Heavens

Cosmic distances are difficult to grasp and no less difficult to measure. When it comes to other galaxies or even remote parts of our own Milky Way, distance measurements are nothing but assessments, derived from indirect clues.

Sunspots spawn solar flares that can cause billions of dollars in damage to satellites, communications networks and power grids. But Stanford researchers have developed a way to detect incipient sunspots as deep as 65,000 kilometers inside the sun, providing up to two days' advance warning of a damaging solar flare.

It is helpful -- even life-saving -- to have a warning sign before a structural system fails, but, when the system is only a few nanometers in size, having a sign that's easy to read is a challenge. Now, thanks to a clever bit of molecular design by University of Pennsylvania and Duke University bioengineers and chemists, such warning can come in the form of a simple color change.

A team of astronomers has used ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to study an unusual object called a Lyman-alpha blob [1]. These huge and very luminous rare structures are normally seen in regions of the early Universe where matter is concentrated. The team found that the light coming from one of these blobs is polarised [2]. In everyday life, for example, polarised light is used to create 3D effects in cinemas [3].

A spinning neutron star is tied to a mysterious tail -- or so it seems. Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found that this pulsar, known as PSR J0357+3205 (or PSR J0357 for short), about 1,600 light years from Earth, apparently has a long, X-ray bright tail streaming away from it.

Astronomers have discovered the darkest known exoplanet – a distant, Jupiter-sized gas giant known as TrES-2b. Their measurements show that TrES-2b reflects less than one percent of the sunlight falling on it, making it blacker than coal or any planet or moon in our solar system. The new work appears in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“TrES-2b is considerably less reflective than black acrylic paint, so it's truly an alien world,” said astronomer and lead author David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Some vaccines are once-in-a-lifetime; others need a booster shot or two to maintain their potency. And then there's the flu vaccine, which only lasts a year. Strains of influenza virus change so much from year-to-year that new vaccines must be developed annually to target the strains of virus that are most likely to cause illness. But Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists have now discovered a human antibody that recognizes many different flu strains. Understanding more about this antibody may help scientists design a longer-lasting vaccine against the influenza virus.