Karl's Weird News

End of the world…for real

Last week we were attacked by the sun. For real.  Huge solar eruptions sent a blast of radiation toward Earth. Thankfully, the planet’s natural magnetic shield warded off the worst effects. Life went on uninterrupted.

That won’t always be the case. In 1859, Richard Carrington recorded what is now called the “Carrington Effect” — intense solar activity that can disrupt modern life dramatically.

In Carrington’s day, there were few electromechanical systems for intense solar radiation to mess with. The new fangled telegraph systems suffered the most. Solar-induced power surges knocked some operators from their chairs and set fire to the paper rolls used to record dashes and dots.

Fortunately, no Carrington Effect has occurred since the whole world became electrified. But scientists worry about what might happen when a real solar tsunami hits.

It is a real danger. In 2008, the National Academies released a report on the “adverse effects of extreme space weather on modern technology — power grid outages, high-frequency communication blackouts. …” Much of the planet’s energy and communications infrastructure is just too fragile to weather a massive electromagnetic onslaught.

New Comet a Stunner — and Visible to Naked Eye:

A recently discovered comet is surprising skywatchers by becoming brighter than predictions had first suggested and can now be seen with the unaided eye during the next few weeks.

 Comet McNaught, officially catalogued as C/2009 R1, was discovered by Australian astronomer Robert McNaught last September using the using the 0.5-meter Uppsala Schmidt telescope and a CCD camera.

It’s the 51st comet that bears McNaught’s name.

Although initially an extremely faint object, enough observations of the newfound comet were made to allow Brian Marsden of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., to calculate an orbit.

Comet McNaught is expected to pass closest to the sun (perihelion) on July 2, at a distance of 37 million miles (60 million km).

The comet is visible now for people with dark skies away from urban and suburban lighting. By mid-June it may be an easy skywatching target for most people.

Big Fireball on Jupiter Spotted by Amateur Astronomers:

A huge fireball has been spotted on Jupiter in yet another collision from space caught on camera and video by amateur astronomers.

The new Jupiter crash occurred on June 3 at 20:31 UT (4:31 p.m. Eastern Time) and was spotted by skywatcher Anthony Wesley in Australia and fellow amateur astronomer Christopher Go in the Philippines.

Wesley’s photos show the Jupiter fireball blazing in the atmosphere of the gas giant planet. So far, no visible scar in the clouds has been reported from the event.

Wesley described the event as a “large fireball” on his website, where he posted the photos taken from Broken Hill, Australia.

This new impact on Jupiter comes less than a year after a spectacular crash on July 19, 2009, when what scientist now think was an asteroid about 1,600 feet (500 meters) wide slammed into the planet.

That collision created a massive bruise the size of the Pacific Ocean. It was Wesley, too, who first spotted the July 2009 collision. His observations kicked off an international observation campaign to study the impact site.

Astronomers initially suspected a comet in last year’s impact, but announced this week that a rogue asteroid was the most likely culprit.

Meteorite-like object falls in Latvia

A meteorite-like object crashed into a meadow in northern Latvia, creating a crater 27 feet (9 meters) wide and 9 feet (3 meters) deep, a geologist who visited the site said Monday.

Uldis Nulle, a scientist at the Latvian Environment, Geology and Meteorology Center, said there was smoke coming out of the crater when he arrived at the crash site late Sunday in the Mazsalaca region near the Estonian border.

“My first impression is that, yes, it was a meteorite,” he said. “All the evidence suggests this when compared to pictures of real meteorite craters.”

He said the rim of the crater was slightly raised and there was a black-grayish scar at the bottom — both signs of a meteorite impact.

Experts outside Latvia said it was unusual for such a large meteorite to hit the Earth. The planet is constantly bombarded with objects from outer space, but most burn up in the atmosphere and never reach the surface.

Mysterious Object Rips Through One of Saturn’s Rings

An unknown object appears to have punched through one of Saturn’s rings and left a calling card in the form of trailing debris. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft snapped the image on June 11, 2009 during its ongoing tour of Saturn and its moons.

Phil Plait of Discover’s Bad Astronomy likens the event to the “fist of an angry god” messing up Saturn’s F ring. He also raises the question of whether mystery object X has a truly bizarre orbit around the planet which takes it up and down through the rings, or whether it’s a wayward wanderer that was pulled in on collision course due to one of Saturn’s moons.

Such a photo opportunity only became possible because of tomorrow’s approaching Saturn equinox, when the planet turns edge-on toward the sun and effectively makes its rings vanish from Earth’s view in the absence of reflected sunlight, as SPACE.com explains. The event only takes place every 15 years.

As Space Station Nears Completion, It Faces End of Mission

A number of times in recent weeks a bright, unblinking light has appeared in the night sky of the nation’s capital: a spaceship. Longer than a football field, weighing 654,000 pounds, the spaceship moved swiftly across the heavens and vanished.

Fortunately, it was one of ours. The international space station is by far the largest spacecraft ever built by earthlings.

Circling the Earth every 90 minutes, it often passes over North America and is visible from the ground when night has fallen but the station, up high, is still bathed in sunlight.

After more than a decade of construction, it is nearing completion and finally has a full crew of six astronauts. The last components should be installed by the end of next year.

And then? “In the first quarter of 2016, we’ll prep and de-orbit the spacecraft,” says NASA’s space station program manager, Michael T. Suffredini.

Umm, do you really want *more* government decision-making in your life?

Sun’s storms set to intensify

ASTRONOMERS are claiming that Earth is witnessing the biggest and most powerful Sunspot ever seen and the sunspot is yet to peak in intensity.

A sunspot is a magnetic storm on the surface of the sun and the area of the spot is colder than the normal surface.

The normal surface is about 5000 degrees, the temperature of a sunspot is about 3000 degrees.

The size of a sunspot varies, ranging from the size of the moon to 65 times larger than the size of earth and lasts for about a month then fades away.

This newest sunspot is thought to be 60 to 80 times the size of Earth and has occurred on the side of the sun, which is in view of Australia.

Wappa Falls Observatory head astronomer Owen Bennedick describes the sunspot shape like the letter S and thinks it to be approximately 150,000 km long and 30,000 km wide.

 “It’s flares have not yet been measured,” Owen Bennedick said, “but it is like hundreds of thousands of hydrogen bombs.”

The Sun Has Spots, Finally:

After one of the longest sunspot droughts in modern times, solar activity picked up quickly over the weekend. A new group of sunspots developed, and while not dramatic by historic standards, the spots were the most significant in many months.

“This is the best sunspot I’ve seen in two years,” observer Michael Buxton of Ocean Beach, Calif., said on Spaceweather.com.

Solar activity goes in a roughly 11-year cycle. Sunspots are the visible signs of that activity, and they are the sites from which massive solar storms lift off.

The past two years have marked the lowest low in the cycle since 1913, and for a while scientists were wondering if activity would ever pick back up.

During 2009 so far, the sun has been completely free of spots about 77 percent of the time. NASA researchers last month said quiet jet streams inside the sun were responsible, and that activity would soon return to normal.

Galaxy’s centre tastes of raspberries and smells of rum

Astronomers searching for the building blocks of life in a giant dust cloud at the heart of the Milky Way have concluded that it tastes vaguely of raspberries.

The unanticipated discovery follows years of work by astronomers who trained their 30m radio telescope on the enormous ball of dust and gas in the hope of spotting complex molecules that are vital for life. Finding amino acids in interstellar space is a Holy Grail for astrobiologists, as this would raise the possibility of life emerging on other planets after being seeded with the molecules.

In the latest survey, astronomers sifted through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a vast dust cloud at the centre of our galaxy. While they failed to find evidence for amino acids, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries.
…

Curiously, ethyl formate has another distinguishing characteristic: it also smells of rum.

Look up tonight for a spectacular treat in the sky

If the full moon tonight looks unusually large, it is not your imagination ? it is the biggest and brightest full moon to be seen for 15 years.

Each month the Moon makes a full orbit around the Earth in a slightly oval-shaped path, and tonight it will swing by the Earth at its closest distance, or perigee. It will pass by 356,613km (221,595 miles) away, which is about 28,000km closer than average.

The unusual feature of tonight is that the perigee also coincides with a full moon, which will make it appear 14 per cent bigger and some 30 per cent brighter than most full moons this year ? so long as the clouds hold off from blocking the view.

Breaking the Cuddle Barrier

Leave it to English schoolchildren, the scientific minds behind Winnie the Pooh and Paddington, to achieve the latest astronautical milestone — sending teddy bears into space.

On Monday, a helium balloon buoyed a quartet of bears 100,000 feet up, to the edge of space, where they sampled the rarefied top of the atmosphere. Sensors monitored the extreme temperatures they experienced — more than 60 degrees Fahrenheit below zero — though the bears themselves kept snug in foil spacesuits custom-made for them by the preadolescent mission control team.

