Heavens

An international team led by Leen Decin, a K.U.Leuven astronomer, has discovered a series of dust shells in the vicinity of CW Leonis, a dying giant star. The star expelled the shells in the course of its long life: the most distant shell was expelled 16,000 years ago and, in that time, has drifted more than 7,000 billion kilometers from the star.

At first glance, a weather forecaster for Venus would have either a really easy or a really boring job, depending on your point of view. The climate on Venus is widely known to be unpleasant -- at the surface, the planet roasts at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit under a suffocating blanket of sulfuric acid clouds and a crushing atmosphere more than 90 times the pressure of Earth's. Intrepid future explorers should abandon any hope for better days, however, because it won't change much.

Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), teams from The University of Manchester, among others, took the new picture showing for the first time a huge dusty double shell surrounding the central hypergiant.

The star and its shells resemble an egg white around a yolky centre, leading the astronomers to nickname the object the Fried Egg Nebula. The international team's results are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Behemoth sunspot 1302 unleashed another strong flare on Saturday morning--an X1.9-category blast at 5:40 am EDT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash.

A NASA SDO movie shows a shadowy shock wave racing away from the blast site. This is a sign that the blast produced a coronal mass ejection (CME) that could deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field on Sept. 26.

Photosynthesis is one of nature's finest miracles. Through the photosynthetic process, green plants absorb sunlight in their leaves and convert the photonic energy into chemical energy that is stored as sugars in the plants' biomass. If we can learn from nature and develop an artificial version of photosynthesis we would have an energy source that is absolutely clean and virtually inexhaustible.

The world's eyes are on the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) headed toward re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. The satellite is currently predicted to re-enter sometime on the afternoon of Friday, September 23, 2011, but it hasn't been easy to precisely determine the path and pace of UARS despite the fact that scientists well understand how satellites move through space. The problem lies in the fact that space itself changes over time -- the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere can warm up and, more importantly, puff up in response to incoming energy and particles from the sun.

Solar power could be harvested more efficiently and transported over long distances using tiny molecular circuits, according to research inspired by new insights into natural photosynthesis.

Tropical Storm Ophelia was born today in the Atlantic Ocean and captured in an infrared image from NOAA's GOES-13 satellite and NASA's Aqua satellite.

NASA and NOAA satellites were watching the low pressure System 98L in the central Atlantic yesterday when it was 1450 miles east of the Leeward Islands.

With most of the plastics that define modern life dating to the1930s-1960s, a new breed of these ubiquitous materials are starting to gain a foothold in products ranging from teapots to potato chip bags to plastic plant pots that biodegrade right in the soil. That's the topic of the covers story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS' weekly newsmagazine.

In the nebula, which lies around 6500 light-years from Earth, hot newborn stars that formed from clouds of hydrogen gas shine brightly with ultraviolet light. This intense radiation in turn excites the surrounding hydrogen cloud, making it glow a distinctive shade of red. This red shade is typical of star-forming regions, another famous example being the Lagoon Nebula (eso0936 - http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso0936/).

Researchers have found a way to prevent HIV from damaging the immune system, in a new lab-based study published in the journal Blood. The research, led by scientists at Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University, could have important implications for the development of HIV vaccines.

HIV/AIDS is the third biggest cause of death in low income countries, killing around 1.8 million people a year worldwide. An estimated 2.6 million people became infected with HIV in 2009.

WASHINGTON -- NASA is testing an element of the sunshield that will protect the James Webb Space Telescope's mirrors and instruments during its mission to observe the most distant objects in the universe.

The sunshield will consist of five tennis court-sized layers to allow the Webb telescope to cool to its cryogenic operating temperature of minus 387.7 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Kelvin).

Earth's deep oceans may absorb enough heat at times to flatten the rate of global warming for periods of as long as a decade--even in the midst of longer-term warming. This according to a new analysis led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

The study, based on computer simulations of global climate, points to ocean layers deeper than 1,000 feet as the main location of the "missing heat" during periods such as the past decade when global air temperatures showed little trend.

With the artistry of a magazine cover shoot, NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this portrait of five of Saturn's moons poised along the planet's rings.

Tropical Storm Roke has changed in size and is starting to change in strength. Roke appears to be consolidating in infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite.

Roke began its life as a monsoon depression with a large low-level circulation center that over time consolidated and organized. The eastern half of Tropical Storm Roke was seen in an infrared image from NASA's Aqua satellite AIRS (Atmospheric Infrared Sounder) on Sept. 15, and it showed a more consolidated center with strong convection and very cold cloud-top temperatures.