New Moon, Supermoon ring in the New Year

The first night of 2014 also brings with it the first lunar phenomenon of the year: a new moon that’s also a supermoon. It’s one of two supermoons in January (the other is January 30) and one of five for the whole year.

What is a supermoon? When the moon orbits slightly closer to Earth than on average, NASA states. Typically, it’s most visible when the moon is full, but that’s not the only time it can occur. In fact, given that the upcoming event is a new moon, we’ll barely be able to see its light at all — no matter how late we celebrate into the night.

People in parts of North America farthest west and those on islands in the Pacific may have some visibility, but only through binoculars. Tides in some places will also be higher. “When the sun, moon and Earth are in alignment (at the time of the new or full moon), the solar tide has an additive effect on the lunar tide,” according to NOAA, “creating extra-high high tides, and very low, low tides — both commonly called spring tides.” Unless a severe weather event accompanies the high tides, however, don’t expect anything dramatic to happen from the lunar effect.

Sadly, the January 30 supermoon is also a new moon, so same deal: no viewing pleasure. On August 10, however — the closest supermoon of the year — the lunar event coincides with a full moon, creating what will look like a huge, low ball of light in the sky.

Click here to read more. You can also know more about the supermoon if you click here.

Birth of Black Hole kills 'exploding' radio star

Astronomers have found a new population of exploding stars that "switch off" their radio transmissions before collapsing into a Black Hole.

These exploding stars use all of their energy to emit one last strong beam of highly energetic radiation - known as a gamma-ray burst - before they die.

Until now, it was thought all gamma-ray bursts were followed by a radio afterglow - a premise that a team of Australian astronomers of the Centre for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) at Curtin University and the University of Sydney originally set out to prove correct.

Lead researcher and Curtin research fellow Dr Paul Hancock said that after studying an ultra-sensitive image of gamma-ray bursts with no afterglow, we can now say the theory was incorrect and our telescopes have not failed us.

It allowed for the stacking of 200 separate observations on top of each other to re-create the image of a gamma-ray burst in much better quality - yet, no trace of a radio afterglow was found.

Click here to know more about the research and its results.

Asteroid-hunting telescope orbiting Earth sends first images

NEOWISE, a repurposed infrared telescope orbiting Earth, has returned its first test images in preparation for its new task: hunting for and characterizing asteroids – especially those that could represent a hazard to Earth.

The images are a milestone for NASA's first mission dedicated to the hunt for near-Earth objects (NEOs) from space. In addition to discovering additional NEOs, the telescope will help refine estimates of the hazards presented by objects already discovered via optical telescopes. Beyond its immediate objectives, the mission is serving as training wheels for a more ambitious mission, NEOCAM, that a team is preparing to propose to NASA.

NASA recently released initial images from NEOWISE. The team, led by Amy Mainzer, is pleased with the results. "The image quality looks excellent," says Dr. Mainzer, who is also leading the NEOCAM effort. "It looks pretty much like we left it about 31 months ago." That's when NASA put the craft to sleep when its initial mission ended.

All-sky catalog

NEOWISE launched in 2009 as NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The exquisitely sensitive telescope spent about six months building an all-sky catalog of objects ranging from brown dwarfs to distant galaxies. NASA's James Web Space Telescope, currently slated for launch in 2018, and other observatories will use the catalog to pick targets for detailed observation.

By end of September 2010, however, the craft had exhausted the coolant that helped the infrared detectors reach the sensitivity needed to build the catalog. Within a month, NASA opted to extended the mission through February 2011 to see how the craft, with warmer detectors, worked as an NEO observatory.

During both phases of the craft's initial mission, it observed more than 158,000 asteroids. Of those, it discovered some 35,000 objects; 135 were NEOs. It picked up 155 comets, including 21 new ones.

Importantly, during the craft's warm phase, the team observed 6,500 asteroids in the main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter, as well as 88 NEOs, according to a study the researchers published in November 2012 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

To know more about NEOWISE, click here.

Gaia space probe blasts off on five-year mission to map a billion stars

A £2 billion European probe has blasted into space on a five-year mission to map more than a billion stars. The Gaia space telescope was launched by a Russian Soyuz rocket from Europe's space port in Kourou, French Guiana, shortly after 9 a.m. UK time.

It is en route to a gravitationally stable parking place called the L2 Lagrangian point almost a million miles from Earth. Gaia is designed to create the most accurate map yet of our galaxy, the Milky Way, by pinpointing millions of stars in 3D with unprecedented accuracy.

It is also expected to discover thousands of previously unknown objects, including exploding stars, planets orbiting other suns, and nearby asteroids. Scientists hope Gaia will yield clues about two of the universe's biggest mysteries, Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

Situated with the Earth shielding it from the Sun, the craft will be perfectly placed to observe the wider universe. As it spins slowly, two telescopes will sweep across the entire sky and simultaneously focus their light on the largest digital camera ever put into space.

More than a billion stars will be observed an average of 70 times each over the five-year period.Gaia will measure the position and key physical properties of every star, including its brightness, temperature and chemical composition. The flood of data beamed back to Earth will be enough to fill more than 30,000 CD-ROMs.

To read more about the exploration, click here.

Molecule of Argon Hydride discovered in space

A molecule containing a noble gas has been discovered in space by a team including astronomers from Cardiff University.

The find was made using a Cardiff-led instrument aboard Europe's Herschel Space Observatory. The molecule, argon hydride, was seen in the Crab Nebula, the remains of a star that exploded 1,000 years ago. Before the discovery, molecules of this kind have only been studied in laboratories on Earth.

The noble gases, which include helium, argon, radon and krypton, usually do not react easily with other chemical elements, and are often found on their own. In the right circumstances, however, they can form molecules with other elements. Such chemical compounds have only ever been studied in laboratories on Earth, leading astronomers to assume the right conditions simply do not occur in space.

"The Crab Nebula was only formed 1000 years ago when a massive star exploded", said Dr Haley Gomez of Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy.

"Not only is it very young in astronomical terms, but also relatively close, at just 6,500 light years away, providing an excellent way to study what happens in these stellar explosions."

Further measurements of the Crab Nebula were made using Herschel's SPIRE instrument. Its development and operation was led by Professor Matt Griffin, from the School of Physics and Astronomy.

As molecules spin in space, they emit light of very specific wavelengths, or colours, called "emission lines". The precise wavelength is dictated by the composition and structure of the molecule. Studying the emission lines observed by the SPIRE instrument allows astronomers to study the chemistry of outer space.

The team, led by Professor Mike Barlow from University College London, did not set out to make the discovery, but stumbled upon it almost by accident.

"We were really concentrating on studying the dust in the filaments with SPIRE, and out pops these two bright emission lines exactly where we see the dust shining", says Dr Gomez. "The team had a hard time figuring out what these lines were from, as no-one had seen them before."

Professor Barlow said, "At first, the discovery of argon seemed bizarre. With hot gas still expanding at high speeds after the explosion, a supernova remnant is a harsh, hot and hostile environment, and one of the places where we least expected to find a noble-gas based molecule."

It now seems the Crab Nebula provides exactly the right conditions to form such molecules. The argon was produced in the initial stellar explosion, and then ionised, or energised, with electrons stripped from the atoms in resulting intense radiation as shockwaves.

