Lutetia: A Rare Survivor from the Birth of Earth

New observations indicate that the asteroid Lutetia is a leftover fragment of the same original material that formed Earth, Venus and Mercury. Astronomers have combined data from ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, ESO's New Technology Telescope, and NASA telescopes. They found that the properties of the asteroid closely match those of a rare kind of meteorites found on Earth and thought to have formed in the inner parts of the Solar System. Lutetia must, at some point, have moved out to its current location in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

A team of astronomers from French and North American universities have studied the unusual asteroid Lutetia in detail at a very wide range of wavelengths to deduce its composition. Data from the OSIRIS camera on ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, ESO's New Technology Telescope (NTT) at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, and NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii and Spitzer Space Telescope were combined to create the most complete spectrum of an asteroid ever assembled .

This spectrum of Lutetia was then compared with that of meteorites found on Earth that have been extensively studied in the laboratory. Only one type of meteorite -- enstatite chondrites -- was found to have properties that matched Lutetia over the full range of colours.

Enstatite chondrites are known to be material that dates from the early Solar System. They are thought to have formed close to the young Sun and to have been a major building block in the formation of the rocky planets, in particular Earth, Venus and Mercury. Lutetia seems to have originated not in the main belt of asteroids, where it is now, but much closer to the Sun.

"But how did Lutetia escape from the inner Solar System and reach the main asteroid belt?" asks Pierre Vernazza (ESO), the lead author of the paper.

Astronomers have estimated that less than 2% of the bodies located in the region where Earth formed, ended up in the main asteroid belt. Most of the bodies of the inner Solar System disappeared after a few million years as they were incorporated into the young planets that were forming. However, some of the largest, with diameters of about 100 kilometres or more, were ejected to safer orbits further from the Sun.

Lutetia, which is about 100 kilometres across, may have been tossed out from the inner parts of the young Solar System if it passed close to one of the rocky planets and thus had its orbit dramatically altered. An encounter with the young Jupiter during its migration to its current orbit could also account for the huge change in Lutetia's orbit.

"We think that such an ejection must have happened to Lutetia. It ended up as an interloper in the main asteroid belt and it has been preserved there for four billion years," continues Pierre Vernazza.

Earlier studies of its colour and surface properties showed that Lutetia is a very unusual and rather mysterious member of the asteroid main belt. Previous surveys have shown that similar asteroids are very rare and represent less than 1% of the asteroid population of the main belt. The new findings explain why Lutetia is different -- it is a very rare survivor of the original material that formed the rocky planets.

"Lutetia seems to be the largest, and one of the very few, remnants of such material in the main asteroid belt. For this reason, asteroids like Lutetia represent ideal targets for future sample return missions. We could then study in detail the origin of the rocky planets, including our Earth," concludes Pierre Vernazza.

Read more at Science Daily

Iguazu Falls, Halong Bay On Natural Wonders List

The Amazon rainforest, Vietnam's Halong Bay and Argentina's Iguazu Falls were named among the world's new seven wonders of nature, according to organizers of a global poll.

The other four crowned the world's natural wonders are South Korea's Jeju Island, Indonesia's Komodo, the Philippines' Puerto Princesa Underground River and South Africa's Table Mountain, said the New7Wonders foundation, citing provisional results.

Final results will be announced early 2012, said the Swiss foundation, warning there may yet be changes between the provisional winners and the final list.

Sites that failed to make the cut include Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro, the Dead Sea and the Grand Canyon.

Residents of Jeju welcomed the announcement, with a 2,000-strong crowd bursting into cheers of "We made it," the Yonhap news agency reported.

Jeju Govenor Woo Geun-Min said the listing would open "a new chapter" for the island's tourism industry.

"This will greatly help attract tourists to Jeju, enhance investment and bolster awareness about Jeju's agricultural products," he told journalists. The island is renowned for its tangerines.

The poll organized by Swiss foundation New7Wonders has attracted great interest, mobilizing celebrities, including Argentinian football star Lionel Messi calling on fans to pick his home country's Iguazu Falls.

The results come after a long consultation process lasting from December 2007 to July 2009, when world citizens were asked to put forward sites which they deemed were natural wonders.

More than a million votes were cast to trim the list of more than 440 contenders in over 220 countries down to a shortlist of 77.

