Heavens

This is the sharpest image ever taken by ALMA -- sharper than is routinely achieved in visible light with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. It shows the protoplanetary disc surrounding the young star HL Tauri. These new ALMA observations reveal substructures within the disc that have never been seen before and even show the possible positions of planets forming in the dark patches within the system.

(Photo Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO))

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Astronomers have captured the best image ever of planet formation around an infant star as part of the testing and verification process for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array's (ALMA) new high-resolution capabilities.

This revolutionary new image reveals in astonishing detail the planet-forming disk surrounding HL Tau, a Sun-like star located approximately 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.

A recently launched European satellite could reveal tens of thousands of new planets within the next few years, and provide scientists with a far better understanding of the number, variety and distribution of planets in our galaxy, according to research published today.

BUFFALO, N.Y. – In the past decade, online gambling has exploded and several states, including New York, have approved measures to legalize various types of gambling. So, it's only natural that the number of people with gambling problems has also increased, right?

Wrong, say researchers at the University at Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions (RIA).

Hurricane Vance was a hurricane on Nov. 4 when the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite and the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission satellite passed overhead and measured its rainfall from space. TRMM and GPM revealed areas of heavy rain within the storm before it weakened to a depression and made landfall on Nov. 5.

Typhoon Nuri continued moving in a northeasterly direction passing the island of Iwo To, Japan when NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible picture of Typhoon Nuri on Nov. 5 at 4:10 UTC (11:10 p.m. EST, Nov. 4).

This news release is available in Japanese.

The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 5:40 p.m. EST on Nov. 3, 2014. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 4, 2014--If you took the junk from the back of your closet and combined it with the dirty laundry already on your floor, you would have an even bigger mess. While this principle will likely always hold true for our bedrooms, it turns out that in certain situations, combining messes can actually reduce the disorder of the whole. An international team of researchers from Slovenia and Iran has identified a set of conditions in which adding disorder to a system makes it more orderly.

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Vance on Nov. 3 as it started moving in a northeasterly direction toward the northwestern coast of Mexico. On Nov. 4, a Tropical Storm Watch was in effect from Mazatlan northward to Topolobampo, Mexico. Hurricane Vance is forecast to make landfall in northwestern mainland Mexico on Nov. 5.

High clouds had moved over Super Typhoon Nuri's eye early on Nov. 4 when NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead as the storm was undergoing eyewall replacement.

Eyewall replacement occurs when the thunderstorms that circle the eye of a powerful typhoons or hurricanes are replaced by other thunderstorms. Basically, a new eye begins to develop around the old eye. Many intense hurricanes undergo at least one of these eyewall replacements during their existence.

If you can uniformly break the symmetry of nanorod pairs in a colloidal solution, you're a step ahead of the game toward achieving new and exciting metamaterial properties. But traditional thermodynamic -driven colloidal assembly of these metamaterials, which are materials defined by their non-naturally-occurring properties, often result in structures with high degree of symmetries in the bulk material. In this case, the energy requirement does not allow the structure to break its symmetry.

For years, astronomers have been puzzled by a bizarre object in the center of the Milky Way that was believed to be a hydrogen gas cloud headed toward our galaxy's enormous black hole.

Having studied it during its closest approach to the black hole this summer, UCLA astronomers believe that they have solved the riddle of the object widely known as G2.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — When NASA's Dawn spacecraft visited the asteroid Vesta in 2011, it showed that deep grooves that circle the asteroid's equator like a cosmic belt were probably caused by a massive impact on Vesta's south pole. Now, using a super high-speed cannon at NASA's Ames Research Center, Brown University researchers have shed new light on the violent chain of events deep in Vesta's interior that formed those surface grooves, some of which are wider than the Grand Canyon.

Scientists have identified a mechanism that could turn out to be a big contributor to warming in the Arctic region and melting sea ice.

The research was led by scientists from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). They studied a long-wavelength region of the electromagnetic spectrum called far infrared. It's invisible to our eyes but accounts for about half the energy emitted by the Earth's surface. This process balances out incoming solar energy.