Heavens

Astronomers have discovered the darkest known exoplanet – a distant, Jupiter-sized gas giant known as TrES-2b. Their measurements show that TrES-2b reflects less than one percent of the sunlight falling on it, making it blacker than coal or any planet or moon in our solar system. The new work appears in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“TrES-2b is considerably less reflective than black acrylic paint, so it's truly an alien world,” said astronomer and lead author David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

New research by scientists at the University of York gives a fresh perspective on the physics of black holes.

Black holes are objects in space that are so massive and compact they were described by Einstein as "bending" space. Conventional thinking asserts that black holes swallow everything that gets too close and that nothing can escape, but the study by Professor Samuel Braunstein and Dr Manas Patra suggests that information could escape from black holes after all.

The implications could be revolutionary, suggesting that gravity may not be a fundamental force of Nature.

Some vaccines are once-in-a-lifetime; others need a booster shot or two to maintain their potency. And then there's the flu vaccine, which only lasts a year. Strains of influenza virus change so much from year-to-year that new vaccines must be developed annually to target the strains of virus that are most likely to cause illness. But Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists have now discovered a human antibody that recognizes many different flu strains. Understanding more about this antibody may help scientists design a longer-lasting vaccine against the influenza virus.

An antibody that mimics features of the influenza virus's entry point into human cells could help researchers understand how to fine-tune the flu vaccine to protect against a broad range of virus strains. Such protection could potentially reduce the need to develop, produce, and distribute a new vaccine for each flu season.

GREENBELT, Md. -- The NASA National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Preparatory Project (NPP) has successfully completed its most comprehensive end-to-end compatibility test of the actual satellite and all five scientific instruments at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp's production and test facility in Boulder, Colo.

Former Tropical Storm Emily made a brief comeback this weekend after degenerating over the mountains of Hispaniola late last week, and NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of Emily just after her "rebirth."

At 5 p.m. EDT on Saturday, August 6, Emily became a tropical depression for the second time in her life about 70 miles west-northwest of Great Abaco Island, near 26.9 North and 78.1 West. She was moving to the north at 8 mph and had a minimum central pressure of 1012 millibars. Maximum sustained winds were 30 mph.

Tropical Storm Muifa is filling up the Yellow Sea on NASA satellite imagery as it continues moving north today to a landfall in East China's Shandong province. NASA's Aqua satellite captured visible and infrared imagery that shows Muifa's cloud cover stretches across the Yellow Sea, from China to the west to South and North Korea to the east.

Emily is now a surface trough or elongated area of low pressure. The National Hurricane Center noted that Emily's remnants contain a large area of cloudiness and thunderstorms extending from eastern Cuba northeastward across the southeastern Bahamas.

There's a good chance that Emily can make a comeback and get her act together on the weekend as upper-level winds become more favorable. The National Hurricane Center gives Emily a 60% chance of making that comeback over the weekend.

In one image, NASA's Aqua satellite captured two tropical cyclones in the western North Pacific today, Tropical Storm Merbok and the large Typhoon Muifa. NASA Satellite imagery shows that Muifa is almost twice as big as Merbok.

Warmer cloud top temperatures mean that cloud heights in a tropical cyclone are dropping and the storm doesn't have as much power to push them higher in the atmosphere. That's what NASA infrared satellite imagery has revealed about Tropical Storm Eugene this morning.

During the very early morning hours (Eastern Daylight Time) on August 5, Eugene was still hurricane strength. Then the storm ran into cooler waters and a more stable atmosphere, weakening into a tropical storm.

A newly released image from ESA's Mars Express shows the north pole of Mars during the red planet's summer solstice. All the carbon dioxide ice has gone, leaving just a bright cap of water ice.

This image was captured by the orbiter's High-Resolution Stereo Camera on 17 May 2010 and shows part of the northern polar region of Mars during the summer solstice. The solstice is the longest day and the beginning of the summer for the planet's northern hemisphere.

Dark, finger-like features that appear and extend down some Martian slopes during the warmest months of the Mars year may show activity of salty water on Mars. They fade in winter, then recur the next spring.

Repeated observations by the HiRISE camera currently orbiting Mars aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have tracked seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in middle latitudes of Mars' southern hemisphere. Some aspects of the observations still puzzle researchers.

Deerfield, IL (Aug. 3, 2011) – An examination of the world's largest river basins found nutrient-rich and powerful river discharges led to spikes in the blooms of plankton associated with cholera outbreaks. These increased discharges often occur at times of increased temperature in coastal water, suggesting that predicting global warming's potential temperature effect on cholera will be more complicated than first thought, according to a new study published today in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

SANTA CRUZ, CA--The mountainous region on the far side of the moon, known as the lunar farside highlands, may be the solid remains of a collision with a smaller companion moon, according to a new study by planetary scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz.