RECENT NEWS: 2
The Worlds of David Darling > Recent News: 2
RECENT NEWS: 1 | LATEST NEWS | NEWS ARCHIVES
(Dec 25, 2009) Though there are no plans to investigate whether Saturn's moon Titan has a Santa Claus, NASA's Cassini will zoom close to Titan's north pole this weekend. The flyby, which brings Cassini to within about 960 km (600 miles) of the Titan surface at 82 degrees north latitude, will take place the evening of Dec. 27 Pacific time, or shortly after midnight Universal Time on Dec. 28. Read more. Source: NASA/JPL |
(Dec 24, 2009) The inner regions of young planet-forming disks offer information about how worlds like Earth form, but not a single telescope in the world can see them. Now, for the first time, astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii have measured the properties of a young solar system at distances closer to the star than Venus is from our sun. Read more. Source: NASA/JPL |
(Dec 23, 2009) Thrifty microbes entombed in a salt crystal have survived for 30,000 years by feeding off the remains of algae that were trapped along with them. This is the most convincing example to date of long-term survival. Brian Schubert, a microbiologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and colleagues studied salt crystals in a sediment core taken from Death Valley in California. Read more. Source: New Scientist |
(Dec 22, 2009) We're lucky Earth resides in the Milky Way's suburbs. Intense comet bombardment near the galaxy's center may make it tough for life to gain a foothold there. More than twice as many comets are shaken loose to potentially hit planets at half our distance to the center, according to simulations by Marco Masi of the University of Padua, Italy, and his colleagues. Read more. Source: New Scientist |
(Dec 21, 2009) As much as 50% of the plume shooting out of geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus could be ice, a researcher revealed yesterday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Previously, scientists had thought that only 10–20% of the plume was made up of ice, with the rest being water vapor. Read more. Source: Nature |
(Dec 21, 2009) NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured the first flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn's moon Titan, confirming the presence of liquid on the part of the moon dotted with many large, lake-shaped basins. Cassini scientists had been looking for the glint, also known as a specular reflection, since the spacecraft began orbiting Saturn in 2004. But Titan's northern hemisphere, which has more lakes than the southern hemisphere, has been veiled in winter darkness. Read more. Source: NASA/JPL |
(Dec 20, 2009) Habitable alien moons like the one depicted in the blockbuster movie Avatar may become science fact within the next few years, according to a leading astronomer. In the 3D film, a race of 10ft blue-skinned giants inhabits an Earth-like moon called Pandora, which orbits a gas giant planet similar to Jupiter. US astronomer and planet-hunter Lisa Kaltenegger, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, believes there is every chance a real-life version of Pandora exists and will soon be found. Read more. Source: The Independent |
(Dec 20, 2009) A daring proposal to try to put a "boat" down on a sea of Saturn's moon Titan is about to be submitted to NASA. The scientific team behind the idea is targeting Ligeia Mare, a vast body of liquid methane sited in the high north of Saturn's largest moon. The concept will be suggested to the US space agency for one of its future mission opportunities that will test a novel power system. Read more. Source: BBC |
(Dec 19, 2009) Portuguese scientists have found a depression on the Atlantic Ocean floor they think may be an impact crater. The roughly circular, 6km-wide hollow has a broad central dome and has been dubbed the "Fried Egg" because of its distinctive shape. It was detected to the south of the Azores Islands during a survey to map the continental shelf. Read more. Source: BBC |
(Dec 18, 2009) For 80 years, it has eluded the finest minds in science. But now it appears that the hunt may be over for dark matter, the mysterious and invisible substance that accounts for three-quarters of the mass of the universe. In a series of coordinated announcements at several US laboratories, researchers said they believed they had captured dark matter in a defunct iron ore mine half a mile underground. Read more. Source: The Guardian |
(Dec 17, 2009) The Moon has the coldest place in the Solar System measured by a spacecraft. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has used its Diviner instrument to probe the insides of permanently shadowed craters on Earth's satellite. It found mid-winter, night-time surface temperatures inside the coldest craters in the northern polar region can dip as low as minus 249°C (26 K). Read more. Source: BBC |
(Dec 17, 2009) The most complete and most detailed atlas of Mercury has been assembled. It is only now thanks to the MESSENGER spacecraft that researchers have the imagery necessary to construct a truly global map of the innermost planet. The probe's latest pictures added to those of the earlier Mariner 10 mission give near-total coverage. Read more. Source: BBC |
(Dec 16, 2009) Baby black holes are puny compared with their humongous cousins at the centers of galaxies, but their birth may spew out the universe's mightiest particles. Todd Thompson at Ohio State University in Columbus and his colleagues argue that ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) may originate in the merger of two types of dead star, which gives birth to a black hole. Read more. Source: New Scientist |
(Dec 16, 2009) Planet-hunters have discovered two "super-Earths" orbiting two nearby Sun-like stars. These rocky planets are larger than the Earth but much smaller than ice giants such as Uranus and Neptune. Scientists say the discoveries are a step towards finding potentially habitable planets – smaller planets that are comparable to the Earth. Read more. Source: BBC |
