Heavens

The Southern Indian Ocean cyclone season is off and running and NASA's Aqua satellite saw the birth of Tropical Cyclone 01S.

Tropical Cyclone 01S (TC01S) formed today December 5, 2011. TC01S has maximum sustained winds near 55 knots (63 mph/102 kmh) and is rapidly consolidating and organizing, so strengthening is forecast. At 0900 UTC (4 a.m. EST) on Dec. 5, TC01S was located about 545 nautical miles west of the Cocos Islands near 12.2 South and 87.0 East. It was moving to the west at 7 knots 8 mph/13 kmh).

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– An international team of scientists has found the fastest-rotating massive star ever recorded. The star spins around its axis at the speed of 600 kilometers per second at the equator, a rotational velocity so high that the star is nearly tearing apart due to centrifugal forces. This confirms a prediction put forward by astrophysicist Matteo Cantiello, a postdoctoral fellow with UC Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, who contributed to the discovery published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Washington, D.C. -- NASA's Kepler Mission has discovered the first super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone of a star similar to the Sun. A team of researchers, including Carnegie's Alan Boss, has discovered what could be a large, rocky planet with a surface temperature of about 72 degrees Fahrenheit, comparable to a comfortable spring day on Earth. This landmark finding will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have discovered the largest black holes to date two monsters with masses equivalent to 10 billion suns that are threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.

These black holes are at the centers of two galaxies more than 300 million light years from Earth, and may be the dark remnants of some of the very bright galaxies, called quasars, that populated the early universe.

An international team of astronomers has discovered two gigantic black holes with masses about 10 billion times the mass of our sun. These black holes have a mass more than 50 per cent greater than any other previously measured.

"They may be the dormant remains of quasars that were extremely luminous billions of years ago," says Professor James Graham, director of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and founding member of the team behind the discovery.

SAN FRANCISCO – A planet made of diamonds may sound lovely, but you wouldn't want to live there.

A new study suggests that some stars in the Milky Way could harbor "carbon super-Earths" – giant terrestrial planets that contain up to 50 percent diamond.

But if they exist, those planets are likely devoid of life as we know it.

The finding comes from a laboratory experiment at Ohio State University, where researchers recreated the temperatures and pressures of Earth's lower mantle to study how diamonds form there.

An international team of astronomers has been using ESO's Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, to make a survey of the heaviest and brightest stars in the Tarantula Nebula (eso1117 - http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1117/), in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

WASHINGTON -- The Naval Research Laboratory Vehicle Research Section has successfully completed flight tests for the Autonomous Deployment Demonstration (ADD) program. The final demonstration took place Sept. 1 at the Yuma Proving Grounds, Yuma, Ariz., and consisted of a series of eight balloon-drops at altitudes of up to 57,000 ft, delivering sensor-emplacement Close-In Covert Autonomous Disposable Aircraft (CICADA) vehicles within 15 feet of their intended landing locations.

Scientists are now starting to identify potential habitable exoplanets after nearly twenty years of the detection of the first planets around other stars. Over 700 exoplanets have been detected and confirmed with thousands more still waiting further confirmation by missions such as NASA Kepler. Most of these are gas giants, similar to Jupiter and Neptune, but orbiting very dangerously close to their stars. Only a few have the right size and orbit to be considered suitable for any life.

A recent study of obese volunteers participating in a 12-week dietary weight-loss program found that successful weight losers had significantly higher resting nerve activity compared to weight-loss resistant individuals. The study was accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).

PASADENA, Calif.—Discoveries of new planets just keep coming and coming. Take, for instance, the 18 recently found by a team of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

In order to identify the flight routes of the birds, postgraduate Matthias Kopp, under the guidance of Dr. Peter, equipped South Polar skuas with geolocators in their breeding areas on King George Island, about 120 kilometers off the Antarctic Mainland. Thus he has been screening their position data over a period of several years, followed by an analysis together with British colleagues and a scientist from Switzerland.

LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico -- A strangely powerful, long-lasting gamma-ray burst on Christmas Day, 2010 has finally been analyzed to the satisfaction of a multinational research team. Called the Christmas Burst, GRB 101225A was freakishly lengthy and it produced radiation at unusually varying wavelengths. But by matching the data with a model developed in 1998, the team was able to characterize the star explosion as a neutron star spiraling into the heart of its companion star.

In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening distance, even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't spy it. It took the revealing power of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to uncover not one, but four remarkably red galaxies. And while astronomers can describe the members of this new "species," they can't explain what makes them so ruddy.

For the last two days, strong wind shear in the Arabian Sea has pushed most of the clouds and showers associated with Tropical Storm 5A away from its center. Today, Nov. 30, NASA satellite imagery shows wind shear continues to push those clouds to the north and west of 5A's center and is taking a big toll on the entire cyclone.