The group was then further cut to 28 finalists by a panel of experts.

Anyone in the world was then able to vote for the final seven via telephone, text messages or Internet social networks.

Founded in 2001 by filmmaker Bernard Weber in Zurich, the foundation New7Wonders is based on the same principle on which the seven ancient wonders of the world were established. That list of seven wonders was attributed to Philon of Byzantium in ancient Greece.

Read more at Discovery News

Solar System May Have Lost Fifth Giant Planet

Astronomer David Nesvorny from the Southwest Research Institute in Texas believes that the solar system might have once contained a fifth gigantic planet, which was ejected deep into the galaxy in a moment of cosmic turmoil.

By looking at the population of the Kuiper belt — the icy-cold ring of asteroids beyond Neptune — and by studying the historical fingerprints left on the craters of the Moon, Nesvorny was able to piece together clues about our solar system’s adolescence.

He found that a dynamic instability, which occurred about 600 million years into the solar system’s life, greatly affected the orbit of our giant planets and scattered smaller bodies. Some moved into the Kuiper belt and others traveled inwards, marking their course as impacts on the Moon and planets.

But that scenario has a flaw. Slow changes in Jupiter’s orbit would have had a large effect on the orbits of the terrestrial planets. All hell would have broken lose, and the Earth could have collided with Mars or Venus. Something had to change.

“Colleagues suggested a clever way around this problem,” says Nesvorny in a press release. Instead of a slow movement, Jupiter’s orbit could have quickly changed, which would have altered the outer solar system but been less harmful to the inner planets.

Unfortunately, this too caused problems. Computer simulations, ran thousands of times, showed that Jupiter’s quick jump had the intended effect, but Uranus or Neptune was always knocked out of the solar system. “Something was clearly wrong,” Nesvorny explains.

So perhaps, instead, the early solar system could have had five giant planets instead of four. By plopping an additional giant planet with a mass similar to that of Uranus or Neptune the simulation worked as planned. Jupiter jumped into place, the inner planets remained unharmed and the outer planets stayed behind.

Read more at Wired Science

Prehistoric Men Scarred, Pierced, Tattooed Privates

Men in prehistoric Europe scarred, pierced and tattooed their penises, likely for ritualistic and social group reasons, according to a new study.

Analysis of phallic decorations in Paleolithic art, described in the December issue of The Journal of Urology, may also show evidence of the world's first known surgery performed on a male genital organ. The alteration, or surgery, might have just been for ornamental purposes, or a piercing, the researchers suggest.

Lead author Javier Angulo, chair of the Department of Urology at Hospital Universitario de Getafe in Spain, explains that, like today, tattooing and manipulation of body parts have always functioned as a way for people to express themselves.

"[People] may feel that scars are a written story on the skin," he said.

"Making scars, holes to pick bones, and also writing on the skin -- tattooing -- may add meaning to an otherwise 'silly body,'" he added. "If one or several marks became popular or fashionable, they may be culturally elected as 'fancy' and 'desirable.' The face and areas around natural orifices are parts of the body with a higher tendency to be decorated and shown."

Angulo and colleagues Marcos García-Díez and Marc Martínez studied male genital representations in portable, mostly handheld sizes of art made in Europe approximately 38,000 to 11,000 years ago.

The pieces, researchers say, frequently mirrored what actually appeared on the male penis. Paleolithic art is known to be very naturalistic, so the artists were recreating what they saw.

Additionally, Angulo said that "Otzi and some mummies confirm tattoos were on their skin."

"Modern primitives did modify their bodies, including their genitals, with the use of tattooing, perforations and cuttings (scars) to change their appearance," Angulo said.

They therefore believe it is "highly probable that the marks left on these phalli are not decorative for the sake of the piece of art but rather a depiction of real-life details."

Many of the marks are geometric shapes, such as triangles or circles. Some designs appear to match those of figures seen within Paleolithic cave art from the same regions. This suggests that the symbols may have held important meanings for people then.

"It is widely understood that these designs are part of an unknown code," Angulo said, adding that some of them might have been made exclusively for a decorative purpose. Tattoos today follow the same coda, for the most part. A lion tattoo on a man's arm may only mean that the man likes the look, not that the lion means anything special to him.

