Heavens

August 13, the Atlantic tropics are quieter than they were the previous week, when four low pressure areas were marching across the ocean basin. Satellite imagery shows two lows in the Atlantic as Tropical Storm Hector spins in the Eastern Pacific Ocean with System 95E near the Mexican coast.

On July 23, 2012, a massive cloud of solar material erupted off the sun's right side, zooming out into space, passing one of NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft along the way. Using the STEREO data, scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. clocked this giant cloud, known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME, as traveling between 1,800 and 2,200 miles per second as it left the sun.

RICHLAND, Wash. -- An analysis of a decade's worth of tropical cyclones shows that when hurricanes blow over ocean regions swamped by fresh water, the conditions can unexpectedly intensify the storm. Although the probability that hurricanes will hit such conditions is small, ranging from 10 to 23 percent, the effect is potentially large: Hurricanes can become 50 percent more intense, researchers report in a study appearing this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

Aug. 10, 2012 – Gamma-ray photons seen emanating from the center of the Milky Way galaxy are consistent with the intriguing possibility that dark-matter particles are annihilating each other in space, according to research submitted by UC Irvine astrophysicists to the American Physical Society journal Physical Review D.

Four tropical systems are marching across the Atlantic Ocean basin on August 10, 2012. NASA's GOES Project, located at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. has been busy creating images and animations of the four tropical cyclones, Ernesto, the remnants of Florence, Tropical Depression 7, and System 93L.

The Atlantic Ocean hurricane season is in full swing and the Eastern Pacific seems like it's trying to catch up. On August 10, NOAA's GOES-15 satellite captured Tropical Storm Gilma and a low pressure area that was once the Atlantic Basin's Tropical storm Ernesto, now moving off the western Mexican coast.

High, cold cloud tops with bitter cold temperatures are indicators that there's a lot of strength in the uplift of air within a tropical cyclone. NASA's Aqua satellite passed by Hurricane Gilma and saw a concentrated area of very cold cloud tops.

In science fiction novels, evil overlords and hostile aliens often threaten to vaporize the Earth. At the beginning of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the officiously bureaucratic aliens called Vogons, authors of the third-worst poetry in the universe, actually follow through on the threat, destroying the Earth to make way for a hyperspatial express route.

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite, known as TRMM can measure the rate rain is falling with a tropical cyclone from its orbit in space, and data from August 9 reveals areas of heavy rainfall in Tropical Storm Ernesto as it heads for a second landfall in Mexico.

Sea surface temperatures cooler than 80 degrees Fahrenheit can sap the strength from a tropical cyclone and Tropical Storm Kirogi is headed toward waters below that threshold on its track through the northwestern Pacific Ocean, according to data from NASA's Aqua satellite.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) has released the largest-ever three-dimensional map of massive galaxies and distant black holes, helping astronomers better explain the mysterious "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up 96 percent of the universe. According to SDSS-III scientific spokesperson and University of Pittsburgh assistant professor of physics and astronomy Michael Wood-Vasey, scientists using the map—titled Data Release 9 (DR9)— can retrace the Universe's history over the last seven billion years.

Dark matter was first proposed by the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s. He found that clusters of galaxies were filled with a mysterious dark matter that kept them from flying apart. At nearly the same time, Jan Oort in the Netherlands discovered that the density of matter near the Sun was nearly twice what could be explained by the presence of stars and gas alone.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) has released the largest three-dimensional map of massive galaxies and distant black holes ever created. The new map pinpoints the locations and distances of over a million galaxies. It covers a total volume equivalent to that of a cube four billion light-years on a side.

"We want to map the largest volume of the universe yet, and to use that map to understand how the expansion of the universe is accelerating," said Daniel Eisenstein (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), the director of SDSS-III.

Typhoon Haikui weakened to a tropical storm just before landfall in China. Eight hours after landfall, NASA's Aqua satellite still showed a strong and organized tropical storm moving inland.

NASA's TRMM satellite has been measuring the heavy rainfall in Ernesto, and some of the rainfall totals may reach one foot in Central America. NASA's Aqua satellite spotted a large area of the strong thunderstorms generating that heavy rainfall, wrapped around the storm's center. Ernesto made landfall in the Yucatan and is currently tracking west over land.

At 11:15 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, August 7, Belize radar indicated Ernesto made landfall along the southern Yucatan coast near Mahahual, Mexico as a category one hurricane with maximum sustained winds near 85 mph (140 kmh).