Ancient Rock Art, Massive Reservoir, Solar Storm News This Week
- This week's science news was filled wiht discoveries once thought lost to time - notably, the world's oldest known rock art was discovered in Indonesia.
- The roughly 70,000-year-old stencil of a human hand, found in a cave in Sulawesi, promises to fill a major gap in scientists' understanding of humanity's migration across the...
- And it wasn't just ancient Homo sapiens who were found to have made intrepid and unexpected journeys this week, as a 2.6 million-year-old fossil jaw of the extinct...
This week’s science news was filled wiht discoveries once thought lost to time – notably, the world’s oldest known rock art was discovered in Indonesia.
The roughly 70,000-year-old stencil of a human hand, found in a cave in Sulawesi, promises to fill a major gap in scientists’ understanding of humanity’s migration across the islands of Southeast Asia to Australia, and was likely left by an ancestor of Indigenous Australians.
An expedition off the coast of Massachusetts confirmed this week the existence of a giant sub-seafloor reservoir that could supply a city the size of New York City with fresh water for around 800 years.
The freshwater reservoir stretches from offshore New Jersey as far north as Maine and possibly formed 20,000 years ago during the last ice age, when rainwater became trapped underground before sea levels rose.
More definitive results about how and when the reservoir took shape, alongside its bacterial and mineral contents, are expected soon.The scientists who found it say the information could prove vital to those who may want to tap into it in the future.
Discover more planet Earth stories
–neurovisual sleight of hand that might potentially be key to our survival.
–If you enjoyed this, sign up for our Life’s Little Mysteries newsletter
The biggest solar radiation storm in decades
Also in science news this week
–Coyote scrambles onto Alcatraz Island after perilous,never-before-seen swim
Not long ago,astronomers thought they knew the story of how gigantic supermassive black holes formed. They believed it happened the same way regular black holes are born: by collapsing from large stars and slowly merging untill they grow to billions of times the sun’s mass.
But the James Webb Space Telescope appears to have upended that story by finding enormous black holes in the earliest epochs of our universe that shouldn’t have had the time to grow by merging or devouring matter.
So how did these behemoths get so enormous? Live Science investigated the explanations –
This week, a compelling time-lapse of the sun was released, potentially offering new insights into a long-standing solar mystery.
Captured by the European Space Agency‘s Proba-3 mission, the footage showcases three significant plumes of plasma erupting from the sun’s surface. Astronomers aim to analyze this data to understand why the sun’s corona-its faint outer atmosphere-reaches temperatures hundreds of times greater than its visible surface.
A comprehensive guide to the sun’s magnetic field, revealed through observations like these, could improve predictions of solar flares. These flares occur when magnetic field lines snap, and some can have substantial impacts on Earth.