Angulo added that other possible explanations for the symbols include: "territorial signs or landmarks, shamanistic repetitive marks in the passage to an unconscious world, some forms of primitive counting, the investigation of non-figurative artistic expression playing with spaces and light and darkness…Who knows?"

What is clear is that phallic decoration became more prevalent among men of the Magdalenian Culture in France and Spain about 12,000 years ago.

"That could be part of a cultural phenomenon related to a concrete time and space," Angulo said.

Another finding of the study is that prehistoric men seemed to favor preputial retraction, or drawing back of the foreskin. As a result, the scientists think it's likely that early males practiced circumcision as both a way to prevent disease and for affiliation purposes. To this day, ritual or religious circumcisions occur within several cultures.

For the prehistoric cultures, Angulo believes that their "canon of beauty” changed over time. Earlier humans of the Gravettian culture, known for characteristic tools such as carving blades, appear to have favored more exaggerated depictions of sexuality, as is evident in many of their "Venus" figurines of naked women. The Magdalenians, on the other hand, had a more naturalistic concept of beauty, according to the authors.

Read more at Discovery News

Great Pyramid Closed Amid 11/11/11 Rumors

Egypt's authorities closed the Great Pyramid on Friday after rumors that various groups planned to hold bizzarre ceremonies on the Giza Plateau at 11:11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 2011.

Although the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) said the closure was due to "necessary maintenance," the head of the Department of Pharaonic Archaeology Atef Abu Zahab told reporters that the decision came "after much pressure" from concerned Internet users.

Rumours of strange rituals spread after the Egyptian daily Ahram reported that people from all over the world were due to hold a "Ceremony of Love" at the ancient monument on 11/11/11.

Called "Cheops Project," the event was aimed at strengthing the power of the pyramid on the alignment of ones by installing a crystal pyramid inside Khufu's sarcophagus for 24 hours.

The operation, carried with people meditating in circles hand-in-hand around the pyramid, was reportedly designed to create a shield around the Earth to protect the planet against cosmic threats, according to Andrzej Wojcikiewicz, president of the Polish foundation Dar Swiatowida, which sponsored the event.

Rumors soon spread over websites and social networks that among the meditators were 1,200 Jews who planned to erect a Star of David on top of the Great Pyramid to support their claim that Jewish slaves built the pyramids, and not the ancient Egyptians.

Aly El-Asfar, head of the Giza Plateau in the SCA, told Ahram Online that Egyptian authorities initially approved the ceremony as the program submitted by the foundation referred to an ordinary private ceremony, with nothing installed inside the sarcophagus of King Khufu.

"I cannot control anyone's belief, but I am the guardian of the pyramids and Egypt's history and will not, by any means, allow that something wrong would happen, or if any damage occur," El-Asfar told the Egyptian daily.

Read more at Discovery News

Farmer Finds Rare Meteorite

It wasn't a goose that laid a golden egg for one Missouri farmer -- it was an asteroid.

Scientists are analyzing an extremely rare meteorite found by a farmer in a tiny Missouri town called Conception Junction (population 202), reports Washington University in St. Louis, which helped identify the rock.

An unnamed farmer had found the unusually heavy stone buried in the side of a hill. He sawed off the end of the stone and realized he had something that didn't come from Earth.

The metal rock is studded on the inside with green olivine crystals. It is one of only 20 so-called pallasite meteorites that have been found in the United States.

These types of meteorites are believed to be fragments of large asteroids that had enough internal heat to begin melting, which allowed heavy metals to sink and form a core, while lighter elements became part of the rocky surface.

Pallasites are believed to come from the area where an asteroid's metal core transitions to olivine in its lower mantle.

Read more at Discovery News

Weird World of Water Gets a Little Weirder

Strange, stranger, strangest! To the weird nature of one of the simplest chemical compounds -- the stuff so familiar that even non-scientists know its chemical formula -- add another odd twist. Scientists are reporting that good old H₂O, when chilled below the freezing point, can shift into a new type of liquid.

 The report appears in ACS' Journal of Physical Chemistry B.

Pradeep Kumar and H. Eugene Stanley explain that water is one weird substance, exhibiting more than 80 unusual properties, by one count, including some that scientists still struggle to understand. For example, water can exist in all three states of matter (solid, liquid,gas) at the same time. And the forces at its surface enable insects to walk on water and water to rise up from the roots into the leaves of trees and other plants.