(Dec 14, 2009) Evidence for the Higgs boson could be pouring down upon us from deep space. If so, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope could upstage the Large Hadron Collider in the search for the elusive particle. Read more. Source: New Scientist |
(Dec 14, 2009) A NASA satellite designed to uncover hidden cosmic objects has blasted off from California. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a Delta II rocket just after 1409 GMT. It will pick up the glow of hundreds of millions of astronomical bodies. Read more. Source: BBC |
(Dec 12, 2009) The first images have been revealed from a telescope that can map the sky much faster and deeper than any other. The VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) is dedicated to mapping the sky in infrared light. Spectacular images, including some of the center of our Milky Way, show, astronomers say, that the UK-designed telescope is working "extremely well". Read more. Source: BBC |
(Dec 11, 2009) New views of Saturn's moon Iapetus accompany papers that detail how reddish dust swept up on the moon's orbit around Saturn and migrating ice can explain the bizarre, yin-yang-patterned surface. The papers, led by Cassini scientists Tilmann Denk and John Spencer, appeared online in the journal Science on Dec. 10, 2009. Read more. Source: NASA/JPL |
(Dec 10, 2009) Previously unseen walls and curlicues in a mysterious hexagon-shaped feature on Saturn's north pole are revealed in this new image by the Cassini spacecraft. The strange hexagonal structure, which spans a distance wider than two Earths, has remained largely unchanged since it was first discovered by NASA's Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. Read more. Source: New Scientist |
(Dec 9, 2009) Hopes of finding life on Mars have been boosted by British scientists studying sources of methane on the planet. They have ruled out any possibility of meteorites delivering the high levels of the gas detected in the Martian atmosphere. That leaves only two alternatives. Either the methane is created by chemical reactions between volcanic rock and water, or it is being generated by living organisms. Read more. Source: The Independent |
(Dec 8, 2009) The asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs 65 million years ago didn't incinerate life on our planet's surface – it just broiled it, a new study suggests. The work resolves nagging questions about a theory that the impact triggered deadly wildfires around the world, but it also raises new questions about just what led to the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. Read more. Source: New Scientist |
(Dec 7, 2009) Richard Branson is unveiling the rocket plane he will use to take fare-paying passengers into space. SpaceShipTwo is being presented to the world in Mojave, California. The vehicle will undergo testing over the next 18 months before being allowed to take ticketed individuals on short-hop trips just above the atmosphere. Read more. Source: BBC |
(Dec 7, 2009) Could snow on Mars harbor life? Perhaps, thanks to a form of greenhouse effect that creates liquid water beneath an icy crust. Calculations by Diedrich Möhlmann of the German Aerospace Center in Berlin suggest that these frozen deposits near the poles could contain liquid water, at least during the day. Read more. Source: New Scientist |
(Dec 6, 2009) Good things come to those who wait. But now that the Large Hadron Collider has restarted after undergoing more than a year of repairs, physicists are racing to analyse the data. Just days after the first protons were smashed together at the LHC, the first paper on the results has been accepted to a journal. Read more. Source: New Scientist |
(Dec 5, 2009) Uranus spins on an axis almost parallel with the plane of the solar system, rather than perpendicular to it – though why it does this nobody knows. Now Gwenaël Boué and Jacques Laskar at the Paris Observatory in France have come up with another explanation: Uranus may once have had an unusually massive extra moon. Read more. Source: New Scientist |
(Dec 4, 2009) Astronomers have published an image of the coolest planet outside our solar system that has been pictured directly. The new find is more similar to our own Solar System than prior pictured exoplanets, in terms of the parent star's type and the planet's size. However, the surface temperature is a scorching 280-370C, and could still prove to be a brown dwarf star. Read more. Source: BBC |
(Dec 3, 2009) An enormous explosion observed in 2007 was the death of one of the most massive stars known in the universe, new calculations suggest. Similar blasts may have polluted the early universe with heavy elements, altering its evolution. A team of astronomers led by Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, detected the explosion in a dwarf galaxy on 6 April 2007. Read more. Source: New Scientist |
(Dec 2, 2009) The Red Planet is experiencing a partial radio blackout this week, as both of NASA's Mars orbiters have been felled by technical glitches. Until one of the probes can be brought back online later this week, the outages will delay operation of the twin Mars rovers, which use the orbiters to efficiently relay data back to Earth. Read more. Source: New Scientist |
(Dec 1, 2009) Researchers at the California Institute of Technology, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and other institutions suggest that the eccentricity of Saturn's orbit around the Sun may be responsible for the unusually uneven distribution of lakes over the northern and southern polar regions of the planet's largest moon, Titan. A paper describing the theory appears in the Nov. 29 advance online edition of Nature Geoscience. Read more. Source: NASA/JPL |
