Heavens

Because it has no source of energy, a dead star — known as a white dwarf — will eventually cool down and fade away. But circumstantial evidence suggests that white dwarfs can still support habitable planets, says Prof. Dan Maoz of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy.

Pasadena, CA.— Blazars are the brightest of active galactic nuclei, and many emit very high-energy gamma rays. New observations of a blazar known as PKS 1424+240 show that it is the most-distant known source of very high-energy gamma rays. But its emission spectrum appears highly unusual.

Astronomers have found a galaxy turning gas into stars with almost 100 percent efficiency, a rare phase of galaxy evolution that is the most extreme yet observed. The findings come from the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer in the French Alps, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

COLLEGE PARK, MD - The NASA Hubble Space Telescope has given astronomers their clearest view yet of Comet ISON, a newly-discovered sun grazer comet that may light up the sky later this year, or come so close to the Sun that it disintegrates. A University of Maryland-led research team is closely following ISON, which offers a rare opportunity to witness a comet's evolution as it makes its first-ever journey through the inner solar system.

Many collisions occur between asteroids and other objects in our solar system, but scientists are not always able to detect or track these impacts from Earth. The "rogue debris" created by such collisions can sometimes catch us by surprise.

MAYWOOD, Ill. -- A new 3-D motion detection system could help identify baseball pitchers who are at risk for shoulder injuries, according to a new study.

The system can be used on the field, and requires only a laptop computer. Other systems that evaluate pitchers' throwing motions require cameras and other equipment and generally are confined to indoor use.

Loyola University Medical Center sports medicine surgeon Pietro Tonino, MD, is a co-author of the study, published in the journal Musculoskeletal Surgery.

Jerusalem, April 23, 2013 -- Scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have discovered why Heteroxenia corals pulsate. Their work, which resolves an old scientific mystery, appears in the current issue of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US).

In July 1994, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) hit Jupiter and left visible scars on the Jovian disk for weeks. This spectacular event was the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision in the solar system, and it was followed worldwide by professional and amateur astronomers.

To Robert Green, light contains more than meets the eye: It contains fingerprints of materials that can be detected by sensors that capture the unique set of reflected wavelengths. Scientists have used the technique, called imaging spectroscopy, to learn about water on the moon, minerals on Mars and the composition of exoplanets. Green's favorite place to apply the technique, however, is right here on the chemically rich Earth, which is just what he and colleagues achieved this spring during NASA's Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (HyspIRI) airborne campaign.

An image from an instrument aboard NASA's Landsat Data Continuity Mission or LDCM satellite may look like a typical black-and-white image of a dramatic landscape, but it tells a story of temperature. The dark waters of the Salton Sea pop in the middle of the Southern California desert. Crops create a checkerboard pattern stretching south to the Mexican border.

On April 20, 2013, at 2:54 a.m. EDT, the sun erupted with a coronal mass ejection (CME), a solar phenomenon that can send billions of tons of solar particles into space that can affect electronic systems in satellites. Experimental NASA research models show that the CME left the sun at 500 miles per second and is not Earth-directed. However, it may pass by NASA's Messenger and STEREO-A satellites, and their mission operators have been notified.

A few years ago, researchers revealed that the universe is expanding at a much faster rate than originally believed — a discovery that earned a Nobel Prize in 2011. But measuring the rate of this acceleration over large distances is still challenging and problematic, says Prof. Hagai Netzer of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy.

It's a bit like learning the secrets of the family that lived in your house in the 1800s by examining dust particles they left behind in cracks in the floorboards.

By looking at specks of dust carried to earth in meteorites, scientists are able to study stars that winked out of existence long before our solar system formed.

This technique for studying the stars – sometimes called astronomy in the lab — gives scientists information that cannot be obtained by the traditional techniques of astronomy, such as telescope observations or computer modeling.

STANFORD, Calif. — Most people know that the way to stay healthy is to exercise and eat right, but millions of Americans struggle to meet those goals, or even decide which to change first.

Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that focusing on changing exercise and diet at the same time gives a bigger boost than tackling them sequentially. They also found that focusing on changing diet first — an approach that many weight-loss programs advocate — may actually interfere with establishing a consistent exercise routine.

A worrisome increase in obesity levels in much of the world suggests that current methods of motivating people to eat healthier food and get more exercise are not all that successful. Much of today's research focuses on ways of delivering messages in order to obtain the best sustained adherence to these two key health behaviors. One such study by Abby King and colleagues from the Stanford School of Medicine in California looks at the timing of giving exercise and nutrition advice. The researchers found that a higher success rate might be possible when the advice is given at the same time.