news, journals and articles from all over the world.
Federal agencies should better coordinate their activities in plasma science and engineering (PSE) and jointly support new funding opportunities that take advantage of PSE’s overlaps with different science disciplines, according to a decadal report by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
When it comes to the best region to form planets, it’s all about location. Planets in the nearby star cluster Westerlund 2 may have a rough time forming in the crowded core. Astronomers using Hubble find that energy from hefty stars is blowing away planet-forming dust clouds from smaller stars.
Astronaut Christina Koch, who set a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman with a total of 328 days in space, was the surprise guest “speaker” on Ursinus’s commencement webpage on Friday, May 15.
Thanks to the teamwork of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Gemini Observatory, and the Juno spacecraft, scientists are able to probe deep into Jupiter’s storm systems and investigate sources of lightning outbursts, map cyclonic vortices, and unravel the nature of enigmatic features within the Great Red Spot.
Science aboard an Alabama Space Grant Consortium (ASGC) student-led cube satellite mission called AEGIS could be valuable to developing future human outposts on the moon and in space travel to Mars if NASA gives the go-ahead for a 2022 flight.
Global Temperature Report: April 2020
Combined observations of WASP-79b from Hubble and other telescopes reveal a weird super-hot planet where the sky is yellow instead of blue due to lack of an atmospheric effect called Rayleigh scattering, which makes Earth’s sky blue.
This pair of Hubble photos of comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), taken on April 20 and 23, 2020, provide the sharpest views yet of the breakup of the solid nucleus of the comet. Hubble distinguishes as many as 30 pieces that are roughly the size of a house.
The American Institute of Physics is delighted to host a virtual lecture by Hubble Space Telescope senior project scientist Jennifer Wiseman in an upcoming Lyne Starling Trimble Science Heritage public lecture to celebrate Hubble’s 30th anniversary. The lecture series is hosted by AIP and highlights experts who study the role of science and technology throughout human history and modern society. “The Hubble Space Telescope: 30 Years of Discovery and Awe” will be hosted virtually, April 29 at 3:30 p.m. EDT.
A colorful image resembling a cosmic version of an undersea world teeming with stars is being released to commemorate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 30 years of viewing the wonders of space.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have come to the jaw-dropping conclusion that a planet orbiting another star has seemingly disappeared after appearing in several years’ worth of Hubble images. A team of astronomers from the University of Arizona believe this is forensic evidence of a titanic collision between two asteroid-sized bodies orbiting a nearby star, Fomalhaut.
Zooming through space, the first bonafide interstellar comet discovered passing through our solar system is yielding chemical clues to its origin. An abundance of carbon monoxide contained in comet Borisov suggests it was born around a cool red dwarf star.
Is the future of personalized medicine out of this world? Cedars-Sinai is trying to find out by launching special stem cells into space to see if they multiply better there. The Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute is partnering with Space Tango of Lexington, Kentucky, to send induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to the International Space Station. The first flight for the project, funded by a $1.5 million award from NASA, could occur as early as next year.
Cloud cover is often characterized in simple terms, such as cloudy, partly cloudy or clear. This does not provide accurate information for estimating the amount of sunlight available for solar power plants. In this week’s Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, a new method is reported for estimating cloud optical properties using data from recently launched satellites. This new technique is known as Spectral Cloud Optical Property Estimation, or SCOPE.
California’s nitrous oxide (NO₂) air pollution has been reduced by a combination of the state’s COVID-19 lockdown and naturally occurring effects, according to an atmospheric scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH)
UC San Diego and Space Tango received a NASA award to develop the first dedicated stem cell research laboratory within the International Space Station.
Peering into the darkness to see what we could not previously see, the Hubble Space Telescope has been delighting scientists and the general public with revealing details and images of galaxies and celestial phenomena. The American Institute of Physics recognizes and celebrates the momentous occasion of the 30th anniversary of its launch and Physics Today is highlighting the anniversary in its April issue with a look back at the history of the telescope and analysis of Hubble’s discoveries over the past 30 years.
A team of astronomers have found the best evidence yet that the culprit in a stellar homicide is a mid-sized black hole, the long-sought “missing link” in the black hole family. Multiple lines of evidence pointed to the elusive type of black hole, including investigations using Hubble and Chandra.
In collaboration with Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), the Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR) at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) has a significant role in LEAP – the LargE Area burst Polarimeter – a mission that is one of four proposals approved by NASA for further review.
A team of astronomers using Hubble have found the most energetic outflows ever witnessed in the universe. These outflows emanate from quasars and tear across interstellar space like tsunamis, wreaking havoc on the galaxies in which the quasars live.
Irvine, Calif., March 18, 2020 – During the exceptionally warm Arctic summer of 2019, Greenland lost 600 billion tons of ice, enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2 millimeters in two months. On the opposite pole, Antarctica continued to lose mass in the Amundsen Sea Embayment and Antarctic Peninsula but saw some relief in the form of increased snowfall in Queen Maud Land, in the eastern part of the continent.
