Heavens

Solar panels are the beacon of renewable energy, yet they are not getting as much light as they could be. Joshua Pearce from Michigan Technological University and a team from Queen's University in Canada have found a way to get more sun to shine on the panels and crank up the output by 30 percent or more.

"We expend a lot of blood, sweat and tears to make solar panels as efficient as possible," Pearce says. "We work so hard to get a fraction of a percent increase on the module level; double digit returns on the systems level was relatively easy."

The RapidScat instrument aboard the International Space Station analyzed Hurricane Olaf's winds in the Central Pacific Ocean.

RapidScat gathered wind speed and direction data on Olaf on Oct. 21 at 2000 UTC (8 p.m. EDT). RapidScat measured sustained winds around the center at more than 36 meters per second/70 knots/80.5 mph/129.6 kph). Hurricane force winds extend outward up to 30 miles (45 km) from the center and tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 155 miles (250 km).

COLUMBIA, Mo. ­-- Muscular dystrophy, which affects approximately 250,000 people in the U.S., occurs when damaged muscle tissue is replaced with fibrous, fatty or bony tissue and loses function. For years, scientists have searched for a way to successfully treat the most common form of the disease, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), which primarily affects boys. Now, a team of University of Missouri researchers have successfully treated dogs with DMD and say that human clinical trials are being planned in the next few years.

For the first time, astrophysicists are able to determine the presence of strong magnetic fields deep inside pulsating giant stars. Magnetic fields have important consequences in all stages of stellar evolution, from a star's formation to its demise.

A consortium of international researchers, including several from UC Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP), used asteroseismology -- a discipline similar to seismology -- to track waves traveling through stars in order to determine their inner properties. Their findings appear in the journal Science.

It has been a busy season in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean, tropically speaking. The twenty-sixth tropical depression of the western North Pacific Ocean hurricane season formed and NASA's Aqua satellite saw it come together.

At 03:20 UTC on October 22, 2015 (11:20 p.m. EDT, Oct. 21), NASA's Aqua satellite passed over newborn Tropical Depression 26W. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer that flies aboard Aqua captured visible image of the storm.

Extremely heavy rainfall from the once Super Typhoon Koppu has caused deadly flooding and mudslides in the Philippines. The Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM core satellite estimates rainfall totals from space and that data was used to create rainfall maps at NASA. By October 21, Koppu had weakened to a depression and continued slowly moving away from the northern Philippines.

The Death Star of the movie Star Wars may be fictional, but planetary destruction is real. Astronomers announced today that they have spotted a large, rocky object disintegrating in its death spiral around a distant white dwarf star. The discovery also confirms a long-standing theory behind the source of white dwarf "pollution" by metals.

"This is something no human has seen before," says lead author Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "We're watching a solar system get destroyed."

When a star comes too close to a black hole, the intense gravity of the black hole results in tidal forces that can rip the star apart. In these events, called tidal disruptions, some of the stellar debris is flung outward at high speeds, while the rest falls toward the black hole. This causes a distinct X-ray flare that can last for years.

Within modern cosmology, the Big Bang marks the beginning of the universe and the creation of matter, space and time about 13.8 billion years ago. Since then, the visible structures of the cosmos have developed: billions of galaxies which bind gas, dust, stars and planets with gravity and host supermassive black holes in their centres. But how could these visible structures have formed from the universe's initial conditions?

Astronomers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum have compiled the largest astronomical image to date. The picture of the Milky Way contains 46 billion pixels. In order to view it, researchers headed by Prof Dr Rolf Chini from the Chair of Astrophysics have provided an online tool. The image contains data gathered in astronomical observations over a period of five years.

Five-year observation period at the university observatory

Data is ubiquitous. In the area of heath, there are growing data streams directly initiated by patients through their activities on the internet and on social networks and other related ones such as electronic medical records and pharmacy sales data. These so-called Novel Data Streams (NDS) are very appealing to public health surveillance officials due to their ease of collection.

Mass extinctions occurring over the past 260 million years were likely caused by comet and asteroid showers, scientists conclude in a new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

For more than 30 years, scientists have argued about a controversial hypothesis relating to periodic mass extinctions and impact craters--caused by comet and asteroid showers--on Earth.

In 14 papers published in the October 2015 Astrophysical Journal Supplement, scientists present findings from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, mission providing the most definitive analyses, theories and results about local interstellar space to date.

NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites saw Hurricane Olaf move west over the longitude line of 140 degrees that separates the Eastern Pacific from the Central Pacific. On October 20, Olaf strengthened to a Category four hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Scale.

On Oct. 19 at 19:35 UTC (3:35 p.m. EDT) the MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite saw Hurricane Olaf moving into the central Pacific Ocean with a visible eye. Powerful thunderstorms circled the eye and extended in a thick band in the eastern quadrant from north to south.

Earth came early to the party in the evolving universe. According to a new theoretical study, when our solar system was born 4.6 billion years ago only eight percent of the potentially habitable planets that will ever form in the universe existed. And, the party won't be over when the sun burns out in another 6 billion years. The bulk of those planets -- 92 percent -- have yet to be born.

This conclusion is based on an assessment of data collected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the prolific planet-hunting Kepler space observatory.