In a breakthrough that will help scientists unlock mysteries of the sun and its impacts on Earth, scientists have created the first-ever comprehensive computer model of sunspots. The resulting visuals capture both scientific detail and remarkable beauty. The results are published this week in a paper in Science Express. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Heavens
"The performance of this breakthrough camera is without an equivalent anywhere in the world. The camera will enable great leaps forward in many areas of the study of the Universe," says Norbert Hubin, head of the Adaptive Optics department at ESO. OCam will be part of the second-generation VLT instrument SPHERE. To be installed in 2011, SPHERE will take images of giant exoplanets orbiting nearby stars.
The Interdisciplinary A building on the Arizona State University Tempe campus looks rather average from the outside. There isn't anything that hints at the excitement, talent and innovation hidden behind its nondescript doors, and there is certainly no indication that the first steps of a great journey are taking place inside.
A University of Colorado at Boulder research team has discovered the first definitive evidence of shorelines on Mars, an indication of a deep, ancient lake there and a finding with implications for the discovery of past life on the Red Planet.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in partnership with the Department of Defense (DOD), the Intelligence Community (IC), and the Committee on National Security Systems (CNSS), has released the first installment of a three-year effort to build a unified information security framework for the entire federal government. Historically, information systems at civilian agencies have operated under different security controls than military and intelligence information systems.
On Aug. 22, 2008, NASA's Swift satellite reported multiple blasts of radiation from a rare object known as a soft gamma repeater, or SGR. Now, astronomers report an in-depth study of these eruptions using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) satellites.
An enormous eruption has found its way to Earth after travelling for many thousands of years across space. Studying this blast with ESA's XMM-Newton and Integral space observatories, astronomers have discovered a dead star belonging to a rare group: the magnetars.
X-Rays from the giant outburst arrived on Earth on 22 August 2008, and triggered an automatic sensor on the NASA-led, international Swift satellite. Just twelve hours later, XMM-Newton zeroed in and began to collect the radiation, allowing the most detailed spectral study of the decay of a magnetar outburst.
The interstellar stuff that became incorporated into the planets and life on Earth has younger cosmic roots than theories predict, according to the University of Chicago postdoctoral scholar Philipp Heck and his international teamof colleagues.
Heck and his colleagues examined 22 interstellar grains from the Murchison meteorite for their analysis. Dying sun-like stars flung the Murchison grains into space more than 4.5billion years ago, before the birth of the solar system. Scientists know the grains formed outside the solar systembecause of their exotic composition.
PASADENA, Calif.— Roughly a billion years from now, the ever-increasing radiation from the sun will have heated Earth into inhabitability; the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that serves as food for plant life will disappear, pulled out by the weathering of rocks; the oceans will evaporate; and all living things will disappear.
A new and novel computer modeling platform developed through intensive, multidisciplinary collaboration at New York University can help hospitals and cities to be more prepared for catastrophic public health scenarios, according to an article published in the American Medical Association's Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness journal.
After weight loss surgery, people have nearly twice the expected risk of breaking a bone and an even higher risk of a foot or hand fracture, a new study has found. The results were presented at The Endocrine Society's 91st Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
"This finding is unexpected," said study co-author Jackie Clowes, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. "The established opinion is that obesity protects against osteoporosis and, therefore, fractures."
A lunar eclipse helped a group of international scientists take a snapshot of earth's chemical fingerprint, which could help to identify planets most similar to earth where life may be thriving.
University of Central Florida Associate Professor Eduardo Martin was a member of the team that made the observation, which is published in the June 11 edition of Nature magazine.
In November 2008, Caroline Moore, a 14-year-old student from upstate New York, discovered a supernova in a nearby galaxy, making her the youngest person ever to do so. Additional observations determined that the object, called SN 2008ha, is a new type of stellar explosion, 1000 times more powerful than a nova but 1000 times less powerful than a supernova. Astronomers say that it may be the weakest supernova ever seen.
Astronomers are announcing today that a sequence of images collected with the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA) clearly reveals the presence of a rotating molecular disk orbiting the young binary star system V4046 Sagittarii. The SMA images provide an unusually vivid snapshot of the process of formation of giant planets, comets, and Pluto-like bodies. The results also confirm that such objects may just as easily form around double stars as around single stars like our Sun.