Typhoon Champi appeared to be the victim of vertical wind shear in infrared imagery from NASA's Terra satellite. Champi has become elongated while moving through the western North Pacific Ocean and is expected to become extra-tropical by October 24.
Heavens
WASHINGTON, D.C., October 23 -- Researchers at the Université du Québec have recently conducted a survey of four Canadian cities to determine the economic feasibility of installing geothermal heating systems in homes in Montreal, Halifax, Vancouver and Toronto.
Tropical Depression 26W was spinning down and speeding up as it was becoming an extra-tropical storm. In fact, its sustained winds were weaker than its forward speed as it moved through the western North Pacific Ocean.
On October 22 at 2100 UTC (5 p.m. EDT), the Joint Typhoon Warning Center issued its final bulletin on Tropical Depression 26. At that time it was becoming an extra-tropical cyclone.
NASA's Aqua satellite saw Central Pacific Ocean Hurricane Olaf maintained its eye and remained a major hurricane on October 23.
At 23:10 UTC (7:10 p.m. EDT) the MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured this visible image of Hurricane Olaf in the central Pacific Ocean. Bands of thunderstorms circled the center and fed into the low-level center from the southeast and north of center.
Studying starlight from red giants has provided insights into the makeup of a star's internal magnetic field - a region that has been notoriously hard to study. The technique applied here could be used to probe the internal magnetic fields in certain star types, providing a clearer picture of the influence of stellar magnetism on a star's evolution. While magnetic fields on the surfaces of stars can be observed, those within the star have so far remained out of reach.
Astronomers have for the first time probed the magnetic fields in the mysterious inner regions of stars, finding they are strongly magnetized.
Using a technique called asteroseismology, the scientists were able to calculate the magnetic field strengths in the fusion-powered hearts of dozens of red giants, stars that are evolved versions of our sun.
Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have taken advantage of gravitational lensing to reveal the largest sample of the faintest and earliest known galaxies in the Universe. Some of these galaxies formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang and are fainter than any other galaxy yet uncovered by Hubble. The team has determined, for the first time with some confidence, that these small galaxies were vital to creating the Universe that we see today.
Before light travelled across it, the universe was a dark place. For about a billion years after the Big Bang, the cosmos was cloaked in a thick fog of hydrogen gas that kept light trapped. But as early stars began to form, hydrogen began to clear through a process called "reionization", leting light escape in all directions and turning the universe transparent. This event played a central role in the formation of the universe as we know it.
NASA's GPM satellite saw that the western side of Tropical Storm Patricia was packing most of the storm's moderate and heavy rainfall when it passed overhead in space. Patricia was close to the coast of western Mexico, and triggered warnings and watches. Patricia intensified into a hurricane on Oct. 22.
Tropical Depression Twenty-E (TD20E) formed on Oct. 20, 2015 off the Mexican coast southeast of Puerto Escondido, Mexico. Later that evening TD20E was upgraded to tropical Storm Patricia.
GPM Sees Lopsided Rainfall
Solar panels are the beacon of renewable energy, yet they are not getting as much light as they could be. Joshua Pearce from Michigan Technological University and a team from Queen's University in Canada have found a way to get more sun to shine on the panels and crank up the output by 30 percent or more.
"We expend a lot of blood, sweat and tears to make solar panels as efficient as possible," Pearce says. "We work so hard to get a fraction of a percent increase on the module level; double digit returns on the systems level was relatively easy."
The RapidScat instrument aboard the International Space Station analyzed Hurricane Olaf's winds in the Central Pacific Ocean.
RapidScat gathered wind speed and direction data on Olaf on Oct. 21 at 2000 UTC (8 p.m. EDT). RapidScat measured sustained winds around the center at more than 36 meters per second/70 knots/80.5 mph/129.6 kph). Hurricane force winds extend outward up to 30 miles (45 km) from the center and tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 155 miles (250 km).
COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Muscular dystrophy, which affects approximately 250,000 people in the U.S., occurs when damaged muscle tissue is replaced with fibrous, fatty or bony tissue and loses function. For years, scientists have searched for a way to successfully treat the most common form of the disease, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), which primarily affects boys. Now, a team of University of Missouri researchers have successfully treated dogs with DMD and say that human clinical trials are being planned in the next few years.
For the first time, astrophysicists are able to determine the presence of strong magnetic fields deep inside pulsating giant stars. Magnetic fields have important consequences in all stages of stellar evolution, from a star's formation to its demise.
A consortium of international researchers, including several from UC Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP), used asteroseismology -- a discipline similar to seismology -- to track waves traveling through stars in order to determine their inner properties. Their findings appear in the journal Science.
It has been a busy season in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean, tropically speaking. The twenty-sixth tropical depression of the western North Pacific Ocean hurricane season formed and NASA's Aqua satellite saw it come together.
At 03:20 UTC on October 22, 2015 (11:20 p.m. EDT, Oct. 21), NASA's Aqua satellite passed over newborn Tropical Depression 26W. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer that flies aboard Aqua captured visible image of the storm.
Extremely heavy rainfall from the once Super Typhoon Koppu has caused deadly flooding and mudslides in the Philippines. The Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM core satellite estimates rainfall totals from space and that data was used to create rainfall maps at NASA. By October 21, Koppu had weakened to a depression and continued slowly moving away from the northern Philippines.