Heavens

Fires are raging in the western U.S. and in one overpass from its orbit around the Earth, NASA's Aqua satellite picked up smoke and identified hot spots from fires in Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.

NASA's Aqua satellite captured smoke and heat signatures from several large fires burning in the western U.S. on June 19, 2012. When Aqua passed overhead, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument captured an image at 4:25 p.m. EDT.

Imagery from NOAA's GOES-13 satellite has shown some towering thunderstorms within the low pressure area called System 96L, located in the southern Gulf of Mexico. NASA continues to create the imagery from the GOES satellite and NASA satellites are also monitoring the developing low. If it does organize further and become a tropical storm over the weekend, it would be named "Debby."

Chris may have been the Atlantic Ocean Hurricane Season's first hurricane, but didn't maintain that title for long. NASA satellite data revealed one good reason why Chris had weakened and became a post-tropical storm.

Sea surface temperatures play a big role in keeping a tropical cyclone alive. They need warm seas of at least 300 Kelvin (80 Fahrenheit/26.8 Celsius) to maintain strength. NASA's Aqua satellite revealed that those conditions were not met where Chris is located in the Atlantic Ocean.

A loose group of stars that was known for over 180 years but never before studied in detail has been revealed to be an important new tool in the quest to understand the evolution of stars like the Sun, and in the search for planets like Earth. "We have discovered that a previously unappreciated open star cluster, which is a little younger than our Sun, holds great promise for use as a standard gauge in fundamental stellar astrophysics," said Jason T. Wright, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, who conceived and initiated the research.

After 10 years of archaeological investigations, researchers have concluded that Stonehenge was built as a monument to unify the peoples of Britain, after a long period of conflict and regional difference between eastern and western Britain.

Its stones are thought to have symbolized the ancestors of different groups of earliest farming communities in Britain, with some stones coming from southern England and others from west Wales.

NASA satellites monitoring the life of Chris in the Atlantic saw the tropical storm become the first hurricane of the Atlantic Ocean season on June 21, 2012.

Infrared satellite imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite have revealed that the clouds around Hurricane Chris' eye have reached a cold peak early on June 21 when it was first designated a hurricane, and have since warmed. The thunderstorms that surround Chris' eye are now between -60 and -70 Celsius. Cloud top temperatures that cold indicate strong, high, thunderstorms with the potential for heavy rainfall.

NASA satellites are providing data on a broad area of low pressure in the south-central Gulf of Mexico that has a medium chance for development into a tropical depression.

Tropical Storm Talim has weakened overnight due to stronger wind shear and land interaction and is now a depression. NASA satellite data from June 21 revealed that the thunderstorms that make up the tropical cyclone are scattered and disorganized.

A research team led by astronomers at the University of Washington and Harvard University has discovered a bigger version of Earth locked in an orbital tug-of-war with a much larger, Neptune-sized planet as they orbit very close to each other around the same star about 1,200 light years from Earth.

The planets occupy nearly the same orbital plane and on their closest approach come within about 1.2 million miles of each other – just five times the Earth-moon distance and about 20 times closer to one another than any two planets in our solar system.

Few nighttime sights offer more drama than the full Moon rising over the horizon. Now imagine that instead of the Moon, a gas giant planet spanning three times more sky loomed over the molten landscape of a lava world. This alien vista exists in the newly discovered two-planet system of Kepler-36.

"These two worlds are having close encounters," said Josh Carter, a Hubble Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

"They are the closest to each other of any planetary system we've found," added co-author Eric Agol of the University of Washington.

AMES, Iowa – Two planets with very different densities and compositions are locked in surprisingly close orbits around their host star, according to astronomers working with NASA's Kepler Mission.

One planet is a rocky super-Earth about 1.5 times the size of our planet and 4.5 times the mass. The other is a Neptune-like gaseous planet 3.7 times the size of Earth and eight times the mass. The planets approach each other 30 times closer than any pair of planets in our solar system.

Washington, D.C.—Until now, Earth was the only planet known to have vast reservoirs of water in its interior. Scientists analyzed the water content of two Martian meteorites originating from inside the Red Planet. They found that the amount of water in places of the Martian mantle is vastly larger than previous estimates and is similar to that of Earth's. The results not only affect what we know about the geologic history of Mars, but also have implications for how water got to the Martian surface. The data raise the possibility that Mars could have sustained life.

CAMBRIDGE, MA. -- About 40 percent of the solar energy reaching Earth's surface lies in the near-infrared region of the spectrum — energy that conventional silicon-based solar cells are unable to harness. But a new kind of all-carbon solar cell developed by MIT researchers could tap into that unused energy, opening up the possibility of combination solar cells — incorporating both traditional silicon-based cells and the new all-carbon cells — that could make use of almost the entire range of sunlight's energy.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft hasreturned data that indicate ice may make up as much as 22 percent ofthe surface material in a crater located on the moon's south pole.

Several hundred miles from Newfoundland, the third tropical storm of the Atlantic Hurricane Season was born on June 19, and NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image just before it reached tropical storm strength, and he appears to have a "tail" on satellite imagery.