Heavens

Claudette's center had moved into southwestern Alabama and weakened into a tropical depression. She'll turn toward the north-northwest later today and soak Alabama with up to 10 inches of rain in some isolated areas.

At 2 a.m. EDT on Monday, August 17, Tropical Storm Claudette made landfall near Fort Walton Beach, Florida with maximum sustained winds near 50 mph. When it made landfall, tropical storm force winds extended 70 miles from the center.

GREENBELT, Md. - NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.

"Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet," said Dr. Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Our discovery supports the theory that some of life's ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts."

GREENBELT, Md.--Solar physicists at NASA have confirmed that small, sudden bursts of heat and energy, called nanoflares, cause temperatures in the thin, translucent gas of the sun's atmosphere to reach millions of degrees.

The sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, is made up of loops of hot gas that arch high above the surface. These loops are comprised of bundles of smaller, individual magnetic tubes or strands that can have temperatures reaching several million degrees Kelvin (K), even though the sun's surface is only 5,700 degrees K.

There are a lot of ups and downs in tropical cyclone formation in the Pacific Ocean this week, and that's keeping NOAA's GOES-11 satellite busy. There are remnants of Maka and Tropical Depression 9E, a fizzled Felicia, and a new Tropical Storm named Guillermo.

The graphics folks that create images from the satellite at the GOES Project at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. are posting updated images on the GOES Project website often and forecasters are watching them.

Taking advantage of advanced techniques to correct distortions caused by Earth's atmosphere, astronomers used the NSF-supported Gemini Observatory to capture the first images of clouds over the tropics of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

The images clarify a long-standing mystery linking Titan's weather and surface features, helping astronomers better understand the moon of Saturn, viewed by some scientists as an analog to Earth when our planet was young.

A new study from two of NASA's Great Observatories provides fresh insight into how some stars are born, along with a beautiful new image of a stellar nursery in our Galaxy. The research shows that radiation from massive stars may trigger the formation of many more stars than previously thought.

While astronomers have long understood that stars and planets form from the collapse of a cloud of gas, the question of the main causes of this process has remained open.

Pasadena, Calif.—For all its similarities to Earth—clouds that pour rain (albeit liquid methane not liquid water) onto the surface producing lakes and rivers, vast dune fields in desert-like regions, plus a smoggy orange atmosphere that looks like Los Angeles's during fire season—Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is generally "a very bland place, weatherwise," says Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

SANTA CRUZ, CA--The stellar explosions known as type 1a supernovae have long been used as "standard candles," their uniform brightness giving astronomers a way to measure cosmic distances and the expansion of the universe. But a new study published this week in Nature reveals sources of variability in type 1a supernovae that will have to be taken into account if astronomers are to use them for more precise measurements in the future.

Pasadena, Calif.—Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and their colleagues in 30 laboratories worldwide have released a new set of standards for graphically representing biological information—the biology equivalent of the circuit diagram in electronics. This visual language should make it easier to exchange complex information, so that biological models are depicted more accurately, consistently, and in a more readily understandable way.

One single atom of a certain isotope of hafnium found on Earth would prove that a supernova once exploded near our solar system. The problem is how to find such an atom - among billions of others. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have developed a laser technique that, in combination with standard techniques, may be able to do the job.

Astronomers recently observed a mysterious flux of particles in the universe, and the hope was born that this may be the first observation of the remnants of "dark matter".

But scientists from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have shown that there is another explanation of the flux.

Tropical Storm Felicia is closing in on the Hawaiian Island chain and its center is now expected to pass just north of the big island before moving through the islands Tuesday and Wednesday. Two NASA satellites captured the height and temperatures of Felicia's clouds to assist meteorologists in their forecasts as she approaches Hawaii. She's already stirring up the surf.

Those rainfall maps are also made into a seven-day "movie loop" that allows users to track storms as they travel over land and oceans around the globe. The rainfall animations are developed in the Laboratory for Atmospheres of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. by the TRMM precipitation research team.

A new supercomputer simulation designed to track the fate of the universe's first black holes finds that, counter to expectations, they couldn't efficiently gorge themselves on nearby gas. The findings have implications for understanding the formation of galaxies and of the giant black holes that reside in their centers.

Just how rare life is in the Universe is one of the key questions in the natural sciences today. By pulling in multidisciplinary expertise from biology, geology, physics and astronomy, astrobiologists are addressing different facets of this very profound question, and notably how the conditions around different types of stars in an early stage of development might help or hinder the emergence of life in a solar system. Several scientists at the forefront of this research have just concluded IAU Symposium 264 on "Solar and Stellar Variability ― impact on Earth and Planets".