Caption: This is Sandia’s Mark Boslough. Credit: Randy Montoya ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Reports by scientists of meteorites striking Earth in the past have resembled police reports of so many muggings — the offenders came out of nowhere and then disappeared into the crowd, making it difficult to get more than very basic facts. Now an [...]
Latest Space News
Missing planets attest to destructive power of stars' tides
During the last two decades, astronomers have found hundreds of planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. New research indicates they might have found even more except for one thing – some planets have fallen into their stars and simply no longer exist. The idea that gravitational forces might pull a planet into its parent [...]
Quantum ghosts are helpful
The idea that far distant particles can somehow 'talk'...
New challenge to galaxy formation theories
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – A team led by an Indiana...
NASA spacecraft show three dimensional anatomy of a solar storm
This artist's animation depicts STEREO's COR1 imager capturing a...
Imaging and discovery from USArray and EarthScope
Unprecedented dense deployment of EarthScope USArray Transportable Array, Flexible...
Recent Space News :
The Crab nebula is the result of a type II supernova explosion observed by Chinese astronomers in 1054. The nebula consists of the outer parts of a red supergiant that exploded after having burned all its fuel. The nebula is still expanding into the surrounding interstellar medium with velocities of several thousand kilometers per second. [...]
This is an artist’s concept of asteroids delivering amino acids to Earth. The jagged white line at the bottom of the image is the actual data from the analysis of the Murchison meteorite. The two largest peaks are the amounts of right-handed and left-handed versions of the amino acid isovaline. Note that the highest of [...]
The Earth explorer satellite GOCE (Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer), built by the European Space Agency ESA, was successfully launched today at 15:21 GMT from the Russian Cosmodrome Plesetsk. GOCE is the first satellite mission within the framework of the Living Planet Programme of ESA and will map Earth’s gravity field in unprecedented [...]
On Feb. 24, 2009, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured a photo sequence of four moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet. The moons, from far left to right, are the white icy moons Enceladus and Dione, the large orange moon Titan, and icy Mimas. Due to the angle of the sun, [...]
This color composite image of Arp 261 was created from images obtained using the FORS2 instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Located 2600 m above sea level, in the mountains of the Atacama Desert, the Paranal Observatory enjoys some of the clearest and darkest skies on the [...]
Magnetospheric electric and magnetic perturbations at ultralow frequencies (ULF, between 2 and 25 megahertz) can accelerate energetic particles in the magnetosphere and thus affect orbiting satellites. However, not all classes of ULF waves are important for electron acceleration. To learn more, Sarris et al. study data from an unusual source: the five-probe constellation of the [...]
At cloud top level, Venus’ entire atmosphere circles the planet in just about four Earth days, much faster than the solid planet does. Despite this “superrotation,” some dynamical and morphological similarities exist between the vortex organization in the atmospheres of Venus’s northern and southern hemispheres and tropical cyclones and hurricanes on Earth. First detected by [...]