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Home > News > Today's News
NASA's Kepler, launched a little more than a year ago, follows in the Earth's wake as it orbits the Sun -- its sights focused permanently on a single patch of sky. With its unblinking gaze, the spacecraft searches among 156,000 stars for slight but regular dips in a star's brightness. Such dimmings could indicate a transit - a planet moving across the face of its home star. If scientists' expectations prove true, over its three and a half year mission, Kepler could discover hundreds or perhaps thousands of transiting exo-planets.
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Imagine floating 35,000 miles above the sunny side of Earth. All seems calm around you. With no satellites or space debris to dodge, you can just relax and enjoy the black emptiness of space. But looks can be deceiving. In reality, you've unknowingly entered into a dimension of sound... A dimension of sight... A dimension of mind... You've just crossed into... the ENA Zone - the place in space where a supersonic "wind" of charged particles from the Sun crashes head-on into the protective magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet. Traveling at a million miles per hour, the solar wind's protons and electrons sense Earth's magnetosphere too late to flow smoothly around it. Instead, they're shocked, heated, and slowed almost to a standstill as they pile up along the outer boundary of the magnetopause forming Energetic Neutral Atoms, or ENAs. That's what NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has just discovered.
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The Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs and more than half of species on Earth, was caused by an asteroid colliding with Earth and not massive volcanic activity, according to a comprehensive review of all the available evidence according to a panel of 41 international experts. The scientists reviewed 20 years' worth of research to determine the cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which happened around 65 million years ago. The extinction wiped out more than half of all species on the planet, including the dinosaurs and large marine reptiles, clearing the way for mammals to become the dominant species on Earth.
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New Jersey Institute of Technology's Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) has achieved "first light" with an new adaptive optics deformable mirror telescope. Images of a sunspots, the most detailed ever obtained in visible light, were released to showcase its resolution. The images were made with the 1.6 meter clear aperture, off-axis New Solar Telescope (NST), which has a resolution covering about 50 miles of the Sun's surface.
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A new analysis of the unusually long solar cycle that ended in 2008 suggests that one reason for the long cycle could be a stretching of the sun's conveyor belt, a current of plasma that circulates between the sun's equator and its poles. The sun goes through cycles lasting approximately 11 years that include phases with increased magnetic activity, more sunspots, and more solar flares, and phases with less activity. The results of this study should help scientists better understand the factors controlling the timing of solar cycles and could lead to better predictions.
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That age-old question, "Where did life on Earth start?" now has a new possible answer. There are several lines of evidence that support the idea that life originated with molecules that lay between mica sheets. The life between the sheets mica hypothesis was developed by Helen Hansma of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). If the "life between the sheets" mica hypothesis is correct, life would have originated between sheets of mica that were layered like the pages in a book.
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Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, European astronomers have for the first time demonstrated that a magnetar — an unusual type of neutron star — was formed from a star with at least 40 times as much mass as the Sun. The result presents great challenges to current theories of how stars evolve, as a star as massive as this was expected to become a black hole, not a magnetar. This now raises a fundamental question: just how massive does a star really have to be to become a black hole?
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New constraints on the elusive Higgs particle are more stringent than ever before. Scientists of the CDF and DZero collider experiments at Fermilab revealed their latest Higgs search results that rule out a significant fraction of the allowed mass range established by earlier experiments. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN, which record proton-proton collisions that have 3.5 times the energy of Tevatron collisions, are also looking for the elusive Higgs boson. But for rare subatomic processes such as the production of a Higgs particle with a low mass, extra energy is less important than a large number of collisions produced. With the Tevatron cranking out more and more collisions, Fermilab has a good chance of catching a glimpse of the Higgs boson.
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Three citizen scientists, a German and an
American couple, have discovered a new radio pulsar hidden in data gathered by the Arecibo
Observatory. This is the first deep-space discovery by Einstein@Home, which uses donated time from the home and office computers of 250,000 volunteers from 192 different countries.
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Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope have for the first time obtained a three-dimensional view of the distribution of the innermost material expelled by an exploding star. The original blast was not only powerful, according to the new results, it was also more concentrated in one particular direction. New observations making use of a unique instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have provided even deeper knowledge of this amazing event, as astronomers have now been able to obtain the first-ever 3D reconstruction of the central parts of the exploding material, which was ejected at an incredible 100 million km per hour or about a tenth of the speed of light.
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