Heavens

Gradual melting of winter snow helps feed water to farms, cities and ecosystems across much of the world, but this resource may soon be critically imperiled. In a new study, scientists have identified snow-dependent drainage basins across the northern hemisphere currently serving 2 billion people that run the risk of declining supplies in the coming century. The basins take in large parts of the American West, southern Europe, the Mideast and central Asia. They range from productive U.S. farm land to war-torn regions already in the grip of long-term water shortages.

Ann Arbor, MI, November 12, 2015 - In the U.S. the chances of being arrested are one in three by age 23. Youth offenders face a greater risk for early death than the rest of the population; according to a new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, that risk increases as a young person becomes more involved in the judicial system. The more serious and prolonged a youth's interaction with the justice system becomes, the more likely he or she is to die prematurely.

The collection of rocky planets orbiting distant stars has just grown by one, and the latest discovery is the most intriguing one to date. The newfound world, although hot as an oven, is cool enough to potentially host an atmosphere. If it does, it's close enough (only 39 light-years away) that we could study that atmosphere in detail with the Hubble Space Telescope and future observatories like the Giant Magellan Telescope.

Scientists have discovered a new exoplanet that, in the language of "Star Wars," would be the polar opposite of frigid Hoth, and even more inhospitable than the deserts of Tatooine. But instead of residing in a galaxy far, far away, this new world is, galactically speaking, practically next door.

An international team of astronomers, led researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Australian National University, have identified some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, which could contain vital clues about the early Universe, including an indication of how the first stars died.

Astronomers have discovered the oldest known stars, dating from before the Milky Way Galaxy formed, when the Universe was just 300 million years old.

The stars, found near the centre of the Milky Way, are surprisingly pure but contain material from an even earlier star, which died in an enormous explosion called hypernova.

The sight of an asteroid being ripped apart by a dead star and forming a glowing debris ring has been captured in an image for the first time.

Comprised of dust particles and debris, the rings are formed by the star's gravity tearing apart asteroids that came too close.

Gas produced by collisions among the debris within the ring is illuminated by ultraviolet rays from the star, causing it to emit a dark red glow which the researchers observed and turned into the image of the ring.

Led by Christopher Manser, a PhD student at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, the team used data from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and other observatories to study the shattered remains of an asteroid around a stellar remnant -- a white dwarf (called SDSS J1228+1040) [1].

The long, shallow grooves lining the surface of Phobos are likely early signs of the structural failure that will ultimately destroy this moon of Mars.

Orbiting a mere 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) above the surface of Mars, Phobos is closer to its planet than any other moon in the solar system. Mars' gravity is drawing in Phobos, the larger of its two moons, by about 6.6 feet (2 meters) every hundred years. Scientists expect the moon to be pulled apart in 30 to 50 million years.

The planet Mercury is being pelted regularly by bits of dust from an ancient comet, a new study has concluded. This has a discernible effect in the planet's tenuous atmosphere and may lead to a new paradigm on how these airless bodies maintain their ethereal envelopes.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10, 2015 -- It's a big week for gamers now that the long-anticipated Fallout 4 video game is being released. The series takes place in a world decades after nuclear war has destroyed most of civilization. Only those who hid in fallout shelters survived. While this idea works in a fictional game universe, could humans really survive for years or even decades in such a shelter? This week, Reactions looks at the basics of survival in a world riddled with radiation.

A presentation by human factors/ergonomics researchers at the HFES 2015 International Annual Meeting in Los Angeles in October explained how a voter's positive or negative experience with a particular voting system is influenced not only by perceptions of trust and aesthetics but also by the polling environment itself.

Recent experiments at the Large Plasma Device (LAPD) at the University of California, Los Angeles, have successfully excited elusive plasma waves, known as whistler-mode chorus waves, which have hitherto only been observed in the Earth's near-space environment. These chorus waves were accidentally discovered as early as World War I by radio operators deploying long lines intended to intercept enemy communication, and were subsequently dubbed "dawn chorus" since the sound of the radio signal when played through loudspeakers sounded like the distant chirping of a rookery of birds.

Since the late 1980s, scientists have discovered nearly 5,000 planetary bodies orbiting stars other than the sun. But astronomers are still working on what exactly we should call them.

Today at an American Astronomical Society meeting, UCLA professor Jean-Luc Margot described a simple test that can be used to clearly separate planets from other bodies like dwarf planets and minor planets.

Tropical Cyclone Megh became the second tropical cyclone to make landfall in Yemen in one week. As Megh began land falling just north of Aden, Yemen, NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead and captured an image of the tropical storm over the southeastern coast.