) is extremely rare in the universe is, somehow, painful because it leads to an inconvenient truth – that humans do not know a lot about everything.

    Actually, humans know very little about very little. Things are still not given, controlled, or known. Interestingly, since the dawn of written records, humans have consistently believed they were at the peak of their knowledge, mastering their own time—only to become a laughable footnote to generations to come. In many ways, we are still similar to the ones who lived many years ago.

    Perhaps, for the first time in history, humans should acknowledge how little is actually known—about water, about everything—and from that starting point, build what could be a truly new age for human knowledge. At the very least, with such a humble starting point, perhaps striving to “know about everything” can get more interesting.

  • The Solar System Ghost

    The Solar System Ghost

    In 2019, a meteorite was found in the Sahara Desert named Northwest Africa 12774. In 2025, a team of researchers started analyzing it and realized that this meteorite belongs to a rare class of meteorites called angrites. There are fewer than 100 angrites out of the more than 80,000 meteorites discovered on Earth’s surface.

    By analyzing Northwest Africa 12774’s chemical fingerprints, scientists found that the number of neutrons in the atoms of its elements (isotopes), specifically oxygen and chromium, matched the composition of astronomical bodies in the solar system.

    By measuring the decay of radioactive elements inside Northwest Africa 12774 (which act as natural clocks), scientists determined that it crystallized from molten rock just 4 million years after the first solids formed in the solar system. This dates it to about 4.56 billion years ago, making it one of the oldest known volcanic rocks of the solar system. Only material that formed alongside the Sun and its surrounding disk of gas and dust could be this old.

    In addition, by testing Northwest Africa 12774’s mineralogy, scientists observed that the meteorite contains crystals of a mineral called clinopyroxene that are unusually rich in aluminum. To forge these specific crystals, the rock had to be subjected to immense pressure that could only be generated inside a large, differentiated body, not a small, undifferentiated asteroid. Scientists calculated that the “angrite parent body” must have been at least 1,000 km (620 miles) in radius. If the crystals formed at a shallow depth, the body could have been as large as 3,600 km (2,200 miles)—comparable in size to the Moon or even Mars.

    Although Northwest Africa 12774 was not seen falling from the sky and its exact path through space cannot be tracked, its classification as an angrite links it to a specific group of meteorites overwhelmingly associated with the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

    To contextualize where and what the asteroid belt actually is, it might be useful to recap what the solar system consists of today:

    • One star: The Sun.
    • Orbiting the Sun in different directions: Comets (because they were formed either entirely outside or on the very outskirts of the solar system).
    • Orbiting the Sun in the same direction:
      • The terrestrial planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth (with 1 moon), and Mars (with 2 moons).
      • The asteroid belt: Between 1 and 2 million asteroids composed of rocky, refractory materials, where Ceres (a dwarf planet) is the largest object.
      • The giant planets: The gas giants (the number of moons grew exponentially over the last few years) – Jupiter with 95 moons, Saturn with 146 moons; The ice giants – Uranus with 27 moons, Neptune with 16 moons.
      • The Kuiper belt: An icy ring with millions of objects made mostly out of ice and volatile elements, featuring proto-planets and dwarf planets like Pluto (with 5 moons), Eris (with 1 moon), Haumea (with 2 moons), and Makemake (with 1 confirmed moon).

    Essentially, scientists are able to know all about the size, chemical composition, and age of all these solar system objects through two main sources of evidence.

    First: telescopes. By analyzing their images, scientists can infer the size, speed, and rotation of astronomical bodies. By analyzing the light and spectrum of Solar System objects, astronomers can determine their chemical composition.

    Second: meteorites. Minerals that either fall to Earth’s surface from space or are sitting at the Earth’s surface waiting to be found carry the chemical signatures of their parent bodies. 

    By comparing meteorite compositions with those observed through telescopes, scientists can piece together the solar system’s makeup.

    It is important to highlight that understanding how, when, and why the solar system developed the way it did is far more valuable than simply listing and classifying its astronomical bodies. In Science, merely describing something, very often, does not move Science forward. In contrast, understanding something is what propels scientific progress.

    To illustrate, consider this timeline:

    • 5.103.200.000 years ago — A star cluster that would become the solar system was taking place in the Milky Way
    • 4.568.200.000 years ago — The first solar system solids were formed
    • 4.518.200.000 years ago — Nuclear fusion ignited the Sun
    • 4.510.000.000 years ago — Earth and the Moon formed

    Knowing these dates is useful. But they don’t change anything if they are not used to understanding why all those milestones happened the way they did. In this context, we can see the data we have as a starting point rather than as an end in itself.

    An effective approach is to look at the Solar System timeline and ask: What are the Solar System milestones that could have happened faster or differently? Are there any shortcuts in terms of planetary system formation that could take place, and does that mean that there might be other planetary systems in the universe, for instance, that could have life for a longer period of time than what happened on Earth?

    Anyway, understanding how planets formed—and what their characteristics were at specific points in time—can give a roadmap for what to look for elsewhere in the universe.

