PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 19, 2012 — A major improvement in the world's lightest solid material and best solid insulating material, described here today, may put more of this space-age wonder into insulated clothing, refrigerators with thinner walls that hold more food, building insulation and other products.
Heavens
Satellite imagery on August 17 is showing signs of re-organization in the remnants of Tropical Depression 7 (TD7). TD7 has moved into the warm waters of the Bay of Campeche where it is regaining strength and appears much more organized.
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., August 17, 2012 — Members of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover ChemCam team have received the first photos from the instrument's remote micro imager. The successful capture of ChemCam's first 10 photos sets the stage for the first test bursts of the instrument's rock-zapping laser in the near future.
NASA's Terra satellite passed over Tropical Storm Gordon as it continues to spin up in the North central Atlantic Ocean, and revealed the storm has become less symmetric, indicating it is being battered by wind shear.
New research, led by University of Warwick physicist Dr Kareem Osman, has provided significant insight into how the solar wind heats up when it should not. The solar wind rushes outwards from the raging inferno that is our Sun, but from then on the wind should only get cooler as it expands beyond our solar system since there are no particle collisions to dissipate energy. However, the solar wind is surprisingly hotter than it should be, which has puzzled scientists for decades. Two new research papers led by Dr Osman may have solved that puzzle.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- A penny-sized rocket thruster may soon power the smallest satellites in space.
In the quest to understand how the world's weather moves around the globe, scientists have had to tease apart different kinds of atmospheric movement, such as the great jet streams that can move across a whole hemisphere versus more intricate, localized flows. Much the same must currently be done to understand the various motions at work in the great space weather system that links the sun and Earth as the sun shoots material out in all directions, creating its own version of a particle sea to fill up the solar system.
Aqua's AIRS instrument captured another infrared image System 93L as it was strengthening into tropical depression 8, and before it became Tropical Storm Gordon. The image was taken on Aug. 15 at 12:53 p.m. EDT, and showed strong bands of thunderstorms to the north and west of the center of circulation where cloud tops were so high into the atmosphere that they were as cold as -63 Fahrenheit (-52 Celsius). When thunderstorms that make up tropical cyclones reach such heights, they likely contain heavy rainfall, and are indicative of a lot of strength within the cyclone.
Astronomers using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have caught two clusters full of massive stars that may be in the early stages of merging. The clusters are 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy to our Milky Way.
What at first was thought to be only one cluster in the core of the massive star-forming region 30 Doradus (also known as the Tarantula Nebula) has been found to be a composite of two clusters that differ in age by about one million years.
WASHINGTON — A new report from the National Research Council presents a prioritized program of basic and applied research for 2013-2022 that will advance scientific understanding of the sun, sun-Earth connections and the origins of "space weather," and the sun's interactions with other bodies in the solar system. This second decadal survey in solar and space physics -- the product of a 18-month effort by more than 85 solar and space physicists and space system engineers -- lays out four scientific goals for the next 10 years along with guiding principles and recommended actions.
"We thought that these very deep sounds might be found in galaxy clusters everywhere," said co-author Ryan Foley, a Clay Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "The Phoenix cluster is showing us this is not the case -- or at least there are times the music essentially stops. Jets from the giant black hole at the center of a cluster are apparently not powerful enough to prevent the cluster gas from cooling."
A massive galaxy cluster nearly six billion light years from Earth has been discovered with an astounding and unexpected burst of star formation – more prodigious than any galaxy cluster yet observed, an international team of astronomers and NASA announced today.
Astronomers have found an extraordinary galaxy cluster — one of the largest objects in the universe — that is breaking several important cosmic records. The discovery of this cluster, known as the Phoenix Cluster, made with the National Science Foundation's South Pole Telescope, may force astronomers to rethink how these colossal structures, and the galaxies that inhabit them, evolve.
A National Science Foundation-funded radio telescope in Antarctica has found an extraordinary galaxy cluster that may force astronomers to rethink how galaxy clusters and the galaxies that inhabit them evolve.
The galaxy cluster was discovered some 5.7 billion light years from Earth by the 10-meter wide South Pole Telescope (SPT) located at NSF's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, which is funded by NSF's Office of Polar Programs.
Scientists using the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) spectrometer aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have made the first spectroscopic observations of the noble gas helium in the tenuous atmosphere surrounding the Moon.
These remote-sensing observations complement in situ measurements taken in 1972 by the Lunar Atmosphere Composition Experiment (LACE) deployed by Apollo 17.