The last thing that Queensland, Australia needs is more rainfall after the record-breaking flooding that has been occurring there in the last two months. Now, NASA's Aqua satellite has noticed a low pressure area with signs of tropical development in the Coral Sea ( part of the South Pacific Ocean Basin), between Papua New Guinea and Australia's East Coast.
NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and Aqua satellites are providing valuable information to forecasters about Tropical Storm Vania's clouds and rainfall as the system continues to impact Vanuatu and New Caledonia in the South Pacific.
New NASA satellite data indicate the current La Niña event in the eastern Pacific has remained strong during November and December 2010.
A new Chandra X-ray Observatory image of Messier 82, or M82, shows the result of star formation on overdrive. At a distance of only 12 million light years, M82 provides a unique cosmic laboratory for studying conditions similar to those that existed billions of years ago when stars were forming at a furious rate in most galaxies.
BATON ROUGE – The Crab Nebula, once considered to be a source of energy so stable that astronomers used it to calibrate their instruments, is dimming. LSU physicists Mike Cherry, Gary Case and graduate student James Rodi, together with an international team of colleagues using the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, or GBM, on NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, discovered the anomaly. This revelation has proven astonishing for astronomers.
Dark energy is a mysterious force that pervades all space, acting as a "push" to accelerate the Universe's expansion. Despite being 70 percent of the Universe, dark energy was only discovered in 1998 by two teams observing Type Ia supernovae. A Type 1a supernova is a cataclysmic explosion of a white dwarf star.
Planet X, an often-sought 10th planet, is so far a no-show, but Sukanya Chakrabarti has high hopes for finding what might be called Galaxy X – a dwarf galaxy that she predicts orbits our Milky Way Galaxy.
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Planck –– an international satellite that peers back into the beginning of the universe –– has produced what scientists are calling new and provocative data. The satellite is a European Space Agency mission with significant contributions from NASA.
On Tuesday, the Planck mission released a new data catalog with initial maps of the entire sky. The catalog includes thousands of never-before-seen dusty cocoons where stars are forming, and some of the most massive clusters of galaxies ever observed.
The first gravitational lens, a phenomenon in which light from a distant object is bent around a massive foreground object, was discovered in 1979 by a team led by Dr. Dennis Walsh from The University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory.
Since then, astronomers have used gravitational lenses in many ways, including studying dark matter and as "Nature's Telescope" to investigate galaxies in the distant universe.
The combined data from several NASA satellites has astonished astronomers by revealing unexpected changes in X-ray emission from the Crab Nebula, once thought to be the steadiest high-energy source in the sky.
New British-led research shows that starting treatment of blood pressure with two medicines rather than the one produces better and faster results and fewer side effects – findings that could change clinical practice world-wide.
The study, published in the Lancet, challenges popular medical practice for the treatment of high blood pressure. The research was led by Cambridge in collaboration with the Universities of Dundee, Glasgow and the British Hypertension Society.
Using two NASA X-ray satellites, astronomers have discovered what drives the "heartbeats" seen in the light from an unusual black hole system. These results give new insight into the ways that black holes can regulate their intake and severely curtail their growth.
Nature has a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde relationship with mercury, but researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have made a discovery that ultimately could help explain the split personality.
