Some of the coldest air of the 2014-2015 winter season was settling over the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. on February 13, 2015. That Arctic air mass brought wind chills from below zero to the single numbers from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic. Despite the cold on the surface, infrared NASA satellite imagery revealed even colder temperatures in cloud tops associated with the air mass.
Heavens
The majority of stars in our galaxy come in pairs. In particular, the most massive stars usually have a companion. These fraternal twins tend to be somewhat equal partners when it comes to mass - but not always. In a quest to find mismatched star pairs known as extreme mass-ratio binaries, astronomers have discovered a new class of binary stars. One star is fully formed while the other is still in its infancy.
A cluster of young, pulsating stars discovered in the far side of the Milky Way may mark the location of a previously unseen dark-matter dominated dwarf galaxy hidden behind clouds of dust.
Astronomers have peered deep into space to discover new features of a galaxy that's been sketched and photographed for 170 years - M51a, also called the "Whirlpool Galaxy."
The researchers were able to see faint plumes extending from the northeast and south of M51a, by taking what is essentially a photograph made by a 20-hour exposure. The image also provides new details of the linear northwest plume, which itself is nearly 120,000 light-years long, and reveals a lack of stars in a portion of the southeast tail.
As the world waits to see if Mars One can establish a human colony on Mars, scientists are working to determine the long-term consequences of living in low or no-gravity conditions, such as those that might exist on the trip to another planet. New research published online in The FASEB Journal, shows that spaceflight may be associated with a process of accelerated aging of the immune system.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured this striking view of spiral galaxy NGC 7714. This galaxy has drifted too close to another nearby galaxy and the dramatic interaction has twisted its spiral arms out of shape, dragged streams of material out into space, and triggered bright bursts of star formation.
NGC 7714 is a spiral galaxy at 100 million light-years from Earth -- a relatively close neighbor in cosmic terms.
Researchers at the University of Southampton have proposed a new fundamental particle which could explain why no one has managed to detect 'Dark Matter', the elusive missing 85 percent of the Universe's mass.
Dark Matter is thought to exist because of its gravitational effects on stars and galaxies, gravitational lensing (the bending of light rays) around these, and through its imprint on the Cosmic Microwave Background - the afterglow of the Big Bang.
Though predictions of a Snowmageddon were misplaced (it happens the other way also - Hurricane Katrina was nothing special before it hit shore), they would have been a lot wilder if weather services had access to what NASA has. NASA's ISS-RapidScat instrument was monitoring wind speed showing hurricane-force wind gusts over a large enough region that RapidScat had to make ascending and descending passes over parts of it every 24 hours.
The two hemispheres of Mars are more different from any other planet in our solar system. Non-volcanic, flat lowlands characterise the northern hemisphere, while highlands punctuated by countless volcanoes extend across the southern hemisphere. Although theories and assumptions about the origin of this so-called and often-discussed Mars dichotomy abound, there are very few definitive answers.
ETH Zurich geophysicists under Giovanni Leone are now providing a new explanation.
Astronomers poring over four years of data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft have discovered a star that's 11.2 billion years old and has at least five Earth-size planets.
Scientists have discovered a solar system with 5 Earth-sized planets dating back to the dawn of the Galaxy.
Thanks to the NASA Kepler mission, the scientists announced today (Tuesday 27 January 2015) in The Astrophysical Journal the observation of a Sun-like star (Kepler-444) hosting 5 planets with sizes between Mercury and Venus.
Kepler-444 was formed 11.2 billion years ago, when the Universe was less than 20% its current age. This is the oldest known system of terrestrial-sized planets in our Galaxy - 2 and a half times older than the Earth.
Astronomers at the Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands, and the University of Rochester, USA, have discovered that the ring system that they see eclipse the very young Sun-like star J1407 is of enormous proportions, much larger and heavier than the ring system of Saturn. The ring system - the first of its kind to be found outside our solar system - was discovered in 2012 by a team led by Rochester's Eric Mamajek.
A swarm of tiny probes each with a different sensor could be fired into the clouds of Jupiter and grab data as they fall before burning up in the gas giant planet's atmosphere. The probes would last an estimated 15 minutes according to planetary scientists writing in the International Journal Space Science and Engineering. Transmitting 20 megabits of data over fifteen minutes would be sufficient to allows scientists to get a picture of a large part of the atmosphere of the planet.
A multinational team of astronomers working on the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) telescopes found three extremely luminous gamma-ray sources in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite dwarf galaxy of the Milky Way. These are objects of different types, namely the most powerful pulsar wind nebula; the most powerful supernova remnant; and a shell of 270 light years in diameter blown by multiple stars, and supernovae - a so-called superbubble.
The dying moments of an asteroid's magnetic field have been successfully captured by researchers, in a study that offers a tantalising glimpse of what may happen to the Earth's magnetic core billions of years from now.