Protective shield of the sun is shrinking

The protective bubble around the sun that helps to shield the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation is shrinking and getting weaker, NASA scientists have discovered.

New data from the Ulysses deep-space probe show that the heliosphere, the protective shield of energy that surrounds our solar system, has weakened by 25 per cent over the past decade and is now at it lowest level since the space race began 50 years ago.

…

If the heliosphere continues to weaken, it is feared intergalactic cosmic radiation reaching Earth will increase, disrupting electrical equipment, damaging satellites and potentially harming life.

Solar wind blows at 50-year low

The solar wind – the stream of charged particles billowing away from the Sun – is at its weakest for 50 years.

Scientists made the assessment after studying 18 years of data from the Ulysses satellite which has sampled the space environment all around our star.

They expect the reduced output to have effects right across the Solar System.

Indeed, one impact is to diminish slightly the influence the Sun has over its local environment which extends billions of kilometres into space.

Giant Meteor Fireball Explodes Over Northwest U.S.

A meteor zipped across the U.S. Pacific Northwest sky early Tuesday morning before exploding, possibly littering eastern Oregon with marble- to basketball-size space rocks, an expert says.

Impact sites are yet to be found, according to Richard Pugh, a scientist with the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory at Portland State University in Oregon.

Pugh is coordinating a search for potential meteorites. He said 40 to 50 eyewitnesses have contacted his lab to report the fireball.

According to the reports, the event happened around 5:30 a.m. PT on Tuesday. The meteor was first spotted over Washington State moving in an east-southeast direction.

Saturn’s rings ‘may live forever’

Saturn’s iconic rings may be much older than we thought, scientists say.New data from the Cassini probe shows these thin bands of orbiting particles were probably there billions years ago, and are likely to be very long-lived.

It means we are not in some special time – the giant planet has most likely always provided a stunning view.

Previous data had led researchers to believe the rings were created just 100 million years ago, when a huge moon or comet shattered in Saturn’s vicinity.

Mira: A Star with a Comet’s Tail

Astronomers using a NASA space telescope, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, have spotted an amazingly long comet-like tail behind a star streaking through space. The star, named Mira after the Latin word for “wonderful,” has been a favorite of astronomers for about 400 years, yet this is the first time the tail has been seen.

Galaxy Evolution Explorer–”GALEX” for short–scanned the popular star during its ongoing survey of the entire sky in ultraviolet light. Astronomers then noticed what looked like a comet with a gargantuan tail. In fact, material blowing off Mira is forming a wake 13 light-years long, or about 20,000 times the average distance of Pluto from the sun. Nothing like this has ever been seen before around a star.

Online Help Sought to Organize Galaxies

Scientists need help sorting through an unusual digital photo album: pictures of about 1 million galaxies.

They are asking volunteers on the Internet to help classify the galaxies as either elliptical or spiral and note, where possible, in which direction they rotate. It would be the largest galactic census ever compiled, something scientists say would provide new insight into the structure of the universe.

”We’re in the golden era of astronomy,” said Bob Nichol, an astronomer at the University of Portsmouth in southern England. ”We have more data than we can assimilate, and we need help.”

If you are down for the cause, click here: Galaxy Zoo

Solar system and Milky Way doing the splits

Our solar system is travelling in a different direction to the rest of the Milky Way, scientists say.

When they used radio signals from two spacecraft nearing interstellar space to map the route, they had some unexpected results.

The researchers determined that the magnetic field in interstellar space is propelling our solar system along at a 60-90° angle to the rest of the galaxy.

That’s happening because the part of the interstellar magnetic field that comes closest to our system is not parallel to the spiraling arms of the galaxy, as it appears to be elsewhere.

As a result, our solar system has taken on a bullet-shaped appearance as it soars through space, says Dr Merav Opher, an assistant professor from George Mason University in Virginia, who publishes the research in the journal Science.

Will the Sun be stolen by another galaxy?

Our Milky Way galaxy is headed for a sedate collision with its neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, billions of years earlier than was previously thought. The earlier date means that the Sun will still be alive when the two collide; and a new computer simulation shows what could happen to our star.

There’s a good chance that it will be flung towards the outer edge of our galaxy, researchers say, and a tiny chance that it will be ‘kidnapped’ by Andromeda.