These shockwaves led to the formation of the network of cool filaments containing cold molecular hydrogen, made of two hydrogen atoms. The ionised argon then mixed with the cool gas to provide perfect conditions for noble gas compounds to form.

To read more, click here.

Geminid meteor shower lights up Alabama skies

The Geminid Metor shower peaked between 9 p.m. Friday and the break of dawn on Saturday. Arizona got a preview on Tuesday. A loud one as a meteor exploded over the state. The meteor that shook windows was not part of the Geminids.

Sky & Telescope says the Geminid meteor shower is the "richest reliable shower of the year." Skywatchers should bundle up and bring a flask for the annual Geminid meteor shower. You will be rewarded with meteors appearing at a rate of about 100 to 120 an hour. Space experts say the peak will be right after the moon sets and just before dawn.

The Geminid meteor shower was named for the stellar constellation Gemini. The Geminid meteors arrive in mid-December when the Earth passes through debris from a small asteroid called 3200 Phaethon.

Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, said "This year, there will be a magic hour starting at about 4 a.m. up until dawn that there will be no moon and you'll be able to see the Geminids in their full glory,"

To read more, click here.

Five exoplanets show evidence of water vapour

The Hubble Space Telescope and some new imaging techniques have helped scientists detect traces of water vapour on five massive planets in our galactic backyard. However, despite the presence of water molecules in their atmospheres, none of these five planets is suitable to life. They are all gas giants, sometimes called hot-Jupiters, and they are all too close to their suns to sustain liquid water on their surfaces.

The planets -- WASP-17b, HD209458b, WASP-12b, WASP-19b and XO-1b -- are tidally locked with their stars so that the same side of the planet always faces the star and is constantly bombarded with a powerful stream of solar radiation. The heat from the star is distributed around the planet via strong winds that move faster than the speed of sound.

To find traces of water vapor in their atmospheres, L. Drake Deming, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, which measures near-infrared light. The scientists waited until each planet was about to pass in front of its sun, then pointed Hubble at it. Because water molecules absorb certain wavelengths of light, the scientists could detect the presence of water vapour during the planet's transit across its sun if those wavelengths were not picked up by Hubble.

Hubble is only strong enough to see the signs of water vapor on the gas giant planets, but Deming said that Hubble's successor -- the James Webb Telescope, slated to launch in 2018 -- will be strong enough to find water signatures in the atmospheres of smaller, rockier planets more like Earth.

To know more about the exoplanets and the findings, click here.

Astronomers get first glimpse of the most distant known galaxy

Just 700 million years after the big bang, our most distant known galaxy was a cauldron of star production, churning out new suns hundreds of times faster than our own Milky Way galaxy, scientists say. This spring, roughly 13 billion years later, astronomers have first glimpsed evidence of this ferocious activity and confirmed the distance and age of the galaxy now designated as z8_GND_5296, according to Los Angeles Times.

In a paper published recently in the journal Nature, researchers said discovery of the galaxy suggested our early universe was capable of far more star production than previously believed.

Radiant energy, including visible light, travels no faster than 186,000 miles per second. Since it took that energy almost 13 billion years to travel from z8_GND_5296 to the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, researchers can only study the galaxy as it was in its infancy.

It would appear very different if we were to glimpse its form in real time, scientists say. In order to determine the galaxy's age and distance from Earth, scientists study its so-called redshift, or the lengthening wavelengths of energy emitted by its stars over great distances. The higher the redshift, the greater the distance.

It's only recently, however, that technology has advanced to the point that high redshifts can be studied. In the case of z8_GND_5296, scientists used Keck's MOSFIRE, the Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration, for this purpose. It's likely then that further galaxies will be observed.

To read more, click here.

Weird galaxy discovered at a distance of 9.4 billion light-years

A team led by Arjen van der Wel of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany has announced that it has made a “weird and interesting discovery,” more precisely described as the most distant gravitational lens ever seen. The lensing object is a galaxy some 9.4 billion light-years away—an enormous distance in a universe that burst into existence just 13.8 billion years ago.

The object being lensed—its image is split into four distinct spots of light—is obviously even more remote, although it’s so small and faint that it’s hard to assign its distance a hard number. What makes this discovery so weird, though, isn’t its distance but the nature of the thing being magnified. It’s a tiny dwarf galaxy whose weight in stars adds up to only about 100 million Suns’ worth—a piker compared with the Milky Way’s 100 billion or more. The overall color of the galaxy tells astronomers that it’s also very young—no more than 40 million years old—and forming stars at a furious rate.

Dwarf galaxies aren’t especially rare; astronomers keep finding them flitting around the Milky Way, and think many more are waiting to be found. But these tiny galaxies can’t sustain bursts of star formation for very long since they don’t have a lot of raw material to work with. That ought to have made this one very hard to spot, since it was at such a distance and it would have been bright enough to see only for a relatively small sliver of its lifespan.

That, plus the inherent difficulty involved in  the lensing effect occurring at all—the foreground and background objects have to line up with exquisite precision—makes the fact that this lensed galaxy ever turned up in telescopes even more improbable, the result of just the right conditions and angles converging at just the right time.

To read more about the discovery, click here.

A tilted solar system: Planets orbit at an angle of 45 degrees!

Astronomers looking at a data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope have discovered a “tilted” solar system – a solar system where two of the planets orbit their star at a 45 degree angle. The two planets are orbiting the star currently known as Kepler-56, which is about 2,800 light years from Earth. Kepler-56 is a red giant that has about twice the diameter of our sun but is only about 30 percent more massive.

Most solar systems discovered so far – including our own – feature planets that orbit their star in roughly the same plane as the star’s equator. Earth, for example, orbits the sun at an angle that’s only about 7.2 degrees above that plane. That’s because most solar systems form from a giant spinning disc of dust and gas that, through the influence of gravity, eventually becomes a star, its planets, its asteroids, etc.

The two planets appear to be held in their tilted orbit because of the gravitational pull of a much larger planet in the same solar system, which is located on the outer edge of the system. That planet  is “tugging” on the other two with its gravity. The gravitational pull of the massive outer planet and the sun keep the two planets at their tilted orbits.

The two planets also have a “resonance” with each other that helps keep their orbits stable – one of the planets circles the star almost exactly twice as fast, which helps keep the two planets in the same orbital plane.

To read more about the discovery, click here.

Free-floating new red planet has no star

There's a new red planet, according to researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Dubbed PSOJ318.5-22, the exotic young planet is about 80 light years from Earth. Unlike all other known planets, this one does not orbit a star and is considered free-floating.

Dr. Michael Liu's research team was on the look out for failed stars, known as brown dwarfs, when they came across PSO J318.5-22. The Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) telescope, located in Haleakala, Hawaii, first detected the planet's heat signature, and they confirmed the findings by using other telescopes on the Hawaii Islands. Despite being named "brown dwarfs," these are typically faint and red.

PSO J318.5-22 is redder and fainter the reddest brown dwarfs. The research team tracked the young planetary-mass object for two years. Studying this planet will give clues to other gas-giants, including Jupiter.

To read more about the research and its findings, click here.

