Heavens

TORONTO, Ont. Jan. 16, 2012—A research team led by St. Michael's Hospital's Dr. Kamran Khan is teaming up with British authorities to anticipate and track the risk for an infectious disease outbreak at the London Olympics this summer.

For the first time, experts from around the world are working together to integrate technologies and disease surveillance at both local and global levels.

The University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey keeps a watchful eye on asteroids that might cross the Earth's path. A byproduct of that effort is the largest database compiling the brightnesses of 200 million objects in the universe, including supernovae and stars torn up by super-massive black holes.

New maps produced by the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal features at the Moon's northern and southern poles in regions that lie in perpetual darkness. LAMP, developed by Southwest Research Institute, uses a novel method to peer into these so-called permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), making visible the invisible. LAMP's principal investigator is Dr. Alan Stern, associate vice president of the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division.

NASA satellites got a look inside Tropical Storm Heidi over the last several days and provided data that enabled forecasters at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center to know she was going to strengthen before making landfall, and she did.

LIVERMORE, Calif. --There are more exoplanets further away from their parent stars than originally thought, according to new astrophysics research.

PASADENA, Calif.—Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Arizona have released the largest data set ever collected that documents the brightening and dimming of stars and other celestial objects—two hundred million in total.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Because healthy enrollees cost them less, Medicare Advantage plans would profit from selecting seniors based on their health, but Medicare strictly forbids practices such as denying coverage based on existing conditions. Another way to build a more profitable membership is to design insurance benefits that attract the healthiest patients. In a study published in the Jan.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has looked deep into the distant universe and detected the feeble glow of a star that exploded more than 9 billion years ago. The sighting is the first finding of an ambitious survey that will help astronomers place better constraints on the nature of dark energy, the mysterious repulsive force that is causing the universe to fly apart ever faster.

Since 2000, the three Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS I, II, III) have surveyed well over a quarter of the night sky and produced the biggest color map of the universe in three dimensions ever. Now scientists at the U.S.

Astronomers using NASA's Kepler mission have discovered two new circumbinary planet systems – planets that orbit two stars, like Tatooine in the movie Star Wars. Their find, which brings the number of known circumbinary planets to three, shows that planets with two suns must be common, with many millions existing in our Galaxy.

"Once again, we're seeing science fact catching up with science fiction," said co-author Josh Carter of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

A team of astrophysicists from the University of Rochester and Europe has discovered a ring system in the constellation Centaurus that invites comparisons to Saturn.

The scientists, led by Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Eric Mamajek of Rochester and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, used data from the international SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) and All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) project to study the light curves of young Sun-like stars in the Scorpius-Centaurus association—the nearest region of recent massive star formation to the Sun.

The discovery of the three smallest planets yet orbiting a distant star, which was announced today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, has an unusual connection to Barnard's star, one of the Sun's nearest neighbors.

PASADENA, Calif. -- A team of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has discovered the three smallest confirmed planets ever detected outside our solar system. The three planets, which all orbit a single star, are smaller than Earth and appear to be rocky with a solid surface. Until now, astronomers have found at most only four other rocky planets, also called terrestrial planets, around other stars.

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have solved a longstanding mystery on the type of star, or so-called progenitor, which caused a supernova seen in a nearby galaxy. The finding yields new observational data for pinpointing one of several scenarios that trigger such outbursts.

Based on previous observations from ground-based telescopes, astronomers knew the supernova class, called a Type Ia, created a remnant named SNR 0509-67.5, which lies 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy.

Last year's discovery of the nearest Type Ia supernova in decades – captured only 11 hours after it exploded – allowed astronomers to finally cinch the identity of the stars behind these explosions, which have become key measures of cosmic distance.

That supernova, called SN2011fe, and presumably most Type Ia supernovae were originally white dwarfs extremely dense and compact stars composed mostly of carbon and oxygen.