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A team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin (USA) has discovered the oldest known fragment of our planet; a 4.4 billion-year-old piece of zircon. The lump of metal, which is one of the oldest and also most abundant minerals on our planet, was discovered in the Jack Hills area of Western Australia. The discovery has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The PLATO mission (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) has finally been approved by ESA within its Cosmic Vision program in which Spain participates significantly with researchers from AstroMadrid and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC). Your objective will be to search for planets that orbit relatively close stars with the intention of locating Earth-like stars, that is, habitable planets. It is the worthy successor to the Kepler mission.

An international team of astronomers has just discovered a very Earth-like planet orbiting a red dwarf star about 200 light-years from us. According to scientific calculations, it has a weight very similar to that of the Earth, but its diameter is 60% greater, which indicates that it must have a very thick gaseous atmosphere.

The Swarm mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) began today with the launch at 13:02 of the rocket that will put three Russian satellites into orbit at an altitude of 490 km. The fleet aims to study the magnetic signals emitted by the core of our planet in order to explain the deceleration of its rotational movement.

Are we all Martians? This is what seems to be deduced from a new discovery made by Steven Benner, from the Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology (USA). At a conference in Florence, Italy today, the Annual Conference of the European Geochemistry Association, Benner will tell the assembled geochemists that an oxidized mineral form of the chemical element molybdenum, which was almost certainly crucial to the origin of life, it may have been available only on the surface of Mars and not on Earth.

Two moons would have shone in Earth's night sky millions of years ago, according to a recent study to be presented in September at the Royal Society in London. Erik Asphaug, planetary scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Martin Jutzi, from the University of Bern, argue that during the collision between our planet and another celestial body that caused the lunar formation, another twin satellite was created, of which today we know.

This is the name of the point in the Earth's orbit at which our planet is located farthest from the Sun. And it occurs because, in its displacement around the star, the Earth does not trace a perfect circular but elliptical path. The aphelion is reached in early July, in contrast to the perihelion or point of the Earth's orbit closest to the Sun, which takes place in January.

Differences between Martian meteorites and rocks examined by NASA's Spirit rover suggest that Mars had an oxygen-rich atmosphere 4 billion years ago, that is, long before oxygen appeared in Earth's atmosphere 2,500 years ago. millions of years.