The densest galaxy is only 54 million light years away?

Astronomers have recently discovered the densest galaxy ever seen, at 54 million light years away, and it is said to be in our galactic neighborhood. Using the combined imaging capabilities of ground-based observatories with the high-flying Hubble Space Telescope and its cousin, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the ultra-compact dwarf galaxy known as M60-UCD1 turns out to be 15,000 times denser than what is found in our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

What’s even more remarkable about M60-USD1 is that the galaxy’s most crowded part–its core, where half its 200 million solar masses resides–spans a radius of only 80 light years. That means the stars in this little galaxy are about 25 times closer to each other than those we find around the Sun’s galactic neighborhood.

Observations have revealed that the galaxy’s tiny core harbors a strong x-ray source, which belongs to a giant black hole that weighs 10 million times the mass of our sun. That makes it about twice the size of the black hole in our own galaxy.

To read more about the observations, click here.  Watch a video about the galaxy here.

When five cosmic events adorned the sky

During the last week, sky-watchers could spot the moon dancing with celestial luminaries like planets and stars. Within a half hour after sunset on Tuesday, September 24, Mercury made a remarkably close encounter with Virgo constellation’s brightest star Spica. The cosmic pair appeared to squeak past each other—well within 1 degree—the closest conjunction between a planet and such a bright star in 2013.

This cosmic duo posed a real challenge for observers because of its proximity to the horizon. Using Venus and Saturn as a convenient guidepost helped track down Mercury/Spica which were about 22 degrees apart—a little more than the width of two side-by-side fists at arm’s length.

Into the early morning hours of Wednesday, September 25, the eastern and southern skies had a stunning waning moon passing the left of the red giant Aldebaran—the bright “eye” of Taurus. The near quarter moon was said to join Aldebaran - the brightest star in the constellation Taurus - the bull on Sept.24/25.

Earth’s natural satellite appeared less than three degrees from the 68 light-year distant star—equal to the width of your three middle fingers at arm’s length. The moon during daytime on Wednesday passed through the southern sky, and one could catch sight of Aldebaran with binoculars.

Last-quarter moon occurred on Thursday, September 26 at 11:56 pm EDT (Friday, 3:56 am UT). The moon rose in the east around midnight, and is said to have passed between winter constellations Gemini, to the left, and Orion, on its right.

At dawn on Saturday, September 28 the waning crescent Moon was only five degrees south of the beacon-like Jupiter. The two appeared particularly pretty with binoculars, and one could also spot the gas giant’s four biggest moons.

On Sunday, September 29, early bird sky watchers gazing towards the eastern sky would have noticed that the moon had sunk between bright Mars, near the eastern horizon, and Jupiter, more than halfway near the zenith, forming a diagonal alignment of the neighboring worlds.

For more amazing pictures, click here.

Powerful solar storm slams into earth

A powerful solar explosion slammed into Earth's magnetic field recently, ramping up the Northern Lights across parts of Canada and the United States.

The sun storm erupted Monday, sending a huge cloud of charged particles streaking into space at incredible speeds. That cloud — known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME — hit Earth's magnetic field at around 10 p.m. on Tuesday, researchers said. NASA released a video of the sun eruption on Monday, before closing down for the current government shutdown.

Such storms can also cause the Northern Lights to be seen as far south as New York and Idaho. Flare-ups were indeed seen in North America as a result of the recent CME impact. The sun is in the peak year of its current 11-year activity cycle, which is known as Solar Cycle 24. The number of sunspots increases during a solar maximum, leading to more solar flares and CMEs, which erupt from these temporary dark patches on our star.

The sun has been quiet during its current cycle, and the peak has been lackluster so far as well. In fact, scientists say Solar Cycle 24's maximum is the weakest in 100 years.

You can read more about the impact here and watch the video here.

Is the moon 100 million years younger?

The moon is quite a bit younger than scientists had previously believed, new research suggests. The leading theory of how the moon formed holds that it was created when a mysterious planet — one the size of Mars or larger — slammed into Earth about 4.56 billion years ago, just after the solar system came together.

However, new analyses of lunar rocks suggest that the moon, which likely coalesced from the debris blasted into space by this monster impact, is actually between 4.4 billion and 4.45 billion years old. The finding, which would make the moon 100 million years younger than previously thought, could reshape scientists' understanding of the early Earth as well as its natural satellite, researchers said.

Scientists know the solar system's age (4.568 billion years) quite well. And they can pin down the formation times of relatively small bodies such as asteroids precisely, too, by noting when these objects underwent extensive melting — a consequence, in part, of the heat generated by the collision and fusion of these objects' building-block "planetesimals."

Scientists keep getting better and better estimates, however, as they refine their techniques and technology improves. And those estimates are pushing the moon's formation date farther forward in time. The moon is thought to have harbored a global ocean of molten rock shortly after its dramatic formation. Currently, the most precisely determined age for the lunar rocks that arose from that ocean is 4.360 billion years, the researchers said.

And here on Earth, scientists have found signs in several locations of a major melting event that occurred around 4.45 billion years ago. So, evidence is building that the catastrophic collision that formed the moon and reshaped Earth occurred around that time, rather than 100 million years or so before, the researchers said.

To read more about the research and findings, click here.

Life on Mars: Absence of methane challenges theory

Nasa’s Mars Rover Curiosity has failed to find a key chemical on the Red Planet challenging the theory of life on Mars. This latest discovery has added a new twist to the debate about possible life on Mars.

According to data collected by the robot, the Martian environment lacks methane. This comes as a surprise to researchers as previous information had indicated positive detections. Crucially, this reduces the possibility that life ever survived there.

Over the past decade, scientists using Mars satellites and telescopes on Earth have reported plumes of methane in the Martian atmosphere. These small but potentially crucial amounts of methane would have indicated the possibility of life on the Red Planet. On Earth, the vast majority of methane in the atmosphere is caused by organic life. The rover is now 14 months into a planned two-year mission to search for signs of organic life.

However, not all scientists are convinced that methane is missing there. And according to the twitter account of the Rover itself, there is still a chance that life once existed on Mars. On 19 September, one of its messages read “Lack of methane doesn’t mean Mars never supported life. Plenty of Earth organisms don’t produce the gas.”

And the debate is still open. It’s hoped an upcoming Indian mission will provide further information on the question. India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, scheduled to be launched at the end of October, will explore the existence of life on the Red Planet.

To read more about India's mission to Mars, click here.

Venus and Moon meet up in spectacular encounter

Venus and moon shared a dazzling celestial meet-up that wowed stargazers around the world Sunday evening (Sept. 8).Skywatchers snapped photos and at least one time-lapse video of Venus and the moon as the pair shined together in the night sky.

Venus and the moon shared what astronomers call a "conjunction," when two celestial objects appear near each other when viewed from Earth. The Venus-moon sight occurred about 45 minutes after sunset on Sunday in what was their closest encounter of the northern summer, fall or winter.

Some observers got a particularly special cosmic treat. From certain locations on Earth, the moon appeeared to hide Venus it passed between Earth and the more distant planet in what scientists call an "occultation." Although the unique sight couldn't be seen around the world, some stargazers in the Southern Hemisphere also got an incredible view of the conjunction.

Click here to watch the video.

To read more and view photos, click here.

Strange brown dwarfs: Little 'failed' stars or big planets?

Is it time for a stellar identity crisis? Astronomers studying cold brown dwarfs have found that the boundary between star and planet might be much blurrier than once thought. These strange 'failed' stars, described online in the journal Science, could help shed light on the atmospheres of distant exoplanets.

Scientists have managed to find out a lot about stars and their atmospheres by studying their light, including their temperatures and their distances, reports Los Angeles Times. But that’s easier said than done for exoplanets: The operating ground rules are very different between a massive, hot, bright star and a very small, cool, dark planet. So these brown dwarfs, which sit on the scale between normal stars and gas-giant planets, can bridge the gap in scientists' knowledge.

There could be a whole lot of them in the sky, too -- so many that some scientists suggested they could help partly explain the mysterious Universe-wide effects attributed to dark matter. These brown dwarfs are essentially the D-listers of celestial Hollywood – their career goals to become stars never quite took off. That’s because these relative lightweights never became dense enough in their cores to start their hydrogen-fueled nuclear fusion engines.

Ultra-cool brown dwarfs, described in the last two years using NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer telescope, are the coldest of the bunch, and very dim and small. They generally sit right around the borderline between a tiny star and a really big gas giant – 13 Jupiter masses.

But brown dwarfs are easier to pick out in the sky than exoplanets, said study coauthor Adam Kraus, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin. And given the number of properties the two share, studying these brown dwarfs and their atmospheres could help astronomers understand exoplanet atmospheres too.

But because brown dwarfs don’t shine the way that successful stars do, it’s hard to judge a lot of their characteristics, including one of the most basic – how far they are. So the researchers decided to directly measure the distances of 16 brown dwarfs with a different method, using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope as it trailed behind the Earth.

As Spitzer moves, it watches how the brown dwarfs 'move' in front of the background stars. It’s the same reason your finger seems to 'jump' against the background if you hold it up and look at it with one eye closed and then quickly switch to the other eye. Each eye has a slightly different perspective because it’s in a slightly different position on your face.

And just as your two eyes’ slightly different perspectives allow your brain to determine depth, the scientists used Spitzer’s snapshots of the same brown dwarf from different positions to calculate the failed star's distance. It's a painstaking but time-tested method known as the parallax method.

The researchers found that these failed stars were between 20 and 50 light years away. They also ended up being hotter than expected. Many of the ultra-cool brown dwarfs are thought to be room temperature, but the brown dwarfs surveyed here were around 260 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

"The coldest brown dwarfs (and by extension, the extrasolar planets that closely resemble them) have their appearance shaped by many properties, and not just by their temperature," said Kraus, who co-wrote the report with Trent Dupuy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "We need to understand the influence of these other properties (such as chemical composition, cloud cover, and surface gravity) in order to interpret the many exoplanet discoveries that we expect to see from ongoing and future discovery programs."

Perhaps the planet-star boundary needs to be redrawn – but not in terms of mass, Kraus added. Size should not matter as much. What should matter is how they formed.

To read the entire story, click here.

Monster storm on Saturn reveals water and hidden layers

A massive storm rages on Saturn once every 30 years, which mixes up the atmosphere and reveals some of its hidden secrets. The most recent mega-storm arrived on the ringed planet about 10 years ahead of schedule, from December 2010 to August 2011, said Lawrence Sromovsky, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The storm grew quickly from a small white dot first detected by NASA's Cassini probe on Dec. 5, 2010, to a spot about the size of Earth by the end of the month, writes Deborah Netburn for the Los Angeles Times. By the end of January 2011, the storm had totally encircled the planet at a latitude of 30 degrees. The mega-storm raged on for seven more months, releasing static electric charges indicative of lightning and causing fierce vertical winds that blew up to 300 mph.

The storm also allowed scientists a rare opportunity to glimpse the hidden layers of Saturn's thick atmosphere. Scientists have hypothesized that Saturn's atmosphere is stacked like a layer cake, with water vapor clouds at the bottom, followed by a layer of ammonia hydrosulfide clouds and pure ammonia clouds near the top. But this structure has been difficult to observe because the surface of Saturn is obscured by a thick haze that is difficult to penetrate.

The storm temporarily changed all that. As the storm's fierce winds cut through the haze, Cassini was able to observe the cloud tops in near-infrared light, revealing a very different infrared color signature than the one produced by haze particles in the surrounding atmosphere. Sromovsky and his team recently analyzed that data and discovered that cloud particles at the top of the storm were probably made of water ice, ammonia ice and a third substance that might be ammonium sulfide. This is the first time that water ice has been detected on Saturn.

To know more about the research and other details, click here.

Did a meteor kill megafauna and trigger prehistoric climate shift?

Scientists have discovered new evidence that an extraplanetary body came down over Canada around 12,900 years ago, possibly triggering the death of the giant animals then roaming the North American continent, and starting a cooling spell that helped drive mankind towards agriculture and civilization.

During the Younger Dryas climactic period, which kicked off around 13,000 years ago, world temperatures fell sharply, with parts of the northern hemisphere dropping around five degrees Centigrade in a decade or less. The effects lasted for over a thousand years before temperatures warmed up again.

The Younger Dryas has been cited as a reason why North America lost the unique megafauna that roamed the continent, including huge saber-toothed cats, a giant sloth, and colossal camels. The cold period is also thought to have spurred the shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture as the means of production for humanity.

The prevailing theory as to what caused the Younger Dryas is that the climate was altered by the draining of Lake Agassiz, a vast fresh-water lake the size of the Black Sea that was dammed by glaciers in the center of the North American continent. When this vented, it sent an enormous amount for fresh water into the Atlantic and Arctic seas, which could have disrupted warming sea currents.

But an alternative theory suggests that the continent may have undergone a series of bombardments from asteroids or comets, triggering the cooling period. One 4km-wide crater from around that time, the Corossal crater, has already been spotted in Canada.

Professor Mukul Sharma, from Dartmouth University said his team has found direct evidence of another massive impact. Sharma studied core samples from six different sites along the Eastern seaboard, looking for spherules, which are crystalline rocks formed by temperatures of 2,000°C. These can only be formed naturally by volcanoes or impacts – forest or coal fires don't burn hot enough – and Shama's team found concentrations of these indicating that an impact had occurred in Quebec at around the time the Younger Dryas started.

The composition of the spherules differs from the element concentration that would have come from the Corossal crater. Sharma says the team now needs to find another crater to account for the new data, and are looking for a suitable target, according to the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

How did scientists find conclusive proof that the impact caused humans to develop agriculture? Read more from this link.

Will Moon and Mars appear the same size this August?

On August 27, 2013, the moon and Mars are expected to appear the same size to the naked eye. That's how the story goes.In the astronomical world, this is called the 'Mars Hoax.'

It all started in 2003, writes Jeff Brush on SouthburyPatch.And here is the full story behind this.The distance between Earth and Mars varies dramatically over time. The maximum distance (when Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the Sun) is about 250 million miles, and the minimum distance (Earth and Mars on the same side of the Sun, with Earth at its farthest distance from the Sun and Mars at its closest distance, is 33 million miles.

As a result, the apparent size of Mars does vary quite a bit, from a mere speck when seen through a typical telescope, to a small disk. When Mars is at its closest approach, the disk shows some level of detail of the surface of the planet, including large canyons and mountain ranges, though typically still quite blurry when viewed by eye through an amateur's telescope.

Mars comes within [approximately] 50 million miles of Earth once every 18 months or so. Because the orbit of Mars is more elliptical than Earth's orbit, it does occasionally get within 35 million miles, and the time between such closer approaches is measured in thousands of years.

The last closest approach occured on August 27, 2003 at 12:30 a.m. A couple months before that closest approach, a PowerPoint presentation posted on the Internet discussed the event. It is  mentioned therein that the next time Mars will be this close to Earth is in the year 2287, and, in big bold letters, "NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN".

As a result, every July and August since 2003, we see a recurrence of these emails or other Internet message types, carrying the same message. Will anyone live up to see this once-in-a-lifetime event? Mars isn't even visible in our nighttime sky this year (or in most of the years since 2003), concludes Brush.

To read more about this hoax, click here.

Comet ISON may pay a visit to the Red Planet

Around the world, astronomers are anticipating the approach of Comet ISON.A new ScienceCast video anticipates its close flyby of Mars on Oct. 1, 2013. On Thanksgiving Day 2013, the icy visitor from the outer solar system will skim the sun's outer atmosphere and, if it survives, could emerge as one of the brightest comets in years. First, though, it has to fly by Mars.

Astronomer Carey Lisse of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab said,"Comet ISON is paying a visit to the Red Planet. On Oct 1st, the comet will pass within 0.07 AU from Mars, about six times closer than it will ever come to Earth."

Mars rovers and satellites will get a close-up view. It's too early to say whether Curiosity will be able to see the comet from the surface of Mars - that depends on how much ISON brightens between now and then. Lisse says the best bet is NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The MRO satellite is equipped with a powerful half-meter telescope named HiRISE that is more than capable of detecting the comet's atmosphere and tail. Observations are planned on four dates: August 20th, Sept 29th, and Oct 1st and 2nd.

The Mars flyby comes at a key time in Comet ISON's journey. It will have just crossed the "frost line," a place just outside the orbit of Mars where solar heating is enough to start vaporizing frozen water. But when ISON crosses the frost line, "the whole comet could erupt in geysers of gas," says Lisse. "Mars orbiters will have a ringside seat."

The amount of outgassing at Mars will give researchers clues to the size of ISON's nucleus, which is hidden from view deep within the comet's dusty atmosphere. McEwen sees this as a tune-up for another comet encounter next year. "The science value of observing Comet ISON is hard to predict. We've never tried such a thing before. However, this is good practice for Comet Siding Spring, which will pass much closer to Mars in 2014."

For now all eyes are on Comet ISON. An unprecedented number of NASA spacecraft - 16 - will be observing the comet. Astronauts on board the International Space Station will be watching, too.

To read more about the comet, click here.

Sun targets giant plumes of plasma towards the Earth

(The picture shows a corona mass ejection (CME) blowing out from just around the edge of the Sun, May 1, 2013. SOHO's C2 and C3 coronagraphs show a large, bright, circular cloud of particles heading out into space. CMEs carry over a billion tons of particles at over a million miles per hour. Courtesy of ESA & NASA / SOHO)

The sun fired off an intense solar storm at the Earth recently — the second in two days — hurtling billions of tons of charged particles at our planet, but it should not pose a threat to people on the ground, NASA says. The solar eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, occurred Wednesday at 1:24 a.m. ET and sent charged particles streaking outward at 380 miles per second. That's just over 1.3 million mph (2.2 million kilometers per hour). The solar fallout from the sun storm is expected to reach Earth within the next three days.

The solar storm on Wednesday erupted just 21 hours after another powerful coronal mass ejection (CME) on Tuesday. That solar tempest also sent billions of tons of solar particles on their way to Earth. "These particles cannot travel through the atmosphere to harm humans on Earth, but they can affect electronic systems in satellites and on the ground," NASA officials explained in a statement.

"Earth-directed CMEs can cause a space weather phenomenon called a geomagnetic storm, which occurs when they funnel energy into Earth's magnetic envelope, the magnetosphere, for an extended period of time," NASA officials said. "The CME’s magnetic fields peel back the outermost layers of Earth's fields, changing their very shape. In the past, geomagnetic storms caused by CMEs of this strength have usually been mild."

Powerful geomagnetic storms can affect communications signals and spark electrical surges in power grids. They can also supercharge northern lights displays or aurora observers at high latitudes. The sun is currently in an active phase of its 11-year solar weather cycle and is expected to reach its peak activity later this year. The current cycle is known as Solar Cycle 24.

To know more about CMEs and how they compare with solar flares, click here.

On new lava-filled planet years last for only 8.5 hours

Would you like to wake up to a new year every day? That’s exactly what you can do if you happen to be on an Earth-size fireball of a planet 700 light-years away, which orbits its star in just 8.5 hours. The newly discovered planet, named Kepler 78b, has one of the shortest orbital periods ever detected with a radius that is only about three times the radius of the star.Researchers believe that the planet is about 40 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun.

Scientists have estimated that the top layer of the planet is likely completely melted, creating a massive, rolling ocean of lava at temperatures at 2760°C. The star around which Kepler 78b orbits is likely relatively young, as it rotates more than twice as fast as the sun- a sign that the star has not had as much time to slow down.

But what has really excited astronomers is that they were able to detect light emitted by the planet.This is the first time researchers have been able to do so for an exoplanet as small as Kepler 78b, and it could give scientists detailed information about the planet’s surface composition and reflective properties.
Kepler 78b is so close to its star that scientists hope to measure its gravitational influence on the star.

To discover Kepler 78b, the team looked through more than 150,000 stars that were monitored by the Kepler Telescope, a NASA space observatory that surveys a slice of the galaxy. The researchers reported their discovery of Kepler 78b in The Astrophysical Journal.
In a separate paper, the same research team observed KOI 1843.03, a previously discovered exoplanet with an even shorter orbital period: just 4 1/4 hours.

In order for the planet to maintain its extremely tight orbit around its star, it would made almost entirely of iron, otherwise the immense tidal forces from the nearby star would rip the planet to pieces. Though Kepler has now been retired, scientists are still analysing data from it in hopes of identifying habitable, Earth-sized planets

Read more about the discovery and research here.

One-way trip to Mars? Sounds exciting!

Do you want to be part of an expedition to the Red Planet? You can be part of a one-way trip to Mars but you have to wait till 2022. Mars One is planning to send humans to the Red Planet and more than 100,000 have already applied for it. But only four individuals will be selected, according to the Dutch organization. The big question is: Will members of such an expedition, estimated to cost $6 billion, be able to survive the trip?

The Obama administration has set a goal to send astronauts to Mars by the 2030s – but Mars One is much more ambitious, looking to send the four people chosen to actually colonize the planet. Applications have poured in and Mars One recently announced the start of its selection program. They say they’ve already passed the 78,000 mark besides the fact that the registration fee ranges from $5 - 73, depending on the country.

