Heavens

Pasadena, CA— A team of astronomers including Carnegie's Ian Thompson have managed to improve the measurement of the distance to our nearest neighbor galaxy and, in the process, refine an astronomical calculation that helps measure the expansion of the universe. Their work is published March 7 by Nature.

These days the core of the Milky Way galaxy is a pretty tame place...cosmically speaking. The galactic black hole at the center is a sleeping giant. Existing stars are peacefully circling. Although conditions are favorable, there doesn't even seem to be much new star formation going on.

Antarctica's topography began changing from flat to fjord-filled starting about 34 million years ago, according to a new report from a University of Arizona-led team of geoscientists.

Knowing when Antarctica's topography started shifting from a flat landscape to one with glaciers, fjords and mountains is important for modeling how the Antarctic ice sheet affects global climate and sea-level rise.

Washington, D.C.—New theoretical modeling by Carnegie's Alan Boss provides clues to how the gas giant planets in our solar system—Jupiter and Saturn—might have formed and evolved. His work was published recently by the Astrophysical Journal.

New stars are surrounded by rotating gas disks during the early stages of their lives. Gas giant planets are thought to form in the presence of these disks.

Montreal, March 5, 2013 – Pulp and paper producers are among Canada's most important industries and also one of the largest producers of wastewater. Estimating the greenhouse gas emissions in this wastewater has become a priority for the industry.

PASADENA, Calif.—If you could lick the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa, you would actually be sampling a bit of the ocean beneath. So says Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Brown—known as the Pluto killer for discovering a Kuiper-belt object that led to the demotion of Pluto from planetary status—and Kevin Hand from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have found the strongest evidence yet that salty water from the vast liquid ocean beneath Europa's frozen exterior actually makes its way to the surface.

Homes in neighborhoods that incorporate protected open space command prices 20 to 29 percent higher than those without open space, according to a new study by a Colorado State University multidisciplinary research team that included Wildlife Conservation Society scientist, Sarah Reed.

The gravitational field surrounding this massive cluster of galaxies, Abell 68, acts as a natural lens in space to brighten and magnify the light coming from very distant background galaxies.

Like a fun house mirror, lensing creates a fantasy landscape of arc-like images and mirror images of background galaxies. The foreground cluster is 2 billion light-years away, and the lensed images come from galaxies far behind it.

Abell 68, pictured here in infrared light, is one of these galaxy clusters, and it greatly boosts the power of Hubble, extending the telescope's ability to observe distant and faint objects [1]. The fuzzy collection of blobs in the middle and upper left of the image is a swarm of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars and vast amounts of dark matter.

Though almost unheard of on Earth, amorphous ice is so widespread in interstellar space that it could be the most common form of water in the universe. Left over from the age when the solar system was born, it is scattered across vast distances, often as particles no bigger than grains of dust. It's also been spotted in comets and icy moons.

The secret to making amorphous ice in the lab, Gerakines finds, is to limit the layer to a depth of about half a micrometer—thinner than a strand of spider's silk.

U.S. researchers, including a trio from Los Alamos National Laboratory, have witnessed the mysterious appearance of a relatively long-lived zone of high-energy electrons stored between Earth's Van Allen radiation belts.

The surprising findings, discovered by NASA's Van Allen Probes (formerly known as the Radiation Belt Storm Probes), were outlined Thursday in Science Express and during a press conference at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. The research was led by Dan Baker of the University of Colorado, Boulder, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

Researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Ottawa have applied a recently developed technique to directly measure for the first time the polarization states of light. Their work both overcomes some important challenges of Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle and also is applicable to qubits, the building blocks of quantum information theory.

They report their results in a paper published this week in Nature Photonics.

Changes made by humans to the natural landscapes can often compromise ecosystems, which paradoxically are vital for human survival. Pollination of crops by wild insects is one such vulnerable ecosystem service, as wild insects are declining in many agricultural landscapes. The study, recently published in Science, focused on understanding whether the ongoing loss of wild insects impacts crop harvest.

The term "big data" is defined as a huge amount of digital information, so big and so complex that normal database technology cannot process it. It is not only scientific institutes like the nuclear research center CERN that often store huge amounts of data ("Big Data"). Companies like Google and Facebook do this as well, and analyze it to make better strategic decisions for their business. How successful such an attempt can be was shown in a New York Times article published last year.

After most NASA science spacecraft launches, researchers wait patiently for months as instruments on board are turned on one at a time, slowly ramped up to full power, and tested to make sure they work at full capacity. It's a rite of passage for any new satellite in space, and such a schedule was in place for the Van Allen Probes when they launched on Aug. 30, 2012, to study two giant belts of radiation that surround Earth.