Heavens

Tropical Storm Son-tinh soaked the Philippines and is now moving into the South China Sea. NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of the storm as the bulk western half of the storm had already moved over water.

Mobile devices include an increasing number of input and output techniques that are currently not used for communication. Recent research results by Dr Eve Hoggan from HIIT / University of Helsinki, Finland, however, indicate that a synchronous haptic communication system has value as a communication channel in real-world settings with users that express greetings, presence and emotions through presages.

Bethesda, MD—When astronauts return to Earth, their altitude isn't the only thing that drops—their blood pressure does too. This condition, known as orthostatic hypotension, occurs in up to half of those astronauts on short-term missions (two weeks or less) and in nearly all astronauts after long-term missions (four to six months).

The heat-seeking capabilities of the international Cassini spacecraft and two ground-based telescopes have provided the first look at the aftermath of Saturn's 'Great Springtime Storm'. Concealed from the naked eye, a giant oval vortex is persisting long after the visible effects of the storm subsided.

The ground-based observations were made by the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Chile, and NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

The latest tropical storm in the western North Pacific Ocean has already spread its clouds and showers over the Philippines, as seen in NASA satellite imagery. NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image as it flew over Tropical Storm Son-tinh today, Oct. 24.

One of the lowest mass supermassive black holes ever observed in the middle of a galaxy has been identified, thanks to NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and several other observatories. The host galaxy is of a type not expected to harbor supermassive black holes, suggesting that this black hole, while related to its supermassive cousins, may have a different origin.

NASA's TRMM satellite measured rainfall and towering clouds within the Arabian Sea's first tropical cyclone of the season as it passed overhead from space. Meanwhile, the infrared AIRS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite noticed that strong thunderstorms surrounded the center of the storm. Tropical Cyclone 1A is expected to be short-lived as it heads for a landfall in Somalia on Oct. 25.

WASHINGTON -- The average area covered by the Antarctic ozone holethis year was the second smallest in the last 20 years, according todata from NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) satellites. Scientists attribute the change to warmertemperatures in the Antarctic lower stratosphere.

A new study based on data from European Space Agency's Cluster mission shows that it is easier for the solar wind to penetrate Earth's magnetic environment, the magnetosphere, than had previously been thought. Scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. have, for the first time, directly observed the presence of certain waves in the solar wind—called Kelvin-Helmholtz waves that can help transfer energy into near-Earth space—under circumstances when previous theories predicted they were not expected.

Irvine, Calif., Oct. 24, 2012 – Isolated stars kicked to the edges of space by violent galaxy mergers may be the cause of mysterious infrared light halos observed across the sky, according to UC Irvine and other astronomers.

Satellite imagery indicated that Tropical Storm Tony is a small, compact storm, traveling through the central Atlantic Ocean.

NASA satellites are closely monitoring Tropical Storm Sandy in visible and infrared light as it approaches Jamaica. Sandy is now responsible for hurricane and tropical storm warnings and watches from Jamaica to Cuba, the Bahamas and southern Florida. Sandy is expected to become a hurricane before it reaches Jamaica and Cuba.

Could it be that dark matter "halos" — the huge, invisible cocoons of mass that envelop entire galaxies and account for most of the matter in the universe — aren't completely dark after all but contain a small number of stars? Astronomers from UCLA, UC Irvine and elsewhere make a case for that.

Astronomers have long disagreed about why they see more light in the universe than it seems they should — that is, why the infrared light they observe exceeds the amount of light emitted from known galaxies.

ESA's quartet of satellites studying Earth's magnetosphere, Cluster, has discovered that our protective magnetic bubble lets the solar wind in under a wider range of conditions than previously believed.

Earth's magnetic field is our planet's first line of defence against the bombardment of the solar wind. This stream of plasma is launched by the Sun and travels across the Solar System, carrying its own magnetic field with it.

Using a whopping nine-gigapixel image from the VISTA infrared survey telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory, an international team of astronomers has created a catalogue of more than 84 million stars in the central parts of the Milky Way. This gigantic dataset contains more than ten times more stars than previous studies and is a major step forward for the understanding of our home galaxy. The image gives viewers an incredible, zoomable view of the central part of our galaxy.