Heavens

An abundance of aerosol particles in the atmosphere can increase the lifespans of large storm clouds by delaying rainfall, making the clouds grow larger and live longer, and producing more extreme storms when the rain finally does come, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin.

Although astronomers often refer to brown dwarfs as "failed stars," scientists at the University of Delaware have discovered that at least one of these dim celestial objects can emit powerful flashes of light.

A research team led by John Gizis, professor in UD's Department of Physics and Astronomy, discovered an "ultracool" brown dwarf known as 2MASS 0335+23, with a temperature of only 4400°F that can generate flares stronger than the sun's. Gizis reported on the finding on June 13 at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego.

San Francisco State University astronomer Stephen Kane is among a team of researchers who have discovered a new planet that orbits two suns simultaneously. The discovery was announced today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego.

Two volunteer participants in an international citizen science project have had a rare galaxy cluster that they found named after them.

The pair pieced together the huge C-shaped structure from much smaller images of cosmic radio waves shown to them as part of the web-based program Radio Galaxy Zoo.

The discovery surprised the astronomers running the program, said the lead author of the study Dr Julie Banfield of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) at The Australian National University (ANU).

SAN DIEGO (June 13, 2016)--If you cast your eyes toward the constellation Cygnus, you'll be looking in the direction of the largest planet yet discovered around a double-star system. It's too faint to see with the naked eye, but a team led by astronomers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and San Diego State University used the Kepler Space Telescope to identify the new planet, Kepler-1647 b. The discovery was announced today in San Diego, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

If you cast your eyes toward the constellation Cygnus, you'll be looking in the direction of the largest planet yet discovered around a double-star system. It's too faint to see with the naked eye, but a team led by astronomers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and San Diego State University (SDSU) in California, used NASA's Kepler Space Telescope to identify the new planet, Kepler-1647b.

Crowdsourcing is used for everything from raising funds to locating the best burger in town. The practice of enlisting a large group of people to provide a service, information or a contribution to a project--most often via the internet--is a defining feature of our era.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Utility companies or others planning to install renewable energy systems such as solar and wind farms have to decide whether to include large-scale energy storage systems that can capture power when it's available and release it on demand. This decision may be critical to the future growth of renewable energy.

In the race towards the discovery of a ninth planet in our solar system, scientists from around the world strive to calculate its orbit using the tracks left by the small bodies that move well beyond Neptune. Now, astronomers from Spain and Cambridge University have confirmed, with new calculations, that the orbits of the six extreme trans-Neptunian objects that served as a reference to announce the existence of Planet Nine are not as stable as it was thought.

The Milky Way, the brilliant river of stars that has dominated the night sky and human imaginations since time immemorial, is but a faded memory to one third of humanity and 80 percent of Americans, according to a new global atlas of light pollution produced by Italian and American scientists.

Light pollution is one of the most pervasive forms of environmental alteration. In most developed countries, the ubiquitous presence of artificial lights creates a luminous fog that swamps the stars and constellations of the night sky.

HOUSTON -- (June 9, 2016) -- Astronomers searching for the galaxy's youngest planets have found compelling evidence for one unlike any other, a newborn "hot Jupiter" whose outer layers are being torn away by the star it orbits every 11 hours.

Intermodal transportation -- which uses a combination of transportation modes, such as trucks, trains and ships, to move everyday goods -- is the backbone of many supply chains, and while the industry is seeing tremendous growth, it also faces a severe container capacity shortage.

Ting Luo, a PhD candidate in operations management in the Naveen Jindal School of Management, recently examined how managers in intermodal marketing companies should use dynamic forecasting to coordinate daily operations, enhance efficiency and improve profitability.

Data from NASA's Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) were used to estimate rainfall from Tropical Storm Colin over a two day period before it dissipated.

Athens, Ga. - A new study provides the first evidence that links melting ice in Greenland to a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification--faster warming of the Arctic compared to the rest of the Northern Hemisphere as sea ice disappears.

The findings show that the predicted effects of Arctic amplification, as described in previous studies, occurred over northern Greenland during summer 2015, including a northern swing of the jet stream that reached latitudes never before recorded in Greenland at that time of year.

Observing very distant objects in the universe is a challenge because the light which reaches us is extremely faint. Something similar occurs with objects which are not so distant but have very low surface brightness. Measuring this brightness is difficult due to the low contrast with the sky background. Recently a study led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) set out to test the limit of observation which can be reached using the largest optical-infrared telescope in the world: the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC).