McCall says twelve of the fourteen giants in the Local Sheet, including the Milky Way and Andromeda, are "spiral galaxies" which have highly flattened disks in which stars are forming. The remaining two are more puffy "elliptical galaxies", whose stellar bulks were laid down long ago. Intriguingly, the two ellipticals sit on opposite sides of the Council. Winds expelled in the earliest phases of their development might have shepherded gas towards the Local Group, thereby helping to build the disks of the Milky Way and Andromeda.
Heavens
Research using NASA data is giving new insight into one of the processes causing Greenland's ice sheet to lose mass. A team of scientists used satellite observations and ice thickness measurements gathered by NASA's Operation IceBridge to calculate the rate at which ice flows through Greenland's glaciers into the ocean. The findings of this research give a clearer picture of how glacier flow affects the Greenland Ice Sheet and shows that this dynamic process is dominated by a small number of glaciers.
Tropical Cyclone Lusi has spawned warnings and watches in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and New Zealand as it moves through the South Pacific Ocean. NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites provided visible and infrared views of the storm that revealed it has become better organized.
NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Lusi over Vanuatu on March 9 at 23:30 UTC. The image showed towering thunderstorms surrounded the center and northwestern quadrants of the storm.
As towns across Cape Cod struggle with problems stemming from septic systems, a recent study by a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientist focuses on one specific toxic by-product: mercury. In a study of local groundwater, biogeochemist Carl Lamborg found microbial action on wastewater transforms it into more mobile, more toxic forms of the element.
His findings were published in Environmental Science and Technology in November 2013.
The Orion Nebula is home to hundreds of young stars and even younger protostars known as proplyds. Many of these nascent systems will go on to develop planets, while others will have their planet-forming dust and gas blasted away by the fierce ultraviolet radiation emitted by massive O-type stars that lurk nearby.
On Friday, March 7 there were two tropical lows located east and west of Queensland, Australia. Those lows organized and intensified into Tropical Cyclone Gillian and Hadi and were caught together in one amazing image from NASA's Aqua satellite. While Gillian has already made one landfall and is expected to make another, Hadi is turning tail and running from the mainland.
Smartphones are capable of giving us directions when we're lost, sending photos and videos to our friends in mere seconds, and even helping us find the best burger joint in a three-mile radius. But University of Houston researchers are using smartphones for another very important function: diagnosing diseases in real time.
The researchers are developing a disease diagnostic system that offers results that could be read using only a smartphone and a $20 lens attachment.
Australian astronomers have shown galaxies in the vast empty regions of the Universe are actually aligned into delicate strings in research published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
A team of astronomers based at The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) has found short strings of faint galaxies in what were previously thought to be extremely empty parts of space.
Potentially devastating plant pests and diseases are highlighted in a new report from EASAC, the European Academies' Science Advisory Council, the leading provider of independent scientific advice to Europe's policy-makers. In the detailed EU-wide study of emerging plant pests and diseases, EASAC describes their combined threat to crops and forests and wider ecosystems, with implications for human health. In economic terms, as admitted by the EU Commission, billions of euros could be at stake and the environmental impact may be irreversible. Prof.
Obesity levels among women in low- and middle-income countries tend to rise in line with wealth as they purchase more energy-dense foods, but a new UCL study suggests that more educated consumers make better food choices that mitigate this effect.
The study showed that in middle-income countries, obesity levels among women with secondary or higher education are 14-19% lower than less-educated women of similar wealth.
Using data from NASA's Van Allen Probes, researchers have tested and improved a model to help forecast what's happening in the radiation environment of near-Earth space -- a place seething with fast-moving particles and a space weather system that varies in response to incoming energy and particles from the sun.
There are two developing areas of tropical low pressure that lie east and west of Queensland, Australia. System 96P and System 98P, respectively. The MODIS instrument that flies aboard both NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites captured images of both tropical trouble-makers as each satellite passed overhead on March 7.
Agricultural fires are still burning in Indochina ten days after the last NASA web posting about the fires. This natural-color image, taken on March 07, 2014, by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, MODIS, aboard the Aqua satellite, shows a more comprehensive area of burning agricultural fires that stretch from Burma through to Laos and south throughout Thailand. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS's thermal bands, are outlined in red.Fire is used in cropland areas for pest and weed control and to prepare fields for planting.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has recorded the never-before-seen break-up of an asteroid into as many as 10 smaller pieces.
Fragile comets, comprised of ice and dust, have been seen falling apart as they near the sun, but nothing like this has ever before been observed in the asteroid belt.
"This is a rock, and seeing it fall apart before our eyes is pretty amazing," said David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles, who led the astronomical forensics investigation.
The ALMA images reveal a vast belt of carbon monoxide located at the fringes of the Beta Pictoris system. Much of the gas is concentrated in a single clump located about 8 billion miles (13 billion kilometers) from the star, or nearly three times the distance between the planet Neptune and the sun. The total amount of CO observed, the scientists say, exceeds 200 million billion tons, equivalent to about one-sixth the mass of Earth's oceans.