mystery

For the past fifty years, scientists who study meteorites have been attempting to solve a mystery concerning the origin of chondrules which are tiny millimeter-size glassy droplets of once-molten rock that meteoriticist Henry Sorby described as "drops of fiery rain" in 1877. These mysterious little droplets are seen in 85% of the meteorites that shower down upon our planet. Solving this great meteorite mystery is difficult, because chondrule formation has not been observed in modern times--the right conditions for their formation probably have not existed for over 4.5 billion years in our Solar System, when a primordial disk of dust and gas (called a protoplanetary disk) circled our newborn Sun. In July 2013, scientists suggested that they may have discovered the strange origin of these my...

Groundbreaking discoveries in science often come with two iconic images, one representing the breakthrough and the other, the discoverer. Known as Mary Beale’s ‘Portrait of a Mathematician,’ could the circa 1680 painting depict Hooke? Mary Beale, CC BY For example, the page from Darwin’s notebook sketching the branching pattern of evolution often accompanies a portrait of Darwin in his early years when the notebook was written. Likewise the drawing of the orbits of the moons of Jupiter often accompanies a portrait of Galileo. Hooke’s famous etching of the tiny magnified cells he saw in a piece of cork. Robert Hooke, Micrographia, 1665/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY Another groundbreaking discovery in science was the discovery of the cell by Robert Hooke (1635-1703). The iconic image of the brea...

Tag: mystery

The Great Meteorite Mystery!

The mystery of the missing portrait of Robert Hooke, 17th-century scientist extraordinaire