“The merger will take place before the Sun burns out, so that future astronomers within the Solar System can witness it,” says Abraham Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although this will be tens of millions of lifetimes from now, it is conceivable that humans may still exist when the two galaxies finally meet.

Biggest stellar explosion detected

Kaboom indeed.

 In a cascade of superlatives that belies the traditional cerebral reserve of their profession, astronomers reported Monday that they had seen the brightest and most powerful stellar explosion ever recorded.

The cataclysm – a monster more than a hundred times as energetic as the typical supernova in which normal massive stars end their lives – may be an example, they said, of a completely new type of explosion.

Scotty finally sent to the stars:

The ashes of Star Trek actor James Doohan have been successfully launched into space from a site in New Mexico, watched by cheering fans. Part of the remains of the actor, who played Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, were sent about 70 miles above the earth on a private SpaceLoft XL rocket. His widow Wende was there to witness her husband going on his final voyage. Doohan’s ashes were accompanied by the remains of former US astronaut Gordon Cooper and those of 200 other people.

Potentially Habitable Planet Found:

For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for “life in the universe.” The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a “red dwarf,” is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.

Private stations could take paying astronauts

Private space exploration took a potentially significant step forward this week as Nevada-based Bigelow Aerospace announced plans to send a series of inflatable space stations into orbit over the next decade.

The spacecraft, initially designed by NASA for use with the International Space Station, would be available to train astronauts from nations not currently active in space, as well as companies that could manufacture unique products in weightlessness.

“We think the time will come when orbiting space complexes won’t be considered a novelty, but a necessity,” said company President Robert Bigelow, who made a fortune as founder of Budget Suites hotel chain.

“When the first satellites went up, they were a novelty too,” he said. “Now they are a major business with enormous commercial importance. This is a logical next step.”

First sign of water found on an alien world

Water has been detected in the atmosphere of an alien world for the first time, a new analysis of Hubble Space Telescope data suggests. Water was widely believed to exist on the planet, but previous observations with other telescopes had failed to find it.The planet, called HD 209458b, is about 70% as massive as Jupiter and is scorched by the heat of its parent star, which it orbits 9 times as close as Mercury does to the Sun.

Because it is one of a small number of extrasolar planets observed to pass directly in front of and behind their parent stars as seen from Earth, astronomers have been able to glean a lot of information – such as its size and mass – about the distant world.

Doohan Memorial Spaceflight Set for April 27-28

The first rocket launch to memorialize James Doohan by taking a portion of his cremated remains into space has been set for Saturday, April 28, in New Mexico, with a public memorial planned for the day prior.

The memorial service will be held at the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo on Friday, April 27. The Saturday launch will take place at New Mexico’s new “Spaceport America” location adjacent to the White Sands Missile Range. A specific time of day has not yet been set for either event. Both the memorial and viewing of the launch will be open to the general public. Doohan’s widow, Wende, will be present at both events, and other special guests may be announced later.

Mysterious hexagon spotted above Saturn

A mysterious giant hexagon lies above Saturn’s north pole, captured by cameras on Nasa’s Cassini Orbiter. Spanning 25,000km – equivalent to the width of two planet Earths – the bizarre geometric feature appears to remain virtually still in the atmosphere as clouds swirl around it.

NASA Engineers Work on New Spacesuits

In labs at Johnson Space Center, away from the buzz about NASA’s new spaceship and its new missions to the moon and Mars, a group of engineers are plodding away at another piece of the puzzle: spacesuits.

Astronaut apparel has evolved over the decades from Mercury’s aluminum foil-looking outfits to the bulky, 275-pound whites now used on jaunts outside the space station. While it’s too early in the process to know how the new suits will look, the space agency is hoping to make new suits both high-tech and low-maintenance.

Hinode sees the dynamic and violent sun as sharply as never before

Hinode, the newest solar observatory on the space scene, has obtained never-before-seen images showing that the sun’s magnetic field is much more turbulent and dynamic than previously known.

Hinode, Japanese for ’sunrise’, was launched on 23 September 2006 to study the sun’s magnetic field and how its explosive energy propagates through the different layers of the solar atmosphere.

“For the first time, we are now able to make out tiny granules of hot gas that rise and fall in the sun’s magnified atmosphere,” said Dick Fisher, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division. “These images will open up a new era of study on some of the sun’s processes that effect Earth, astronauts, orbiting satellites and the solar system.”

