“Europa may be one of the most promising places in our solar system to find present-day environments suitable for some form of life beyond Earth.” This week in News & Views, Kevin Trinh, a PhD student at Arizona State University, discusses how his recent works on Jupiter’s moon Europa can enlighten us about the evolution of Europa’s interior. One of the most promising p ...[Read More]
It is the smallest planet of the Solar System, the closest to the Sun and the quickest at orbiting around it, the one with the least inclined and most elongated orbit, the only one where a day lasts two-thirds of a full year, the one with the highest bulk density. Mercury is a planet of extremes, but rarely visited by space missions (compared to Mars, Venus and the Moon). This week Dr. Nicola Tosi ...[Read More]
Starting to teach a course at a university can be an exciting but daunting experience. In today’s post Menno Fraters shares his experiences of starting to teach a class of 100+ students during the challenging time of the COVID-19 pandemic. He provides three quick tips for when you start teaching, that may be useful for teaching in academics. During your time as a PhD student, you may have al ...[Read More]
This week on the GD Blog we are taking a magical geodynamicist’s mystery tour to our planet’s Moon thanks to Tobias Rolf, Researcher at the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) at the University of Oslo, Norway (currently a Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Münster, Germany). Imagine you are orbiting the Earth at an altitude of a few hun ...[Read More]
The Geodynamics 101 series serves to showcase the diversity of research topics and/or methods in the geodynamics community in an understandable manner. In this week’s Geodynamics 101 post, Brad Foley, Assistant Professor at the Department of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University, talks about the geodynamics of planetary habitability and in particular the key role of CO2 cycling in the mantle. ...[Read More]
It is a question that humankind has been asking for thousands of years: Are we alone in the Universe or are there other worlds like our own? As of today, it is unknown whether or not inhabited planets exist outside of our own solar system. With the discovery of the extrasolar planet 51 Peg b in 1992, it was confirmed that our sun is not the only star that hosts planets and therefore the search for ...[Read More]