在地球形成之初，小行星和微行星的频繁撞击塑造了地壳，并创造出可能支持前生物化学反应、甚至可能孕育早期生命的环境。
craters
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Cosmic Bombardment Created Potential for Prebiotic Chemistry
Frequent impacts from asteroids and planetesimals in Earth’s earliest days shaped the planet’s crust and created environments that may have supported prebiotic chemistry, and possibly even early life.
Posted inNews
Scientists Discover South America’s First Space Glass Fields, in Brazil
Tektites, rare natural glasses formed by ancient asteroid impacts, were found stretching across more than 900 kilometers of the country’s interior.
Posted inNews
Oozing Gas Could Be Making Stripes in Mercury’s Craters
Scientists are using new computational tools to analyze troves of old spacecraft data to better understand one of Mercury’s unsolved mysteries.
Posted inNews
Primordial Impact May Explain Why the Moon Is Asymmetrical
Analysis of surface samples from the Chang’e-6 mission suggests that an asteroid may have vaporized parts of the lunar mantle, suppressing volcanic activity on the farside of the Moon.
Posted inNews
Sediments Hint at Large Ancient Martian Moon
Regular, alternating layers in Gale Crater may have been deposited as the result of tides raised by a moon at least 18 times the mass of Phobos, a study says.
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A Flash, a Boom, a New Microbe Habitat
After an asteroid struck Finland long ago, microscopic life colonized the impact site within a few million years, new research reveals.
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Submerged Crater near Europe Tied to an Impact
New subsurface imaging and rock samples suggest that Silverpit Crater formed from an impact that occurred roughly 45 million years ago.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Gravity with an “Edge”: What Lies Beneath Aristarchus Crater
A method combining three different approaches to the processing and analysis of GRAIL data from the Moon defines areas of sharply contrasting densities beneath Aristarchus Crater.
Posted inNews
Scientists Track Down Fresh Boulder Falls on the Moon
By poring over thousands of satellite images, researchers geolocated 245 fresh boulder tracks, revealing signs of seismic activity or impact events within the last half-million years.