‘Cave entrances’ spotted on Mars:

Scientists studying pictures from Nasa’s Odyssey spacecraft have spotted what they think may be seven caves on the surface of Mars. The candidate caves are on the flanks of the Arsia Mons volcano and are of sufficient depth their floors mostly cannot be seen through the opening.
…

The caves may be the only natural structures capable of protecting primitive life forms from micrometeoroids, UV radiation, solar flares and high energy particles that bombard the planet’s surface.

The spacecraft spotted what seemed to be vertical “skylight” entrances to caves below the surface.

There is a sheer drop of between about 80m and 130m or more to the cave floors below.

Did a giant impact create the two faces of Mars?

The impact of a giant asteroid could explain why Mars has two very different faces – but only if it struck the planet with a glancing blow, computer simulations suggest.

A longstanding puzzle about Mars is why its northern and southern hemispheres are so different. The northern hemisphere is much flatter and lies lower than the southern hemisphere, with a difference in elevation between the two of about 5 kilometres.

 In the 1980s, scientists suggested a giant impact by an asteroid about 300 kilometres across in Mars’s early history could have led to a permanent depression in the planet’s northern hemisphere.

Now, two teams of scientists have created the first computer simulations testing whether such an impact could have produced the observed differences.

Huge Reservoir of Frozen Water Found on Mars

Mars is unlikely to sport beachfront property any time soon, but the planet has enough water ice at its south pole to blanket the entire planet in more than 30 feet of water if everything thawed out. With a radar technique, astronomers have penetrated for the first time about 2.5 miles (nearly four kilometers) beneath the south pole’s frozen surface. The data showed that nearly pure water ice lies beneath.

If it happened to Mars, it could happen to us.  Count your blessings that we are neither frozen solid nor submerged!

Berlin plans flat tax on prostitutes

Berlin plans to levy a flat rate daily tax on prostitutes from April to raise some extra revenues for its strained finances.

 Following a model used by Cologne, which collected over $1 million (514,000 pounds) last year with its own flat tax, the German capital plans to tax prostitutes 30 euros (20 pounds) per working day. Berlin has rising debts of more than 60 billion euros.

Prostitution is legal in most places in Germany and sex workers are required to pay income tax as well as value-added tax (VAT). However, tax collectors have long suspected their income and VAT was not being fully reported on tax returns.

Forget toxic spills: sushi-loving astronaut unleashes wasabi on space station:

Astronauts are always are on guard against toxic spills that could contaminate the International Space Station.

But there is nothing in their training manuals about how to clean up flying wasabi. The spicy greenish condiment was squirted out of a tube while astronaut Sunita Williams was trying to make a pretend sushi meal with bag-packaged salmon. The three space station crew members are given a certain number of bonus packs of their favourite foods to help endure their months in space.

Since everything is weightless, spilled food is no ordinary clean-up challenge.

Williams reports it took a while to get rid of the smell of wasabi in the station.

Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says:

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet’s recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist’s controversial theory.

Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures. In 2005 data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide “ice caps” near Mars’s south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.

“The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars,” he said.

NASA’s plan for unstable astronauts: Duct tape, tranquilizers

What would happen if an astronaut became mentally unstable in space and, say, destroyed the ship’s oxygen system or tried to open the hatch and kill everyone aboard?

That was the question after the apparent breakdown of Lisa Nowak, arrested this month on charges she tried to kidnap and kill a woman she regarded as her rival for another astronaut’s affections.

It turns out NASA has detailed, written procedures for dealing with a suicidal or psychotic astronaut in space. The documents, obtained this week by The Associated Press, say the astronaut’s crewmates should bind his wrists and ankles with duct tape, tie him down with a bungee cord and inject him with tranquilizers if necessary.

Astronauts urged to take up skiing ahead of lunar missions:

Astronauts could be trained to cross-country ski across the surface of the moon as preparations for the next generation of lunar missions take shape, a conference heard Saturday.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced plans last year to build a base on the moon by 2020, hoping to use the lunar outpost as a launchpad for exploring the solar system in future generations.

Apollo 17 astronaut Harry Schmitt said that future inhabitants of the moonbase should be taught Nordic skiing to travel around the moon, where lower gravity means large distances can be covered with minimum effort.

“If I was running the astronaut office I certainly would recommend cross-country skiing, yes,” Schmitt told reporters during a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting.

‘UFO’ kills nomads

A suspected meteorite killed two nomads and injured five others on Thursday in the northern Indian desert state of Rajasthan, a report said.