In another strange turn, scientists have proposed that water can go from being one type of liquid into another in a so-called "liquid-liquid" phase transition, but it is impossible to test this with today's laboratory equipment because these things happen so fast. That's why Kumar and Stanley used computer simulations to check it out.

They found that when they chilled liquid water in their simulation, its propensity to conduct heat decreases, as expected for an ordinary liquid. But, when they lowered the temperature to about 54 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the liquid water started to conduct heat even better in the simulation. Their studies suggest that below this temperature, liquid water undergoes sharp but continuous structural changes whereas the local structure of liquid becomes extremely ordered -- very much like ice. These structural changes in liquid water lead to increase of heat conduction at lower temperatures.

Read more at Science Daily

More Findings, Uncertainty About Emperor's Birthplace

A mosaic floor in what is believed to be the birthplace of Rome's first emperor Augustus. Credit: Clementina Panella.

Archaeologists digging in Rome's Palatine Hill have found the remains of a large house which they believe is the birthplace of Rome's first emperor Augustus.

However, archaeologists are still not totally certain that it was the place where Augustus was born in 63 B.C.

Announced at the end of a 10-year excavation, the finding was partly uncovered in 2006, when a team led by Clementina Panella, professor at the University of Rome La Sapienza, unearthed part of a corridor and other fragments of "a very ancient aristocratic house" near the Arch of Titus on the northeastern side of the Palatine.

Extensive excavation in the past five years (founded by the Sapienza University and the Banca Nazionale delle Comunicazioni) and historical cross-checks have provided further weight to support the hypothesis that the house belonged to Gaius Octavius, Augustus's father.

"We have unearthed more than 10 rooms, beautiful mosaic floors and frescoed walls," Panella told Discovery News.

According to the archaeologist, the two story house looks like it almost climbed up on the Palatine, the most aristocratic of all the Roman hills. Built around an atrium (a large open space), the residence had great views, overlooking the Roman Forum and Esquiline Hill.

Beyond a tufa wall, the archaeologists also found the remains of a sanctuary.

"This is a crucial finding indeed. We have identified this area as the Curiae Veteres, the earliest shrine of the curies of Rome," Panella said.

According to tradition, Romulus, the city's founder, divided the Romans into 30 parts or curiae. These in turn were grouped into three sets of ten that were called tribes.

Mentioned by the Roman historian Tacitus (AD 56 – AD 117) as one point in the Palatine pomerium, which according to legend was the original line ploughed by Romulus to mark Rome's boundaries, the Curiae Veteres were an important gathering place.

The place housed the ritual obligations that the representatives of the thirty curiae had to carry on certain days of the year to reaffirm their membership.

Thousands of votive offerings and cult objects unearthed at the site indicate that the Curiae Veteres sanctuary was active for about 11 centuries -- from the 7th century BC to the 4th century AD.

The Roman historian and biographer Suetonius (about 69/75 – after 130), reported that Augustus was born on September 23, 63 BC, "in the region of the Palatine called Ad Capita Bubula (Ox Heads)."

Several scholars believe that the toponym probably indicated a place in the Curiae Veteres.

"Augustus could have even made up his birth in the Curiae Veteres. He might have badly wanted to be born in that place as it was strongly symbolic. It represented Romulus' founding and Augustus' re-founding of Rome," Panella said.

Born Gaius Octavius in 63 B.C., the future emperor was named adoptive son and heir of his great-uncle Julius Caesar when he was 18 years old.

After the civil wars that followed Caesar's assassination, Gaius Octavius was made emperor in 29 B.C., taking the name Augustus.

He was deified after his death in 14 A.D., and a calendar month -- Sextilis -- was renamed Augustus (August) in his honor.

The architect of the "Pax Romana" (Roman peace), a 200 -year period of peace and prosperity after years of civil war, Augustus was known for his fear of thunder and lightning and for his dislike of ostentation and excess.

"For more than 40 years, he used the same bedroom in winter and summer," Suetonius wrote in his "Life of Augustus."

Augustus lived in the house near the Curiae Veteres for just three years. His family then moved to the Carinae, a spur which stretched from the Esquiline towards the Palatine.

When he was 18 years old, Augustus bought a house near the Roman Forum; then, at 36, he moved again to the Palatine, where he bought the house of the orator Hortensius.

