Heavens

The low pressure area known as System 94P on January 13 strengthened into the seventh tropical cyclone of the South Pacific Cyclone season, today becoming Tropical Storm Zelia. NASA's TRMM satellite found heavy rainfall was already occurring in the storm as it was turning away from New Zealand and heading toward New Caledonia.

Building high pressure is expected to make Tropical Storm Vince do a U-turn in the Southern Indian Ocean and take a westward track away from Western Australia. Two instruments on NASA's Aqua satellite looked at Vince's clouds this morning before Vince's forecast U-turn.

Tropical Storm Vania moved through southeastern New Caledonia on January 14 and NASA's TRMM satellite noticed heavy rainfall occurring. Residents of Norfolk Island are now expected to receive gusty winds and rainfall as Vania continues to move south in the South Pacific Ocean.

WASHINGTON—Scientists have taken a major step toward accurately determining the amount of energy that the sun provides to Earth, and how variations in that energy may contribute to climate change.

The last thing that Queensland, Australia needs is more rainfall after the record-breaking flooding that has been occurring there in the last two months. Now, NASA's Aqua satellite has noticed a low pressure area with signs of tropical development in the Coral Sea ( part of the South Pacific Ocean Basin), between Papua New Guinea and Australia's East Coast.

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and Aqua satellites are providing valuable information to forecasters about Tropical Storm Vania's clouds and rainfall as the system continues to impact Vanuatu and New Caledonia in the South Pacific.

New NASA satellite data indicate the current La Niña event in the eastern Pacific has remained strong during November and December 2010.

A new Chandra X-ray Observatory image of Messier 82, or M82, shows the result of star formation on overdrive. At a distance of only 12 million light years, M82 provides a unique cosmic laboratory for studying conditions similar to those that existed billions of years ago when stars were forming at a furious rate in most galaxies.

BATON ROUGE – The Crab Nebula, once considered to be a source of energy so stable that astronomers used it to calibrate their instruments, is dimming. LSU physicists Mike Cherry, Gary Case and graduate student James Rodi, together with an international team of colleagues using the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, or GBM, on NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, discovered the anomaly. This revelation has proven astonishing for astronomers.

Dark energy is a mysterious force that pervades all space, acting as a "push" to accelerate the Universe's expansion. Despite being 70 percent of the Universe, dark energy was only discovered in 1998 by two teams observing Type Ia supernovae. A Type 1a supernova is a cataclysmic explosion of a white dwarf star.

Planet X, an often-sought 10th planet, is so far a no-show, but Sukanya Chakrabarti has high hopes for finding what might be called Galaxy X – a dwarf galaxy that she predicts orbits our Milky Way Galaxy.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Planck –– an international satellite that peers back into the beginning of the universe –– has produced what scientists are calling new and provocative data. The satellite is a European Space Agency mission with significant contributions from NASA.

On Tuesday, the Planck mission released a new data catalog with initial maps of the entire sky. The catalog includes thousands of never-before-seen dusty cocoons where stars are forming, and some of the most massive clusters of galaxies ever observed.

The first gravitational lens, a phenomenon in which light from a distant object is bent around a massive foreground object, was discovered in 1979 by a team led by Dr. Dennis Walsh from The University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory.

Since then, astronomers have used gravitational lenses in many ways, including studying dark matter and as "Nature's Telescope" to investigate galaxies in the distant universe.

The combined data from several NASA satellites has astonished astronomers by revealing unexpected changes in X-ray emission from the Crab Nebula, once thought to be the steadiest high-energy source in the sky.