A "solar wind" of charged particles continuously travels at supersonic speeds away from the Sun in all directions. This solar wind inflates a giant bubble in interstellar space called the heliosphere — the region of space dominated by the Sun's influence in which the Earth and other planets reside. As the solar wind travels outward, it sweeps up newly formed "pickup ions," which arise from the ionization of neutral particles drifting in from interstellar space.
Heavens
DURHAM, N.H. – On Thursday, October 15, scientists and engineers from the University of New Hampshire's Space Science Center will celebrate the announcement of the first major results from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission, which will be published online Thursday in the journal Science in conjunction with a 2 p.m. press conference held at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The Moon is a big sponge that absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These particles interact with the oxygen present in some dust grains on the lunar surface, producing water. This discovery, made by the ESA-ISRO instrument SARA onboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, confirms how water is likely being created on the lunar surface.
It also gives scientists an ingenious new way to take images of the Moon and any other airless body in the Solar System.
STANFORD, Calif. — Older Americans living in nursing homes experience a significant decline in their ability to perform simple daily tasks — such as feeding themselves, getting dressed or brushing their teeth — after starting dialysis, say researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Starting dialysis to treat kidney failure did not help nursing home patients maintain or improve their functional capacity, said Manjula Kurella Tamura, MD, lead author of a study on the topic, which will appear in the Oct. 15 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
How do humans and their environment interact, and how can we use knowledge of these links to adapt to a planet undergoing radical climate and other environmental changes?
To answer these and related questions, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded 14 grants to scientists, engineers and educators across the country to study coupled natural and human systems.
In the new ESO image, Barnard's Galaxy glows beneath a sea of foreground stars in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer). At the relatively close distance of about 1.6 million light-years, Barnard's Galaxy is a member of the Local Group (ESO 11/96), the archipelago of galaxies that includes our home, the Milky Way.
Tropical Storm Nepartak is now speeding in a northeasterly direction in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, where it is becoming extra-tropical and developing frontal qualities.
The last official position of Napartak from the U.S. Navy's Joint Typhoon Warning Center was on October 13 at 6 a.m. EDT, when the storm was 605 nautical miles east-northeast of the island of Chichi Jima, Japan. That's near 31.5 North and 154.3 East. Nepartak was speeding to the northeast at 33 mph (29 knots) and it had maximum sustained winds near 46 mph (40 knots).
Tropical Storm Parma crossed over the Hainan Island, China over the weekend and is now poised for a final landfall in Vietnam around 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
Not surprisingly, interacting galaxies have a dramatic effect on each other. Studies have revealed that as galaxies approach one another massive amounts of gas are pulled from each galaxy towards the centre of the other, until ultimately, the two merge into one massive galaxy. The object in the image, NGC 2623, is in the late stages of the merging process with the centres of the original galaxy pair now merged into one nucleus. However, stretching out from the centre are two tidal tails of young stars showing that a merger has taken place.
Britney E. Schmidt, a UCLA doctoral student in the department of Earth and space sciences, wasn't sure what she'd glean from images of the asteroid Pallas taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But she hoped to settle at least one burning question: Was Pallas, the second-largest asteroid, actually in that gray area between an asteroid and a small planet?
The answer, she found, was yes. Pallas, like its sister asteroids Ceres and Vesta, was that rare thing: an intact protoplanet.
GOLDEN, Colo. (October 13, 2009) – The largest annual study of patient outcomes at each of the nation's 5,000 nonfederal hospitals found a wide gap in quality between the nation's best hospitals and all others. According to the study, issued today by HealthGrades, the leading independent healthcare ratings organization, patients at highly rated hospitals have a 52 percent lower chance of dying compared with the U.S. hospital average, a quality chasm that has persisted for the last decade even as mortality rates, in general, have declined.
Forecasters were watching a storm they designated as 91 yesterday, October 6, until it organized into a tropical cyclone east of the Leeward Islands around 5 p.m. EDT. It was then named "Tropical Storm Henri," the eighth named tropical cyclone of the Atlantic hurricane season.
The National Institute for Computational Sciences' (NICS's) Cray XT5 supercomputer—Kraken—has been upgraded to become the first academic system to surpass a thousand trillion calculations a second, or one petaflop, a landmark achievement that will greatly accelerate science and place Kraken among the top five computers in the world.
Depression happens to everyone, even tropical storms, and Henri is now tropically depressed. NASA satellite imagery has confirmed he's weakened to a tropical depression and he is further expected to degenerate into a remnant low pressure area.
At 11 a.m. EDT on October 8, Henri's maximum sustained winds were down to 35 mph and waning. The National Hurricane Center used NASA's QuikScat satellite wind date from 6:12 a.m. EDT this morning to confirm Henri's wind speed.
At 7:30 a.m. EDT on October 9, a two-ton rocket body will slam into a crater near the moon's south pole. By studying the resulting plume of gas and dust, scientists hope this grand experiment will confirm the presence of ice in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles.