All articles tagged with #basalt
Seasick on a 1829 voyage to Staffa, Mendelssohn heard Fingal’s Cave’s diffuse acoustics and began drafting what would become the Hebrides Overture. Scientists explain the cave’s sound arises from hexagonal basalt columns formed as cooling lava cracked, creating a natural, complex acoustic chamber that has fascinated listeners and researchers for centuries.
In March 1982, the Soviet Venera 13 lander survived 127 minutes on Venus—nearly four times its 32-minute design life—enduring 457°C heat and 89 atm pressure to return two color panoramas of flat basaltic rock under an orange sky and gather surface and atmospheric data; this long-lived surface mission remains one of humanity’s clearest records of Venus, and no surface mission has succeeded since Vega 1985.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope directly analyzed the surface of the rocky exoplanet LHS 3844 b, about 50 light-years away, by measuring infrared heat from its dayside. The data indicate a dark, atmosphere-free surface likely dominated by basalt, similar to the Moon or Mercury, with temperatures around 725°C. The planet is tidally locked, and the findings suggest a surface shaped by recent volcanic activity or long-term weathering rather than an Earth-like crust. Follow-up JWST observations are planned to refine its crustal nature.
Researchers are exploring the potential of using the James Webb Space Telescope to identify water worlds by detecting specific minerals formed when water interacts with cooling lava on exoplanets. By studying basalt, a common volcanic rock, scientists aim to identify chemical fingerprints that indicate the presence of water. This method could help determine if exoplanets like LHS 3844b once had surface or subsurface water, although it requires extensive telescope time to analyze distant lava flows.
Earth, atmospheric and planetary scientists at MIT have tested the impact of hand magnets on terrestrial basalt as a stand-in for meteorites. They found that moving hand magnets within inches of basalt samples led to magnetic fields in the rocks being irretrievably erased and replaced by the magnetic field of the hand magnet. The loss of magnetic field data from meteorites is particularly devastating because it could have provided clues about the magnetic field on Mars that once shielded its atmosphere from depletion. The research pair conclude their paper by asking that people who find meteorites not use magnets on them.