Rutgers researchers have discovered the origins of the protein structures responsible for metabolism: simple molecules that powered early life on Earth and serve as chemical signals that NASA could use to search for life on other planets. Their study, which predicts what the earliest proteins looked like 3.5 billion to 2.5 billion years ago, is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Rutgers student Julia Van Etten, whose @Couch_Microscopy Instagram page garnered more than 25,000 followers by showcasing microorganisms as art, is now working with NASA on research into how red algae can help explain the origins of life on Earth.
A team of researchers designed a computer algorithm based on slime mold behavior to generate a filamentary map of the universe, which they then confirmed with archival observations from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Launching no earlier than March 6 at 11:50 PM EST, the Johns Hopkins University will send heart muscle tissues, contained in a specially-designed tissue chip the size of a small cellphone, up to the microgravity environment of the International Space Station (ISS) for one month of observation.
Global Temperature Report: February 2020
NASA’s BIG Idea Challenge funds eight university teams to work on lunar payloads and study the Moon’s darkest reaches. A student team at Michigan Technological University takes their rover technology to the “dark side”. Not for evil — the polar craters…
The operations people behind the Space Telescope’s 30 years of breakthrough science are honored by the National Air and Space Museum.
Hubble Space Telescope observations suggest that the broad “brim” of the Sombrero galaxy may conceal a turbulent past. Clues to a rough-and tumble history lie in the galaxy’s extended halo.
The Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR) at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) will be central to the modeling and data crunching that follow the scheduled launch of NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission in 2024.
Global Temperature Report: January 2020
The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) will have a major role in exploring an expected massive data stream that will follow the launch of the European Space Agency (ESA) Solar Orbiter, a mission that will fly over the sun’s poles and on which UAH’s Dr. Gary Zank is a co-primary investigator.
A new study published late last year in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society explored the molecular gas within and surrounding the intracluster medium, which fills the space between galaxies in a galaxy cluster.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has studied the universe in infrared light since its launch in 2003, and at the end of this month its mission will come to an end — leading NASA and astronomers worldwide to reflect on the…
The new Psyche Mission Innovation Toolkit online course is designed to help learners understand the unique challenges of a diverse team and provides tools to help address these challenges and take actions to be more successful in working with others. Image by ASU Continuing and Professional Education
Astronomers using Hubble have made the most precise measurement yet of the universe’s expansion rate using the gravitational lensing method, which is independent
from the usual cosmic distance ladder.
Hubble observations suggest that orange stars, slightly cooler than our Sun, are better hangouts for life. There are more of them in our galaxy, they live much longer than our Sun, and unleash less deadly radiation than red dwarf stars.
Using Hubble and a new observing technique, astronomers have uncovered the smallest clumps of dark matter ever detected. Dark matter is an invisible
substance that makes up most of the universe’s mass and forms the scaffolding upon which galaxies are built.
A hybrid remotely operated vehicle developed by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) took the first known automated sample performed by a robotic arm in the ocean. Last month, an international team of researchers used one of WHOI’s underwater robots, Nereid Under Ice (NUI), to explore Kolumbo volcano, an active submarine volcano off Greece’s famed Santorini island.
Global Temperature Report: December 2019
Hubble has photographed a majestic spiral galaxy, UGC 2885, located 232 million light-years away. The galaxy is 2.5 times wider than our Milky Way and contains 10 times as many stars. Astronomers want to know how it got so big.
Astronomers and visualization specialists have combined the visible, infrared and X-ray vision of NASA’s Great Observatories to create a 3D representation of the dynamic Crab Nebula—the tattered remains of an exploded star.
NASA’s upcoming Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), scheduled for launch in the mid-2020s, will have the power to survey the sky 1,000 times faster than the Hubble Space Telescope, with Hubble-quality detail, in the near-infrared.
Engineering students at South Dakota State University are designing a drone large enough to carry a human for their capstone senior design project through a nearly $80,000 grant from NASA.
Deep in our Milky Way galaxy’s center, a candy cane emerges as the centerpiece of a new, colorful composite image from a NASA camera, just in time for the holidays.
To better understand large, disruptive snowstorms, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist will lead a NASA field campaign this winter to fly through major snowstorms along the East Coast. The multi-institutional team will observe snow as it forms in clouds to help with satellite monitoring of snowfall and ultimately improve forecasts.
Hubble captured interstellar comet 2I/Borisov streaking past the Sun in a pair of images taken on November 16 and December 9. It is the first confirmed interstellar comet known to have passed through the solar system.
Irvine, Calif., Dec. 12, 2019 – A University of California, Irvine-led team of glaciologists has unveiled the most accurate portrait yet of the contours of the land beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet – and, by doing so, has helped identify which regions of the continent are going to be more, or less, vulnerable to future climate warming.
The first published science from the Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP) instruments aboard NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP) poses a major challenge to our understanding of the dynamics of the near-sun solar wind.
NASA has a research grant with The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) to model how a spacecraft might be engineered to work with nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP), en route to an eventual test flight.
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