A new model shows how an elusive type of black hole can be formed in the gas surrounding their supermassive counterparts.
Heavens
Infrared imagery of Tropical Storm Khanun shows that the storm is weakening as it heads toward a landfall in the Chungcheongnam-do province of western South Korea. Khanun is already bringing rainfall and stirring up seas around southwestern South Korea.
Infrared satellite data from NASA's Aqua satellite showed a very small area of strong thunderstorms north of the center of what is now post-tropical storm Fabio as it moves toward the southern California coast.
Throughout the universe more than 99 percent of matter looks nothing like what's on Earth. Instead of materials we can touch and see, instead of motions we intuitively expect like a ball rolling down a hill, or a cup that sits still on a table, most of the universe is governed by rules that react more obviously to such things as magnetic force or electrical charge. It would be as if your cup was magnetized, perhaps attracted to a metal ceiling above, and instead of resting, it floats up, hovering somewhere in the air, balanced between the upward force and the pull of gravity below.
Astronomers have witnessed for the first time a spiral galaxy in the early universe, billions of years before many other spiral galaxies formed. In findings reported July 19 in the journal Nature, the astronomers said they discovered it while using the Hubble Space Telescope to take pictures of about 300 very distant galaxies in the early universe and to study their properties. This distant spiral galaxy is being observed as it existed roughly three billion years after the Big Bang, and light from this part of the universe has been traveling to Earth for about 10.7 billion years.
The University of Central Florida has detected what could be its first planet, only two-thirds the size of Earth and located right around the corner, cosmically speaking, at a mere 33light- years away.
The exoplanet candidate called UCF 1.01, is close to its star, so close it goes around the star in 1.4 days. The planet's surface likely reaches temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The discoverers believe that it has no atmosphere, is only two-thirds the gravity of Earth and that its surface may be volcanic or molten.
WASHINGTON –- The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Spacecraft Engineering Department's space robotics research facility recently took possession of a one-of-a-kind 75,000 pound Gravity Offset Table (GOT) made from a single slab of solid granite.
To emulate the classical mechanics of physics found in space on full-scale replica spacecraft on Earth requires not only a hefty amount of air to 'float' the object, but a precision, frictionless, large surface area that will allow researchers to replicate the effects of inertia on man-made objects in space.
Astronomers connected APEX, in Chile, to the Submillimeter Array (SMA) [3] in Hawaii, USA, and the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT) [4] in Arizona, USA. They were able to make the sharpest direct observation ever [5], of the centre of a distant galaxy, the bright quasar 3C 279, which contains a supermassive black hole with a mass about one billion times that of the Sun, and is so far from Earth that its light has taken more than 5 billion years to reach us. APEX is a collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), the Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) and ESO.
The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) is keeping an eye on the rainfall being generated by Tropical Storm Khanun as it moves past Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan.
Southern California's coast is already feeling rough surf from Tropical Storm Fabio, and as the storm draws closer it is expected to bring scattered showers and thunderstorms as well. NASA's Aqua satellite peered into Fabio's clouds to see what power lurks under them, and saw only a small area of heavy rainfall remaining and the cooler waters that Fabio is now moving through.
Our day-to-day lives exist in what physicists would call an electrically neutral environment. Desks, books, chairs and bodies don't generally carry electricity and they don't stick to magnets. But life on Earth is substantially different from, well, almost everywhere else. Beyond Earth's protective atmosphere and extending all the way through interplanetary space, electrified particles dominate the scene. Indeed, 99% of the universe is made of this electrified gas, known as plasma.
PASADENA, Calif.—Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) pioneered the study of the link between irregularities in the immune system and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism a decade ago. Since then, studies of postmortem brains and of individuals with autism, as well as epidemiological studies, have supported the correlation between alterations in the immune system and autism spectrum disorder.
An ice island twice the size of Manhattan has broken off from Greenland's Petermann Glacier, according to researchers at the University of Delaware and the Canadian Ice Service. The Petermann Glacier is one of the two largest glaciers left in Greenland connecting the great Greenland ice sheet with the ocean via a floating ice shelf.
A study of teenage girls with eating disorders has shown that reduced essential fatty acid levels returned to normal once the girls increased their weight to a healthy level.
The research, published in the August issue of Acta Paediatrica, suggests that it is not necessary to give omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid supplements to adolescent girls with eating disorders.
When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Depression Khanun on July 15, infrared data revealed some high, strong thunderstorms that hinted the cyclone would intensify. On July 16 Khanun had indeed become a tropical storm.