    Without making a direct association between a planet’s emergence conditions in our own solar system, we are just going to be looking for water out there for a very long time… without ever finding anything.


  • Why Black Holes Matter

    Why Black Holes Matter

    Recently, the scientific world has been baffled with the new discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope – JWST

    (as the name says, a Space Telescope, launched on December 25, 2021 that sits on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun, about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) away from Earth which is nearly four times farther from Earth than the Moon is)

    of “Little Red Dots” – LRD that turned out to be black holes that were not just massive but also way older than scientists expect black holes could ever be.

    Besides the dichotomy of namegiving (little red dots = massive black holes), the research is extremely elegant. Several dedicated programs

    (Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science – CEERS, JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey – JADES, Next Generation Deep Extragalactic Exploratory Public Survey – NGDEEP, Public Release Imaging for Extragalactic Research – PRIMER, Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam Observations before the Epoch of Reionization –  UNCOVER, and Cosmic Evolution Survey — a project designed to map the evolution of the universe’s large-scale structure – COSMOS-Web)

    generated huge amounts of data and images about the universe.

    Machine learning algorithms grouped little red objects that were then sorted out through morphology, brightness, and color. By specifically separating some extreme combinations of color cuts, and splitting the object’s light into a rainbow of individual wavelengths through spectrographs, scientists could infer that the light in LRDs was very old coming from very far away, and that hydrogen gas was moving at incredibly high speeds in these objects.

    The vast majority of LRDs have been dated between 600 million and 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, and in about 70% of the analyzed LRDs, hydrogen gas was moving at incredibly high speeds—roughly 1,000 kilometers per second (about 2 million miles per hour) which can only be produced by gas spiraling into a supermassive black hole’s accretion disk. In addition, this discovery was also confirmed with older data from other observatories, together with a comparison with other stellar populations. Beautiful.

    But why is everyone talking about it? 

    Why black holes matter so much?

    Well, first things first. Let us all agree that name-giving is not a strong part of physicists and astronomers – calling something we know so little about a part of a human anatomy we don’t like to talk about is already an indication. 

    As weird as it seems, it is through the studies of black holes that science really comes to life. Science, empirical science, is built upon discoveries that are able to move human intelligence and technology further. Black holes are the ultimate test for fundamental physics, general relativity, the quantum gravity quest, galaxy formation, and cosmic expansion. Studying black holes isn’t just about understanding distant, exotic objects. It’s a direct path to unlocking the deepest laws of physics, understanding our cosmic origins, and potentially developing revolutionary future technologies. Black Holes sit the vanguard of intellectual thought. 

    The kind of science the study of Black Holes is about, empirical science, does not need consensus to be accurate, and that is the beauty of it. Even if everyone doesn’t like the theory or think it does not make sense, that is when black holes, across the whole universe, shine. 

    Let’s celebrate empirical science through an universe timeline.

    Around 13.800.000.000 years ago – The Big Bang
    According to its latest definition, the Big Bang is the point in history where the observable universe can be verified to have entered into a regime where the laws of physics (as we understand them) can be applied. The Big Bang theory does not explain what was there before the universe, nor why the Big Bang occurred. 

    10-43 seconds after the Big Bang 
    temperature and average energies were so high that matter (particles) could not form. The 4 fundamental forces that shape the universe – gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force – were combined and formed one fundamental force.

    Before 10-32 seconds after the Big Bang
    A phenomenon called inflation occurred – the universe suddenly, very rapidly, and exponentially expanded (from something like half of a DNA molecule in length to 100 trillion kilometers long in a tiny fraction of a second).

    About 10−30 seconds after the Big Bang
    The universe was filled with a radiation/light/field that lasted 380.000 years. This phenomenon, called the cosmic microwave background radiation, has been streaming throughout the universe since. Even though scientists are still figuring out what exactly cosmic microwave background radiation is, the images apparently capture the fundamental building block of nature – the quantum field. 

    Around 10-12 after the Big Bang
    The quantum field of gravity, the quantum electrodynamics (electromagnetic force), the gluon field (strong nuclear force), and the W and Z boson field (weak nuclear force) were able to take their present forms. 

    1 second after the Big Bang
    The quantum fields of matter bedrocks of the universe – the neutrino, the electron, the up quark, and the down quark- were already formed (there are 12 known quantum fields of matter today, of which 8 of them are “heavier” variations of the 4 bedrock ones). 

    1 minute after the Big Bang 
    The universe had atoms of the lightest and simplest element – hydrogen.

    2 minutes after the Big Bang
    Pressure and temperature were still too high in the universe, enabling a reaction called nuclear fusion to take place. With nuclear fusion, hydrogen atoms quickly fuse to form helium (the second-lightest element). 

    After 20 minutes following the Big Bang
    pressure and temperature drop to a point where nuclear fusion ends, leaving the universe with an initial composition of 75% hydrogen and 25% helium (and tiny proportions of other elements). 

    No earlier than 150.000.000 years after the Big Bang
    ignition of the first stars. 

    From 600.000.000 to 1.800,000,000 years after the Big Bang
    LRDs – Little Red Dots – Massive black holes