Lunar settlements could face high-voltage sparks.:

Lunar colonists could be in for a nasty shock — literally. A team of US scientists has found that the Moon’s surface can become charged with up to several thousand volts of static electricity

This charging could release sparks that disable electronic equipment — including monitors, space buggies or even the front door of a Moon base. And it could cause dust clouds that clogs up instruments. What’s worse, it can be caused by bad weather in space: just when astronauts need their equipment to give them warning and allow them to shelter from the radiation.

Mars may hold massive reservoirs of water, CO2 just beneath its surface:

Data gleaned from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter has revealed that the Red Planet might hold large underground reservoirs of water and carbon dioxide that once formed the planet’s ancient atmosphere.

Stas Barabash and colleagues from the Swedish Institute of Space Physics who studied the data said, of the water and carbon dioxide that once existed on the planet, only a small amount was likely lost to the effects of solar wind over the past 3.5 billion years.

Hints of huge water reservoirs on Mars

Mars is losing little water to space, according to new research, so much of its ancient abundance may still be hidden beneath the surface. Dried up riverbeds and other evidence imply that Mars once had enough water to fill a global ocean more than 600 metres deep, together with a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide that kept the planet warm enough for the water to be liquid. But the planet is now very dry and has a thin atmosphere.

Stars Cooperate to Blow Super Space Bubble

Massive stars and their dead brethren are teaming up to build a colossal space bubble outside our Milky Way galaxy. Expanding envelopes of gas and dust shed by massive stars and supernovas are in the act of merging in a peculiar region of the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of two dwarf galaxies near the Milky Way.

Magellanic Clouds ‘just passing’

Two nearby galaxies – long thought to be true companions of the Milky Way – may instead be drifters, passing through the cosmic neighbourhood. Astronomers say the Magellanic Clouds may be moving too fast to be gravitationally bound to our galaxy.

First 3D map of the Universe’s dark matter scaffolding:

By analysing the COSMOS survey – the largest ever survey undertaken with Hubble – an international team of scientists has assembled a three-dimensional map that offers a first look at the web-like large-scale distribution of dark matter in the Universe. This historic achievement, one of the most important results in cosmology, accurately confirms standard theories of structure formation.

Russian Rocket Comes Down Over Wyoming

A spent Russian booster rocket re-entered the atmosphere Thursday over Colorado and Wyoming, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said. Eyewitnesses reported seeing flaming objects in the sky at the time the rocket was re-entering, NORAD spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Sean Kelly said. “It was pretty spectacular,” said Riverton Police Capt. Mark Stone, who said he saw the burning object while he was retrieving his newspaper. “My first concern is that we had some sort of aircraft that was coming down. It was definitely leaving a burning debris trail behind it.”

Metal object crashes through NJ home

A metal, rock-like object about the size of a golf ball and weighing nearly as much as a can of soup crashed through the roof of a Monmouth County home, and authorities on Wednesday were trying to figure out what it was. The rough-feeling object, with a metallic glint, was displayed Wednesday by police. “There‘s some great interest in what we have here,” said Lt. Robert Brightman. “It‘s rather unusual. I haven‘t seen anything like it in my career.”

Martian robot rovers outlive expectations

Their 90-day warranties expired long ago. But NASA’s six-wheeled Martian rovers still are going strong. After a bleak winter on the fourth rock from the sun, Spirit and Opportunity are rolling again.

Three years ago, when the first of the two rovers bounced to a landing on Mars, scientists hoped one of them might last long enough to transmit a few hundred pictures from the surface and help them decide where the arid planet’s water went.

Few dared dream that, come Wednesday, they would be celebrating the third anniversary of operations by two rovers on opposite sides of the planet.

 So far, the two little robots have beamed back 160,000 pictures. NASA now aims to keep the solar-powered robots running through September.

Comet observations upend scientists’ beliefs

Detailed observations from the first comet samples returned to Earth are debunking some of science’s long-held beliefs on how the icy, celestial bodies form.Scientists expected the minute grains retrieved from a comet Wild 2 to be made up mostly of interstellar dust — tiny particles that flow through the solar system thought to be from ancient stars that exploded and died.

Instead, they found an unusual mix of primordial material as if the solar system had turned itself inside out. Hot particles from the inner solar system migrated out to the cold, outer fringes beyond Pluto where they intermingled and congealed to form a comet.