Tag: Nickel

Building Blocks of Everything, Everywhere

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One of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time came with the invention of the spectroscope by Joseph Von Fraunhofer in 1814.  It enabled us to look out at the universe and realize that the same basic building blocks that made you and I and all other life, were the same things that make up everything else in the cosmos.  The tiny atoms in our bodies all started out at the center of a massive star billions of years ago.  So naturally, when we talk about the odds of life forming elsewhere, we have to include a study of where...

The Great Iron Ball

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Deep within the Earth, far below the layers of rock that form the crust, and even further below the molten rock of the mantle, lies a hot core of Iron and Nickel.  The swirling of the liquid metal creates a flow of charge and produces the magnetic field of the Earth, without which we humans could not survive. But there is still more.  At the centre of the Earth, a part of the liquid metal core, the size of Pluto, cooled into a solid ball of Iron and Nickel.  When in the Earth’s history did it form? This question has...