The choice of the residence was again symbolic. It was just above what is believed to be the grotto where Romans once worshiped the city's founders, Romulus and Remus.

Read more at Discovery News

Deep-Sea Camouflage Switcheroo

When swimming near the ocean’s well-lit surface, some octopus and squid become transparent in order to hide from hungry predators. In deeper waters, found a new study, they do something completely different: They turn deep red.

The study, which offers a rare look into the behavior of deep-sea creatures, documents the first known example of an animal using completely different tricks to achieve camouflage in different situations. And it gives new insight into the secrets of invisibility, which has a range of applications, from sustainable fishing to medicine.

The findings also suggest that a decline in water quality from pollution and other sources may harm undersea animals more than researchers have previously realized.

"A lot of ecosystems are balanced on who can see who and who can hide from who," said Sönke Johnsen, a visual ecologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C. "If you change the optics of the water, all of a sudden you shift the ecosystem for things that relied on sight for the ability to catch their prey. When the water becomes murkier, species diversity drops."

Cephalopods, the group that includes squid and octopuses, have long impressed divers with their rapid color displays. They can turn from clear to green to nearly black in an instant.

To better explain these rainbow-like behaviors, Johnsen and colleague Sarah Zylinski caught members of one species of octopus and one species of squid, caught while on a ship off the coasts of Peru, Chile and Mexico, they put the animals in shipboard tanks and performed a series of experiments.

Under the room's ambient light, the researchers reported today in the journal Current Biology, both the squid and the octopus were transparent. But when the researchers shone blue light on them, they turned deep red. They did not respond the same way to beams of red light, moving light, or other kinds of light disturbances.

Those findings suggested that the animals might use different strategies for camouflage, depending on how deep they were because in shallow waters, being mostly clear makes an animal basically invisible.

But like a windowpane, a transparent animal reflects light at depths below about 800 meters (2,600 feet), where hiding places are scarce and predators lurk with bioluminescent flashlights that shine in the blue wavelengths. In that environment, it is wisest to be red or black, as those colors absorb blue light rather than reflect it – creating a different kind of invisibility.

To confirm that camouflage was the motivation for switching from clear to red and back again, the researchers measured how much light the squid and octopuses reflected in their alternate color schemes. The results showed that their chosen hues did the best job of hiding the animals under various conditions.

"This is the first time that anyone has ever shown that these animals are actively switching between completely different modes of camouflage," Johnsen said. "Being clear or deeply red are completely different tricks that work under completely different principles."

Read more at Discovery News

Pristine Big Bang Gas Found

Scientists have found two interstellar clouds of original gas, which -- unlike everything else in the universe -- has never mingled with elements forged later in stars.

The existence of pristine gas that formed minutes after the Big Bang explosion some 13.7 billion years ago, had been predicted, but never before observed.

The clouds, which are located about 12 billion light-years from Earth within the constellations Ursa Major and Leo, were found serendipitously during an ongoing study to characterize gas in distant galaxies.

In analyzing the light coming from quasars (active nuclei of distant galaxies), astronomers realized the rays had passed through gas that contained only hydrogen and deuterium, elements that formed minutes after the Big Bang.

The surprise was that the clouds contained nothing else -- no carbon, no nitrogen, no silicon, no iron -- none of the heavier elements forged in stars and spread throughout the universe.

"In some respect we were searching for this, but we had been doing so for years and had been unsuccessful so the discovery was a very welcome surprise," astronomer Jason Prochaska, with the University of California's Lick Observatory, told Discovery News.

One of the foundations of the Big Bang theory is that only the lightest elements -- hydrogen, helium, lithium and the hydrogen variant deuterium -- formed minutes after the universe's creation, but no such pristine samples had ever been found.

"These two clouds are the first examples to fit precisely in that picture," Prochaska said.

All other elements were made inside of stars millions and billions of years later.

The hunt for other pockets of primordial gas is under way. Scientists believe the clouds may have played in role in funneling cold gas to growing early galaxies.

"One of our biggest questions in cosmology is how galaxies get the gas they need to form stars, and how they also sent out the remnants of stars into their surroundings," physicist John O'Meara, with Saint Michael's College in Vermont, told Discovery News.

Read more at Discovery News