Heavens

Washington, D.C.— An international team of astronomers, including five Carnegie scientists, reports the discovery of two new planets orbiting a very old star that is near to our own Sun. One of these planets orbits the star at the right distance to allow liquid water to exist on its surface, a key ingredient to support life. Their work is published by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Cutting-edge observations with the 1.6-meter telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) in California have taken research into the structure and activity of the Sun to new levels of understanding. Operated by New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), the telescope at Big Bear is the most powerful ground-based instrument dedicated to studying the Sun.

The 1.6 meter telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) in California has given researchers unparalleled capability for investigating phenomena such as solar flares. Operated by New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), the BBSO instrument is the most powerful ground-based telescope dedicated to studying the star closest to Earth.

Multi-wavelength observations of sunspots with the 1.6-meter telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) in California and aboard NASA's IRIS spacecraft have produced new and intriguing images of high-speed plasma flows and eruptions extending from the Sun's surface to the outermost layer of the solar atmosphere, the corona. Operated by New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), BBSO houses the largest ground-based telescope dedicated to solar research.

Prior to this survey, astronomers were in a curious position. They knew a lot about star formation occurring in nearby galaxies thanks to UV telescope facilities such as NASA's Galex observatory, which operated from 2003 to 2013. And, thanks to Hubble's near-infrared and visible capability, they had also studied star birth in the most distant galaxies. We see these distant galaxies in their most primitive stages due to the vast amount of time it takes their light to reach us.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Patients trying to navigate today's complex medical system with its costly laboratory analyses might prefer a pain-free home diagnostic device, worn on the wrist, that can analyze, continuously record and immediately remedy low electrolyte levels.

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an infrared image of Tropical Depression 2E that revealed high, very cold cloud top temperatures. Strong thunderstorms with cold cloud top temperatures that reach high into the troposphere have the potential to drop heavy rainfall amounts, and the National Hurricane Center has forecast large rainfall for the southern region of Mexico over the next couple of days.

A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for Salina Cruz to the Mexico and Guatemala border as the depression remained stationary near the southwestern coast of Mexico on June 3.

As a kind of ground-based optical astrometric instrument, zenith telescope observes stars near zenith, which substantially reduces the influence of normal atmospheric refraction. Its high-precision observations can be used to calculate astronomical latitude and longitude, which are mainly applied in mobile measurement for deflection of the vertical, long-term measurement for the variations of the vertical, and related researches of astronomical seismology.

The big data era bring the confusions, challenges and opportunities to the modeling and simulation field tightly associated with big data. The Chinese Association for System Simulation undertook the 81st new ideas and new theories academic salon of China Association for Science and Technology. This salon, directed by Li Bohu (academician of Chinese Academy of Science) and Hu Xiaofeng (professor of National Defense University, PLA) as the leading scientists, called about 20 specialists and scholars from all the country together.

Astronomers using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have produced a spectacular image revealing new details of violent collisions involving at least four clusters of galaxies. Combined with an earlier image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the new observations show a complex region more than 5 billion light-years from Earth where the collisions are triggering a host of phenomena that scientists still are working to understand.

WHAT:

By analyzing the blood of almost 100 treated and untreated HIV-infected volunteers, a team of scientists has identified previously unknown characteristics of B cells in the context of HIV infection. B cells are the immune system cells that make antibodies to HIV and other pathogens. The findings augment the current understanding of how HIV disease develops and have implications for the timing of treatment. Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, led the study.

At 2 p.m. EDT, the National Hurricane Center update noted that showers and thunderstorms associated with a low pressure area became better organized during the morning hours. System 93E is located 250 miles south-southeast of Salina Cruz, Mexico,

Because the environmental conditions are conducive for additional development, The National Hurricane Center expects a tropical depression may likely form later today or tonight as the low moves slowly northeastward or northward.

Astronomers announced today that they have discovered a new type of planet - a rocky world weighing 17 times as much as Earth. Theorists believed such a world couldn't form because anything so hefty would grab hydrogen gas as it grew and become a Jupiter-like gas giant. This planet, though, is all solids and much bigger than previously discovered "super-Earths," making it a "mega-Earth."

The planets of our solar system come in two basic flavors, like vanilla and chocolate ice cream. We have small, rocky terrestrials like Earth and Mars, and large gas giants like Neptune and Jupiter. We're missing the astronomical equivalent of strawberry ice cream - planets between about one and four times the size of Earth. NASA's Kepler mission has discovered that these types of planets are very common around other stars.

Life in the universe might be even rarer than we thought. Recently, astronomers looking for potentially habitable worlds have targeted red dwarf stars because they are the most common type of star, comprising 80 percent of the stars in the universe. But a new study shows that harsh space weather might strip the atmosphere of any rocky planet orbiting in a red dwarf's habitable zone.

"A red-dwarf planet faces an extreme space environment, in addition to other stresses like tidal locking," says Ofer Cohen of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).