原创 Lots of interesting stuffs: Diamond planet, black hole eats star, life on Mars

 2011-9-22 21:18  15699 29 29 分类: 消费电子

Good grief, my brain is now reeling with all of the interesting info that is flashing before my eyes...

	 
	First I got sucked into a series of articles on the Reuters.com website. For example, it seems that astronomers have detected an exotic planet that appears to be formed largely out of diamond. I have no idea how they work out this sort of thing (<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/25/us-planet-diamond-idUSTRE77O69A20110825">Click here</a> to see this article).

	 
	As an aside, this made me think about the World of Tiers books by Philip José Farmer. These tales are set within a series of artificially-constructed universes, created and ruled by decadent beings who are genetically identical to humans, but who regard themselves as superior, the inheritors of an advanced technology they no longer really understand.

	 
	I read the first book in the series – The Maker of Universes – when I was a young lad and it totally captivated me. It starts with an older guy called Robert Wolff (I think he's about 65 and feeling his aches and pains ... one of which is his wife). Wolff is transported to a strange new world, the World of Tiers, where he starts to grow young again and has a bunch of adventures before he discovers...

	 
	Ha! You don't think I'm going to give the game away that easily, do you? In fact I recently found that the world of tiers books had been gathered into two volumes:

	 Volume 1 
	The Maker of Universes (1965) 
	The Gates of Creation (1966)

	 Volume 2 
	A Private Cosmos (1968) 
	Behind the Walls of Terra (1970) 
	The Lavalite World (1977)

	 
	Sadly, the books and these compilation volumes are all long out of print. Happily, I recently managed to acquire copies of both volumes from a secondhand book store. I read Volume 1 a couple of weeks ago and Volume 2 is sitting on my desk waiting for me to have a spare moment... maybe on the coming holiday weekends...

	 
	But we digress... after reading about the diamond planet, I took a slight detour when my old chum Jay Dowling sent me a link to an article about a black hole eating a star on the HuffingtopPost.com website (<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/25/black-hole-eats-star-video_n_937150.html">Click here</a> to see this article).

	 
	Then it was back to Reuters.com to read an article about the recent discovery of the Earth's oldest fossils in Australia, which provides evidence that early sulphur-based cells and bacteria were able to thrive in an oxygen-free world more than 3.4 billion years ago. In turn, this supports the idea that similar life forms could exist on other planets where oxygen levels are low or non-existent ... like Mars, for example (<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/21/us-fossils-life-idUSTRE77K1TE20110821">Click here</a> to see this article).

	 
	From here I wandered into an article about the fact that recently analysed images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite provide evidence of liquid water occurring today on Mars.

	 
	Arrgggh, I can't help myself. All this talk about Mars reminded me about that hole the size of a football field that was discovered on Mars. This hole – which appears pitch black – is so deep that its insides are completely un-illuminated by the Sun and consequently so dark that nothing can be seen inside.

	 
	The theory is that this is the entrance to a huge underground cave that may be capable of protecting Martian life, should such life exist (<a href="http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap070528.html">Click here</a> to visit the appropriate page on the NASA website).

	 
	And then it was back to Reuters.com again. Have you ever wondered why the face of the moon pointing towards Earth has so many craters and tends to be rough and bumpy (as it were), while the far side of the moon is relatively smooth?

	 
	I've heard quite a few theories about this ... and now there's a new one. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon">prevailing hypothesis</a> today is that the Earth–Moon system formed as a result of a giant impact: a Mars-sized body hit the nearly formed proto-Earth, blasting material into orbit around the proto-Earth, which accreted to form the Moon.

	 
	Well, new research suggests that the blasted material originally formed two moons. After about 100 million years, the smaller moon finally crashed into the larger moon leaving one side rough and the other side smooth (<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/04/us-moons-collision-idUSTRE7730N120110804">Click here</a> to see this article).

	 
	As as I pen these words, I wonder what nuggets of knowledge and tidbits of trivia will the afternoon the next few days bring...