Heavens

Sonamu has left the Philippines and Palawan behind and NASA satellite imagery showed the storm intensified into a tropical storm while moving through the easternmost South China Sea.

At Jan. 4, 2013 at 0535 UTC (12:35 a.m. EST), a visible image of Tropical Storm Sonamu was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently selected Southwest Research Institute to provide the flight low-rate crosslink wireless communications platform for the System F6 Program.

A large new collection of space photos taken at wavelengths that are invisible to the human eye and blocked by Earth's atmosphere has been released as a New Year's gift to the people of Earth by NASA and Penn State University. The images were captured by a telescope on board NASA's Swift satellite, whose science and flight operations are controlled by Penn State from the Mission Operations Center in State College, Pennsylvania, using the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope, which resulted from Penn State's collaboration with the Mullard Space Science Laboratory of the University College-London.

The first Tropical Depression of 2013 formed the western North Pacific Ocean today, and NASA's Terra satellite captured an infrared image of the "birth."

Tropical Depression Sonamu, otherwise known as Tropical Depression 01W developed near 8.6 north latitude and 118.6 east longitude, about 185 nautical miles (213 miles/342.6 km) northwest of Zamboanga, Philippines. Sonamu's center is located in the Sulu Sea and is expected to cross the southern end of Palawan before moving into the open waters of the South China Sea.

NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites captured visible and infrared data on Tropical Cyclone Dumile as it slammed into the islands of La Reunion and Mauritius in the Southern Indian Ocean.

The protoplanet Vesta has been witness to an eventful past: images taken by the framing camera onboard NASA's space probe Dawn show two enormous craters in the southern hemisphere. The images were obtained during Dawn's year-long visit to Vesta that ended in September 2012. These huge impacts not only altered Vesta's shape, but also its surface composition. Scientists under the lead of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau in Germany have shown that impacting small asteroids delivered dark, carbonaceous material to the protoplanet.

PASADENA, Calif.—Look up at the night sky and you'll see stars, sure. But you're also seeing planets—billions and billions of them. At least.

That's the conclusion of a new study by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that provides yet more evidence that planetary systems are the cosmic norm. The team made their estimate while analyzing planets orbiting a star called Kepler-32—planets that are representative, they say, of the vast majority in the galaxy and thus serve as a perfect case study for understanding how most planets form.

Because modern computers have to depict the real world with digital representations of numbers instead of physical analogues, to simulate the continuous passage of time they have to digitize time into small slices. This kind of simulation is essential in disciplines from medical and biological research, to new materials, to fundamental considerations of quantum mechanics, and the fact that it inevitably introduces errors is an ongoing problem for scientists.

Tropical Storm Freda may no longer be a tropical storm, but as a low pressure area it is bringing rainfall and gusty winds to New Caledonia. Two NASA satellites captured two different looks at the storm.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have seen a key stage in the birth of giant planets for the first time. Vast streams of gas are flowing across a gap in the disc of material around a young star. These are the first direct observations of such streams, which are expected to be created by giant planets guzzling gas as they grow. The result is published on 2 January 2013 in the journal Nature.

Seen from Earth, the outflows stretch about two-thirds across the sky from horizon to horizon.The outflows correspond to a "haze" of microwave emission previously spotted by the WMAP and Planck space telescopes and regions of gamma-ray emission detected with NASA's Fermi space telescope in 2010, which were dubbed the "Fermi Bubbles".

The WMAP, Planck and Fermi observations did not provide enough evidence to indicate definitively the source of the radiation they detected, but the new Parkes observations do.

Astronomers have used the ALMA telescope to get their first glimpse of a fascinating stage of star formation in which planets forming around a young star are helping the star itself continue to grow, resolving a longstanding mystery. The young system, about 450 light-years from Earth, is revealing its complex gravitational dance to the ever-sharpening vision of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), scheduled for completion this year.

Enormous outflows of charged particles from the centre of our Galaxy, stretching more than halfway across the sky and moving at supersonic speeds, have been detected and mapped with CSIRO's 64-m Parkes radio telescope.

Corresponding to the "Fermi Bubbles" found in 2010, the recent observations of the phenomenon were made by a team of astronomers from Australia, the USA, Italy and The Netherlands, with the findings reported in today's issue of Nature.

A team of international archaeologists including Christian Cloke of the University of Cincinnati is providing new insights into successful and extensive water management and agricultural production in and around the ancient desert city of Petra, located in present-day Jordan. Ongoing investigations, of which Cloke is a part, are led by Professor Susan Alcock of the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project (BUPAP).

Magnets have practically become everyday objects. Earlier on, however, the universe consisted only of nonmagnetic elements and particles. Just how the magnetic forces came into existence has been researched by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Schlickeiser at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. In the journal Physical Review Letters, he describes a new mechanism for the magnetisation of the universe even before the emergence of the first stars.

No permanent magnets in the early universe