However, a one-way trip to Mars would face an enormous number of technical and practical hurdles that aren’t close to being figured out. NASA’s intrepid rover Curiosity has started addressing one of the questions: radiation exposure on the journey.But the radiation challenges aren't insurmountable, according to scientists.

To know more about NASA's exploration and the risks involved in the journey, click here.

The sun's magnetic field is about to flip

Something big is about to happen on the sun... its vast magnetic field is about to flip! According to measurements from NASA-supported observatories, the sun's magnetic field changes polarity approximately every 11 years. It happens at the peak of each solar cycle as the sun's inner magnetic dynamo re-organizes itself.

The coming reversal will mark the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24. Half of 'Solar Max' will be behind us, with half yet to come. Solar physicist Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University said, "It looks like we're no more than 3 to 4 months away from a complete field reversal. This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system." A new ScienceCast video anticipates the reversal of the sun's global magnetic field. You can watch it here.

Solar physicist Phil Scherrer, also at Stanford, describes what happens: "The sun's polar magnetic fields weaken, go to zero, and then emerge again with the opposite polarity. This is a regular part of the solar cycle." A reversal of the sun's magnetic field is, literally, a big event. The domain of the sun's magnetic influence (also known as the "heliosphere") extends billions of kilometers beyond Pluto. Changes to the field's polarity ripple all the way out to the Voyager probes, on the doorstep of interstellar space.

When solar physicists talk about solar field reversals, their conversation often centers on the "current sheet."  The current sheet is a sprawling surface jutting outward from the sun's equator where the sun's slowly-rotating magnetic field induces an electrical current.  The current itself is small, only one ten-billionth of an amp per square meter (0.0000000001 amps/m2), but there’s a lot of it: the amperage flows through a region 10,000 km thick and billions of kilometers wide.  Electrically speaking, the entire heliosphere is organized around this enormous sheet.

During field reversals, the current sheet becomes very wavy. Scherrer likens the undulations to the seams on a baseball.  As Earth orbits the sun, we dip in and out of the current sheet. Transitions from one side to another can stir up stormy space weather around our planet.

Cosmic rays are also affected. These are high-energy particles accelerated to nearly light speed by supernova explosions and other violent events in the galaxy.  Cosmic rays are a danger to astronauts and space probes, and some researchers say they might affect the cloudiness and climate of Earth. The current sheet acts as a barrier to cosmic rays, deflecting them as they attempt to penetrate the inner solar system. A wavy, crinkly sheet acts as a better shield against these energetic particles from deep space.

As the field reversal approaches, data from Wilcox show that the sun's two hemispheres are out of synch. "The sun's north pole has already changed sign, while the south pole is racing to catch up," says Scherrer. "Soon, however, both poles will be reversed, and the second half of Solar Max will be underway."

New Stellar System that 'blinks' every 93 days

Using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space telescope, scientists have discovered a young stellar system that 'blinks' every 93 days. This is the fourth example of a star system known to blink in such a manner, suggesting that these systems might be more common than previously thought.

U.S. astronomers using a NASA space telescope say they've spotted a young stellar system whose developing stars cause the system to 'blink'. The system is said to consist of three developing stars, two of which are surrounded by a disk of material left over from the star-formation process, according to scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

As the two inner stars whirl around each other, astronomers said, they periodically peek out from the disk that girds them like a hula hoop, causing the cosmic "blink" witnessed by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.It is believed this disk should go on to spawn planets and the other celestial bodies that make up a solar system, astronomers said.The stellar system YLW 16A is the fourth example of a star system known to blink in such a manner.

Planets in such a system can orbit one or both of the stars in the binary star system; the famous science fiction planet Tatooine in "Star Wars" orbits two stars, and such worlds are referred to as circumbinary planets. Peter Plavchan, a scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena said, "These blinking systems offer natural probes of the binary and circumbinary planet formation process." 

Astronomers discover two heavy metal stars

A team of astronomers from Taiwan and the UK has discovered two unusual subdwarf stars with extremely high concentrations of lead in their atmospheres. These stars, labeled HE 2359-2844 and HE 1256-2738, have surfaces containing 10,000 times more lead than is present on the surface of the Sun, according to their paper published in the journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

While the star HE 2359-2844 is a subdwarf located at a distance of 800 light years away in the constellation of Sculptor, HE 1256-2738 is located about 1,000 light years away in the constellation of Hydra.

The scientists using observations from the archives of the ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile identified a few features in spectra of both stars that did not match any atoms expected to be present. After some detective work, they realized that the features were due to lead, one of the heaviest naturally occurring elements. In the Sun there is less than one lead atom for every ten billion hydrogen atoms.

At around 38,000 degrees Celsius, the surfaces of HE 2359-2844 and HE 1256-2738 are so hot that three electrons are removed from every lead atom. The resulting ions produce distinctive lines in the star’s spectrum, from which the concentration of lead in the atmosphere can be measured. Using the same technique, HE 2359-2844 was also found to show ten thousand times more yttrium and zirconium than on the Sun. Along with the zirconium star LS IV-14 116, the newly discovered stars form a new group of ‘heavy metal subdwarfs.’

Study lead author Dr Naslim Neelamkodan from Armagh Observatory explains: “The heavy-metal stars are a crucial link between bright red giants, stars 30-40 times the size of the Sun, and faint blue subdwarfs, stars one-fifth the size, but seven times hotter and 70 times brighter than the Sun.”

NASA reveals mystery behind identity of space centaurs

A study using sightings from a NASA telescope may have answered an old mystery surrounding centaurs, according to a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) news release.The infrared images showed two-thirds of the population of centaurs to be blue-gray in color, indicating they are comets.

Centaurs are small stellar bodies orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Neptune and scientists have not been able to determine if they are comets or asteroids. A study based on images from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) suggests they are comets.Centaurs get their name from the creature of Greek mythology with a human's torso and horse's legs. The galactic mystery was named "centaur" because it shared characteristics of both an asteroid and a comet.

"Cometary origin" means the centaur is made of the same material as a comet and may be inactive for now and could be active in the future. The study, published online July 22 in the Astrophysical Journal, analyzed infrared images of 52 centaurs in the sky, 15 of which were new discoveries.

Centaurs and their distant cousin, scattered disks, are part of an unstable belt orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Neptune. The two massive planets' gravitational force either pulls the centaurs and disks away from their locations or toward the sun.

Astronomers in the past have observed some centaurs and seen dark halos around them, regularly associated with outgassed comets. NEOWISE, WISE's asteroid-spotting component, can tell whether the centaur has a matte dark surface or a shiny reflective one.

Combined with what was already known about comet and asteroid colors, NEOWISE helped the scientists piece together the rest. Objects with a blue-gray color were more likely to be comets, while red objects were more likely asteroids.Results showed that about two-thirds of the population of centaurs was comets.

To know more about the study and its findings, click here.

Man may land on Red Planet by 2021

Can man set his foot on Mars? NASA says it can happen by 2033 at the earliest, but scientists at Imperial College London have come up with a mission that could land within eight years.

