A Little Help From Physics

While the radar data the scientists had, gave them a good starting point, they took things to a new level when they used a variety of other strategies to acquire even more information. Among these is the physics-based method of mass conservation.

You may already be familiar with the law of conservation of mass from your high school physics teacher. To refresh your memory, the principle basically states that an element’s mass is neither created nor destroyed when a chemical reaction occurs. So, whatever happens, an element will have the same mass it did in the end as it did in the beginning.