http://www.physorg.com/ en-us Physorg.com internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. (AP) -- NASA began the countdown for its final trip to the Hubble Space Telescope on Friday as the astronauts who will attempt the daunting repairs arrived at the launching site. http://www.physorg.com/news161028386.html Space & Earth Fri, 08 May 2009 19:06:58 EST news161028386 (AP) -- The Hubble Space Telescope is about to get one last house call. And never before have the risks been higher. http://www.physorg.com/news160926151.html Space & Earth Thu, 07 May 2009 14:43:45 EST news160926151 NASA's final mission to the 17-year-old Hubble Space Telescope, which begins May 11, will deliver a new instrument partly built by University of California, Berkeley, physicists to map the structure of the universe. http://www.physorg.com/news160925519.html Space & Earth Thu, 07 May 2009 14:32:47 EST news160925519 Whatever dark energy is, explanations for it have less wiggle room following a Hubble Space Telescope observation that has refined the measurement of the universe's present expansion rate to a precision where the error is smaller than 5 percent. The new value for the expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant, or Ho (after Edwin Hubble who first measured the expansion of the universe nearly a century ago), is 74.2 kilometers per second per megaparsec (error margin of ± 3.6). The results agree closely with an earlier measurement gleaned from Hubble of 72 ± 8 km/sec/megaparsec, but are now more than twice as precise. http://www.physorg.com/news160923906.html Physics Thu, 07 May 2009 14:05:55 EST news160923906 The world's astronomers are about to get a trio of powerful new eyes on the sky that can see better and farther than existing space telescopes. http://www.physorg.com/news160907171.html Space & Earth Thu, 07 May 2009 09:26:41 EST news160907171 The primary mission of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is about to end after more than five and a half years of probing the cosmos with its keen infrared eye. Within about a week of May 12, the telescope is expected to run out of the liquid helium needed to chill some of its instruments to operating temperatures. http://www.physorg.com/news160835772.html Space & Earth Wed, 06 May 2009 13:36:46 EST news160835772 (PhysOrg.com) -- Something in our galactic neighborhood seems to be producing large numbers of high-energy electrons, according to new data gathered by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The electrons could be coming from nearby pulsars -or they could be a longed-for signal of dark matter, the elusive, invisible material thought to make up nearly a quarter of the universe. http://www.physorg.com/news160764898.html Physics Tue, 05 May 2009 17:56:20 EST news160764898 NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is about to use its last drop of the coolant that has chilled it for the past five-and-a-half years. On about May 12, give or take a week or so, the observatory is predicted to run out of the liquid helium that has run through its veins, keeping its infrared detectors at frosty operating temperatures of just a few degrees above the coldest temperature possible, called absolute zero. http://www.physorg.com/news160762028.html Space & Earth Tue, 05 May 2009 17:07:31 EST news160762028 (Physorg.com) -- Since its launch last June, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a new class of pulsars, probed gamma-ray bursts and watched flaring jets in galaxies billions of light-years away. Today at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver, Colo., Fermi scientists revealed new details about high-energy particles implicated in a nearby cosmic mystery. http://www.physorg.com/news160659605.html Space & Earth Mon, 04 May 2009 12:41:03 EST news160659605 (PhysOrg.com) -- Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered streams of young stars flowing from their natal cocoons in distant galaxies. These distant rivers of stars provide an answer to one of astronomy's most fundamental puzzles: how do young stars that form clustered together in dense clouds of dust and gas disperse to form the large, smooth distribution seen in the disks of spiral galaxies like the Milky Way? http://www.physorg.com/news160410037.html Space & Earth Fri, 01 May 2009 15:20:59 EST news160410037 (PhysOrg.com) -- NASA managers completed a review Thursday of space shuttle Atlantis' readiness for flight and selected an official launch date for the STS-125 mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. Commander Scott Altman and his six crewmates are scheduled to lift off at 2:01 p.m. EDT, May 11, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. http://www.physorg.com/news160327349.html Space & Earth Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:23:16 EST news160327349 (PhysOrg.com) -- Bursts of star making in a galaxy have been compared to a Fourth of July fireworks display: They occur at a fast and furious pace, lighting up a region for a short time before winking out. http://www.physorg.com/news160318098.html Space & Earth Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:48:50 EST news160318098 An extremely deep Chandra X-ray Observatory image of a region near the center of our Galaxy has resolved a long-standing mystery about an X-ray glow along the plane of the Galaxy. The glow in the region covered by the Chandra image was discovered to be caused by hundreds of point-like X-ray sources, implying that the glow along the plane of the Galaxy is due to millions of such sources. http://www.physorg.com/news160231864.html Space & Earth Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:51:39 EST news160231864 (PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer Mission marks its sixth anniversary studying galaxies beyond our Milky Way through its sensitive ultraviolet telescope, the only such far-ultraviolet detector in space. http://www.physorg.com/news160161119.html Space & Earth Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:12:47 EST news160161119 The gamma-ray sky comes alive in a movie made from data acquired by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope during its first three months of operations. Gamma rays from sources near and far turn the sky into a hypnotic froth. The sun arcs serenely across the northern sky as active galaxies called blazars flare up and fade out. http://www.physorg.com/news159812078.html Space & Earth Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:15:44 EST news159812078 (PhysOrg.com) -- A team of astronomers from the Instituto Astrofisica Canarias (IAC) have found an interesting shadow cast by a forming star system. Team member Dr Basmah Riaz, an ER fellow for the Marie Curie CONSTELLATION network, will present the results of their work on Thursday 23rd April in a poster at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science conference at the University of Hertfordshire. http://www.physorg.com/news159719058.html Space & Earth Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:25:26 EST news159719058 (AP) -- NASA may move up its final trip to the Hubble Space Telescope by one day. http://www.physorg.com/news159714064.html Space & Earth Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:01:25 EST news159714064 An international team of astronomers has used the world's biggest radio telescope to look deep into the brightest galaxies that NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can see. The study solidifies the link between an active galaxy's gamma-ray emissions and its powerful radio-emitting jets. http://www.physorg.com/news159639919.html Space & Earth Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:25:56 EST news159639919 (PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii, the IRAM Millimetre-wave Telescope in Spain, and the Spitzer Space Telescope in orbit above the Earth, have completed the most wide-ranging census ever produced of dynamical star formation in and around the well-known Great Nebula of Orion. http://www.physorg.com/news159460527.html Space & Earth Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:35:59 EST news159460527 (PhysOrg.com) -- Using NASA`s Spitzer Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers have found that at least 1 in 100 white dwarf stars show evidence of orbiting asteroids and rocky planets, suggesting these objects once hosted Solar Systems similar to our own. http://www.physorg.com/news159460384.html Space & Earth Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:33:37 EST news159460384 (AP) -- Space shuttle Endeavour is on a launch pad, ready to rocket off on a rescue mission if shuttle Atlantis needs help when it flies to repair the Hubble Space Telescope next month. http://www.physorg.com/news159193884.html Space & Earth Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:32:02 EST news159193884 The most crowded collision of galaxy clusters has been identified by combining information from three different telescopes. This result gives scientists a chance to learn what happens when some of the largest objects in the Universe go at each other in a cosmic free-for-all. http://www.physorg.com/news159100327.html Space & Earth Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:32:30 EST news159100327 (PhysOrg.com) -- A flare-up in a jet of matter blasting from a monster black hole is giving astronomers an incredible light show. http://www.physorg.com/news158939828.html Space & Earth Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:57:53 EST news158939828 (PhysOrg.com) -- The first mirror segment that will fly on the James Webb Space Telescope, built by Northrop Grumman Corporation, has completed its first series of cryogenic temperature tests in the X-ray and Cryogenic Facility at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. http://www.physorg.com/news158409413.html Space & Earth Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:37:25 EST news158409413 (PhysOrg.com) -- Life on Earth is thought to have arisen from a hot soup of chemicals. Does this same soup exist on planets around other stars? A new study from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope hints that planets around stars cooler than our sun might possess a different mix of potentially life-forming, or "prebiotic," chemicals. http://www.physorg.com/news158341061.html Space & Earth Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:38:41 EST news158341061 A new Hubble image highlights striking swirling dust lanes and glittering globular clusters in oddball galaxy NGC 7049. http://www.physorg.com/news158329219.html Space & Earth Tue, 07 Apr 2009 13:20:46 EST news158329219 (PhysOrg.com) -- A powerful, newly refined image-processing technique may allow astronomers to discover extrasolar planets that are possibly lurking in over a decade's worth of Hubble Space Telescope archival data. http://www.physorg.com/news157820664.html Space & Earth Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:04:54 EST news157820664 A scientist at Rochester Institute of Technology has expanded the Hubble Space Telescope's capability without the need for new instruments or billions of dollars. http://www.physorg.com/news157212883.html Space & Earth Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:15:39 EST news157212883 (PhysOrg.com) -- Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere? Answering those questions will not be easy. http://www.physorg.com/news156776825.html Space & Earth Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:07:45 EST news156776825 An international team of astrophysicists using telescopes on the ground and in space have uncovered surprising changes in radiation emitted by an active galaxy. The picture that emerges from these first-ever simultaneous observations with optical, X-ray and new-generation gamma-ray telescopes is much more complex than scientists expected and challenges current theories of how the radiation is generated. http://www.physorg.com/news156613697.html Space & Earth Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:49:17 EST news156613697