Mars has been the next stop for the human exploration of space ever since the Apollo missions. We have now come up with a mission concept that uses both robots and humans to get us to Mars and back. The robots will be sent to the northern plains of Mars, with a rocket to get back to Earth — but without fuel. Sending the tanks empty saves a huge amount of mass on launch. Instead, the robots will dig up ice on Mars. Once the ice is melted, we can use solar electricity to produce hydrogen and oxygen to fill the fuel tanks. Better still, combining hydrogen with the atmosphere can make powerful methane.

A three-man crew will then get from Earth to Mars, and in the nine months it takes to reach there, without weight from gravity, muscles weaken and bones become brittle — so they need artificial gravity. We can do this by splitting their spacecraft into two, tied together by a tether, and spinning the parts around each other. With the right spin speed, they will be fooled into thinking they feel gravity.

The landing on Mars will be an extreme ride lasting just a few minutes. The landing module will approach Mars at 14,000 mph. The atmosphere will cut the speed to 700 mph, then parachutes with rockets will slow the module, landing in the warmest place on Mars, near the equator. The mission will first focus on exploring their surroundings and collecting rocks.

To return, the crew will have to journey some 1,000 miles north via rover from their landing site to the return rocket. Such a mission will finally take us further than Apollo. We need not wait 60 years after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon to get the first human on Mars.

New theory: Universe isn't expanding... it's just getting fat

Conventional thinking says the Universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang. But theoretical astrophysicist Christof Wetterich says it's not expanding at all. It’s just that the mass of all the particles within it is steadily increasing.

We think the Universe is expanding because all the galaxies within it are pushing away from one another. Scientists see this as the redshift — a kind of doppler effect that happens when atoms emit or absorb light.

We see these frequencies as appearing in the red, an indication that mass is moving away from us. Galaxies exhibit this redshift, which is why scientists say the Universe is expanding.

However, Wetterich, who works out of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, says the characteristic light emitted by atoms are also governed by the masses of the atoms’ elementary particles, particularly their electrons. He says his theory is useful for thinking about different cosmological models. And indeed, it may offer some fresh insights into the spooky dark energy that's apparently pushing the Universe outwards at an accelerating rate.

Such an interpretation could help physicists to understand problematic issues such as the so-called singularity present at the Big Bang, he said. "I think it's fascinating to explore this alternative representation. His treatment seems rigorous enough to be entertained," Journal Nature quoted Hongsheng Zhao, a cosmologist at the University of St Andrews, UK, as saying.

In the 1920s, astronomers including Georges Lemaitre and Edwin Hubble found that most galaxies exhibit a redshift -- and that the redshift was greater for more distant galaxies. From these observations, they deduced that the Universe must be expanding.

Read more about the theory here or about the entire study — which has not yet been peer reviewed — at arXiv: “A Universe without expansion.” 

Astronomers strike gold: Earth's precious metal comes from crashing of dead neutron stars!

Astronomers panning the heavens for glints of gamma-ray bursts have struck gold. They found gold -- so much of it, in fact, that they say they could potentially account for the universe's entire reserve of the precious metal prized by Earthlings for jewellery and industrial uses alike.

All the gold in the cosmos may have come from stellar cataclysms -- the collision of two neutron stars, which sends bursts of particles and radiation into the universe.Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, paraphrasing iconic astronomer Carl Sagan said, "We are all star stuff, and our jewelry is colliding-star stuff."

These neutron stars are the incredibly dense, deadened husks left from dramatic stellar explosions known as supernovas. Supernovas are what seeded a hydrogen-rich universe with heavier elements fused in the stars' cores, like carbon, oxygen or iron. But unlike carbon or iron, gold can’t be forged in the heart of a star, so its origin has remained a mystery.

Berger discovered an answer during his search for short gamma-ray bursts. Gamma-ray bursts are flashes of high-energy radiation that signal truly powerful explosions that can come from billions of light-years away. Some of them are long, lasting even a few minutes, and others are incredibly short – fractions of a second, making them very difficult to catch in the act.Berger was looking for the short ones. And it was a flash in what's called GRB 130603B, picked up by NASA’s Swift satellite, that caught his attention. When his phone rang at 2 a.m., he and his team quickly moved to examine the short burst – which lasted two-tenths of a second  -- captured with the powerful Magellan/Baade telescope in Chile.

The burst appeared to be coming from the collision of two neutron stars -- each roughly the size of Austin and filled with 1.5 times the mass of the sun -- an impact that produced a black hole and the bright burst of gamma rays that they picked up. But they also saw something else around the bright beacon: A strange glow of infrared radiation. This, the astrophysicists realized, was coming from  radioactive elements – like lead, thorium, uranium -- decaying and thus producing the infrared light.

Clearly, the explosion had been responsible for the creation of a whole menagerie of heavy elements. They estimated that an equivalent of 1 percent of the sun’s matter was being flung out from the collision in a tail, and about 10 parts per million of that tail was made of gold. They could be seeing perhaps 10 times the moon’s mass in gold, Berger said. The gold out there could be worth around $10 octillion. (That’s $100 trillion squared.)

Combining their estimate of the amount of gold from the neutron star mashup with the estimated number of such explosions since the beginning of time, it could even be that all the gold in the universe came from such exotic collisions, the scientists said. Their paper has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

So while there is indeed gold in them thar stars, should amateur prospectors still panning for the yellow metal lift their eyes from the ground and search the skies instead? Probably not. This exploding star system is 3.9 billion light-years away. 

Neptune's 14th moon discovered via Hubble images

Images taken by the Hubble Space telescope show that Neptune has another moon. Senior research scientist Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute, the private California-based organization, first discovered the new Neptune moon on July 1.Designated S/2004 N 1, the moon was previously overlooked by astronomers due to its small size and the speed at which the tiny body orbits the planet -- once every 23 hours.

Using a method similar to one often employed by action photographers, Showalter stumbled across the moon in Hubble images of Neptune taken between 2004 and 2009."The moons and arcs orbit very quickly, so we had to devise a way to follow their motion in order to bring out the details of the system," he said in a statement released by NASA on Monday.The astronomer further detailed the process he used to spot Neptune's moon in a blog on Cosmic Diary.

Showalter notes in his blog post, the discovery is also significant since astronomers studying Neptune's moons previously thought that the smallest moons orbit closer to the planet. However, S/2004 N 1 is located between Proteus and Larissa, Neptune's second- and third-largest moons.

Cloud cover influences habitable zone around stars in Milky Way

Factors in cloud cover and its influence on alien climate has extended the habitable zone around red dwarf stars to include double the number of planets in the life-supporting region, according to new research. This could mean  that some 60 billion habitable planets are orbiting red dwarf stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone.

Scientists had previously believed that each red dwarf had just one Earth-sized planet in its habitable zone – the sweet spot just far enough from the sun that the planet’s water doesn’t turn to vapor in the overwhelming heat, and just close enough that water doesn’t freeze without the reassuring warmth of the sun’s glow.

But now the habitable zone, once thought to be fairly small around the eponymously named red dwarfs (the stars are small and faint, relative to our sun) has been expanded. That’s because the formula for calculating the habitable zone of far-flung planets had not previously included how cloud cover might mitigate the star’s influence planets.

