Heavens

Typhoon Choi-Wan passed the island of Iwo To stirring up heavy surf, hurricane-force winds and torrential, flooding rains. This weekend, it will continue on its northeasterly track paralleling Japan, while its center remains in the open Western Pacific Ocean.

Microwave and infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite during the early morning hours of September 18 revealed extremely high thunderstorms in Typhoon Choi-Wan as it passed the island of Iwo To and was approaching Chichi Jima.

BOULDER--Challenging conventional wisdom, new research finds that the number of sunspots provides an incomplete measure of changes in the Sun's impact on Earth over the course of the 11-year solar cycle. The study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Michigan, finds that Earth was bombarded last year with high levels of solar energy at a time when the Sun was in an unusually quiet phase and sunspots had virtually disappeared.

Black holes are invading stars, providing a radical explanation to bright flashes in the universe that are one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy today.

The flashes, known as gamma ray bursts, are beams of high energy radiation – similar to the radiation emitted by explosions of nuclear weapons – produced by jets of plasma from massive dying stars.

The orthodox model for this cosmic jet engine involves plasma being heated by neutrinos in a disk of matter that forms around a black hole, which is created when a star collapses.

The Planck space telescope has returned its first images of the sky. The mission, run by the European Space Agency with participation from NASA, will map tiny differences in microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang, allowing scientists to get a better picture of the structure of the universe when it was about 400,000 years old.

Using cameras which capture fireballs streaking across the night sky and sophisticated mathematics, a world-wide team of scientists have managed to find not only a tiny meteorite on the vast Nullarbor Plain, but also its orbit and the asteroid it came from.

The research team, including CSIRO scientist Dr Rob Hough, was led by Professor Phil Bland of Imperial College London.

The remarkable "detective" work was detailed in a paper published in Science on September 18, 2009.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), an unmanned mission to comprehensively map the entire moon, has returned its first data. One of the seven instruments aboard, the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment, is making the first global survey of the temperature of the lunar surface while the spacecraft orbits some 31 miles above the moon.

NASA and the Japanese Space Agency's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite flew over the center of Super Typhoon Choi-Wan at 2:34 EDT on September 17, 2009 and captured heavy rainfall around the storm's center.

TRMM rainfall images are false-colored with yellow, green and red areas, which indicate rainfall between 20 and 40 millimeters (.78 to 1.57 inches) per hour. Dark red areas are considered heavy rainfall, as much as 2 inches of rain per hour.

Marty is struggling to hold onto tropical storm status, and things are just going to get worse for him, as he moves into an area with stronger wind shear. Infrared satellite imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite showed that Marty's thunderstorm cloud tops are not as cold as they were earlier today, September 17, and his cloud pattern has become a little less organized.

CINCINNATI—Cancer and cell biology experts at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have developed a new mass spectrometry-based tool they say provides more precise, cost-effective data collection for drug discovery efforts.

Preliminary studies have shown that the new mass spectrometry tool—known as MALDI-QqQMS (matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-triple quadruple mass spectrometer)—provides a superior means of measuring the enzyme reactions critical to drug discovery at speeds comparable to currently available high-throughput screening systems at significantly lower costs.

NASA's Aqua satellite again flew over Super Typhoon Choi-Wan late last night and captured visible and infrared imagery of the monster typhoon. Aqua's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument and Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) captured two different views of Choi-Wan's clouds.

Researchers have discovered an unusual kind of meteorite in the Western Australian desert and have uncovered where in the Solar System it came from, in a very rare finding published today in the journal Science.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), launched on June 18 of this year, has begun its extensive exploration of the lunar environment and will return more data about the Moon than any previous mission. The Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP), developed by Southwest Research Institute, is an integral part of the LRO science investigation. LAMP uses a novel method to peer into the perpetual darkness of the Moon's so-called permanently shadowed regions.

BOULDER--Challenging conventional wisdom, new research finds that the number of sunspots provides an incomplete measure of changes in the Sun's impact on Earth over the course of the 11-year solar cycle. The study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Michigan, finds that Earth was bombarded last year with high levels of solar energy at a time when the Sun was in an unusually quiet phase and sunspots had virtually disappeared.

Results: MIT researchers and colleagues have solved a longstanding mystery about a pair of stars called DI Herculis whose peculiar rotation (a shift in their orbit that was four times slower than expected) had remained a mystery for three decades. The real enation is simple: The stars are rotating tipped over on their sides, relative to their orbits around each other. This produces tidal effects that counteract the expected rate for the orbits to shift orientation over time (called precession), finally explaining the mysterious anomaly.

Planck, ESA's mission to study the early Universe, started surveying the sky regularly from its vantage point at L2 on 13 August. The instruments of ESA's 'time machine' were fine-tuned for optimum performance in the period preceding this date. In preparation for routine scientific operations, their long-term stability has been verified by conducting a first 'trial' survey.

ESA's Planck microwave observatory is the first European mission designed to study the Cosmic Microwave Background – the relic radiation from the Big Bang.