Building 3D computer models that simulate how clouds behave on alien planets, researchers at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University found that where there is surface water there are also water clouds. On planets close to their sun, those clouds exert a significant cooling effect, which allows those planets to retain their water, despite their closeness to the dwarf star’s heat. In other words, the habitable zone has been extended inward, closer to the star, than had been imagined to be possible.

The researchers plan to test their findings with the James Webb Telescope, which will go into orbit into 2018, taking the temperature of those alien planets during their days and nights to measure cloud cover. But the big question is, when an alien looks up at that planet’s clouds, what strange shapes, what foreign animals or objects or ideas, does he or she see?

Did Milky Way collide with Andromeda 10 billion years ago?

Yes. Our Milky Way did smash into its neighbouring Andromeda galaxy around 10 billion years ago, according to European astronomers. Previous studies have suggested that our galaxy is set to crash into Andromeda in 3-4 billion years, and that this will be the first time such a collision has taken place.

However, now a European team of astronomers led by Hongsheng Zhao of the University of St Andrews propose that the two star systems collided some 10 billion years ago and that our understanding of gravity is fundamentally wrong.

This would neatly explain the observed structure of the two galaxies and their satellites, something that has been difficult to account for until now, researchers said. The Milky Way, made up of about 200 billion stars, is part of a group of galaxies called the Local Group. Astrophysicists often theorize that most of the mass of the Local Group is invisible, made of so-called dark matter.

Zhao and his team argue that at present the only way to successfully predict the total gravitational pull of any galaxy or small galaxy group, before measuring the motion of stars and gas in it, is to make use of a model first proposed by Professor Mordehai Milgrom of the Weizmann Institute in Israel in 1983. This modified gravity theory (Modified Newtonian Dynamics or MOND) describes how gravity behaves differently on the largest scales, diverging from the predictions made by Newton and Einstein, researchers said.

Zhao and his colleagues have for the first time used this theory to calculate the motion of Local Group galaxies. Their work suggests that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies had a close encounter about 10 billion years ago. If gravity conforms to the conventional model on the largest scales then taking into account the supposed additional pull of dark matter, the two galaxies would have merged. "Dark matter would work like honey: in a close encounter, the Milky Way and Andromeda would get stuck together, figuratively speaking," said team member Pavel Kroupa from Bonn University.

Mars rover Curiosity tracks Martian moonrise

One of Mars' two tiny moons climbs high into the Red Planet sky in an otherworldly new video recorded by NASA's Curiosity rover. The video, which stitches together 86 frames snapped by Curiosity's navigation camera, shows the Mars moon Phobos rising shortly after sunset on June 28, 2013.
Though the video lasts just 32 seconds, the action it depicts actually took place over the course of 27 minutes. The large, diffuse ring visible in the video is an artifact caused by the scattering of light inside the camera, officials said.

Phobos is just 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide on average, while Mars' other moon, Deimos, is even smaller. Many scientists think both Phobos and Deimos are former asteroids captured by the Red Planet's gravity long ago. Curiosity landed inside Mars' huge Gale Crater last August, kicking off a planned two-year surface mission to determine if the Red Planet could ever have supported microbial life. The rover has already checked off this big milestone; in March, mission scientists announced that a site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago.

Curiosity has yet to venture far from its landing site, but that will change soon. The rover is getting set to start heading for its ultimate destination, the base of the mysterious Mount Sharp, which rises 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) into the sky from Gale Crater's center. Mount Sharp's many layers hold a history of Mars' changing environmental conditions over time, and Curiosity scientists want the 1-ton robot to read this history like a book as it climbs up through the mountain's lower reaches. The foothills of Mount Sharp lie about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from Curiosity's current location as the crow flies. The rover is wrapping up its last activities near its landing site and could begin the roughly year-long drive any day now.

The new video does not mark Curiosity's first observations of Phobos. In September of last year — just five weeks after touching down — the rover used its workhorse MastCam camera to photograph the moon as it crossed the face of the sun, taking a tiny bite out of the star. Such eclipse photos can help refine scientists' understanding of the orbits and orbital evolution of Phobos and Deimos, researchers have said. And the gee-whiz factor may be a motivator as well, especially since these images are not terribly difficult for the Curiosity rover to collect.

You can watch the video here.

Looking for life beyond Earth? Explore the habitable zone of planets

You now have twice as many planets to explore for the so-called habitable zone because there may be as many as 60 billion exoplanets in our galaxy alone in the space around their stars - double the number previously thought of.

A study by astronomers at the University of Chicago shows how cloud patterns can alter the temperature of a planet enough that planets that were previously considered too close to their stars to support liquid water might be able to support it. Using a 3-D climate model originally created to forecast global warming on Earth, the scientists were able to model cloud patterns on planets that orbit red dwarf stars, the most common star in our galaxy.

Red dwarf stars are less massive and cooler than our sun, and planets have to get pretty close to them in order to get enough heat to keep liquid water from freezing on their surface. Because the planets are so close to the star, they eventually get tidally locked with it, meaning the same side of the planet is always facing the star.

To be in a habitable zone, a planet needs to be just the right distance from its star so that liquid water (considered a requisite for life as we know it)  can exist on the planet's surface.If the planet is too near its star, the liquid water would turn to vapor; too far away, and the water would turn to ice.For decades, scientists have determined whether a planet is in this liquid-water-friendly Goldilocks zone by calculating how far the planet is from its star, and how hot the star is burning.

According to the researchers' models at the university, thick, giant clouds develop over the part of the planet that directly faces the star, reflecting light and heat back at the star and keeping the planet from getting too warm.Dorian Abbot, an associate professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago and one of the study's authors, said his team's findings could easily be tested using the James Webb Space Telescope, which will go into orbit in 2018.

NASA's new satellite to explore mysteries of the sun

A winged Pegasus rocket recently lifted a compact solar observatory into orbit around Earth's poles, kicking off a $181 million mission to shed light on a major mystery: What heats up the sun's outer atmosphere to extreme temperatures and how that, in turn, affects Earth's space weather.

NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS spacecraft will focus on the dynamic zone between the sun's 6,000-degree visible surface -- the photosphere -- and the tenuous corona, which is somehow heated to more than a million degrees over a span of a few thousand miles.

Scientists hope to gain insights into the energy transport mechanisms that drive the solar wind -- the supersonic stream of atomic particles blasted away from the sun -- solar flares and explosive eruptions known as coronal mass ejections that occasionally disrupt power grids, satellite operations and communications on Earth.

Alan Title, IRIS principal investigator at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center said, "What we want to discover is what the basic physical processes are that transfer energy and material from the surface of the sun to the outer atmosphere of the sun, the corona.The visible surface (is) the place where virtually all of the light that leaves the sun leaves from. Immediately above that, the temperature rises to the million-degree corona. How that happens is a mystery. What are the processes that occur there?"

Making the program's 42nd flight, the Orbital Sciences Pegasus XL rocket was carried aloft from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., by an L-1011 carrier jet.The Orbital Sciences "Stargazer" jet carried the 51,000-pound rocket to a pre-determined drop point over the Pacific Ocean and, after final tests were completed, released the Pegasus at a planned altitude of 39,000 feet at 10:27 p.m. EDT (GMT-4; 7:27 p.m. local time).

Read about the sun's violent dance from here.