Space & Earth news

Forty years ago man first walked on the moon

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

18 hours ago | 4.3 / 5 (4) | 2

Forty years ago on July 20, 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong realized the oldest dream of human civilizations when he became the first man to walk on the moon.

Global warming tactic cools climate but won’t help corals, say researchers

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

Jul 03, 2009 | 3 / 5 (6) | 6

(PhysOrg.com) -- “Geoengineering” experiments proposed to reduce global warming by blocking sunlight with atmosphere-injected particles may cool the world but still leave carbon dioxide levels dangerously high, Stanford scientists ...

Coolest spacecraft ever in orbit around L2

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

Jul 03, 2009 | 4.8 / 5 (9) | 3

(PhysOrg.com) -- Last night, the detectors of Planck's High Frequency Instrument reached their amazingly low operational temperature of -273°C, making them the coldest known objects in space. The spacecraft ...

VLBA locates superenergetic bursts near giant black hole

Space & Earth / Astronomy

Jul 02, 2009 | 4.9 / 5 (7) | 1

(PhysOrg.com) -- Using a worldwide combination of diverse telescopes, astronomers have discovered that a giant galaxy's bursts of very high energy gamma rays are coming from a region very close to the supermassive ...

Many characteristics of Mars, including ice, are similar to Earth

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

Jul 02, 2009 | 4.5 / 5 (4) | 1

Mars gets as far as 250 million miles away, but many parts of it closely resemble places on Earth, including its landscape, history of water, soil and even its weather, says a Texas A&M University researcher ...

European rocket hoists biggest-ever telecoms satellite (w/ Video)

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

Jul 02, 2009 | 5 / 5 (4) | 0

A European rocket placed the world's biggest commercial telecommunications satellite into geostationary orbit, launch operator Arianespace said.

Mars data published in Science this week

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

Jul 02, 2009 | 3.3 / 5 (3) | 1

Four papers in the journal Science this week offer new details about the history of water on Mars, gleaned from the 2008 NASA Phoenix Mars Mission that was operated from The University of Arizona.

Free Spirit: Rock Under the Belly

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

Jul 02, 2009 | 4 / 5 (4) | 1

Engineers placed a rock underneath the test rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., on July 1, 2009, to more closely simulate Spirit's predicament on Mars.

Pacific Northwest forests could store more carbon, help address greenhouse issues

Space & Earth / Environment

Jul 02, 2009 | 2.3 / 5 (3) | 0

The forests of the Pacific Northwest hold significant potential to increase carbon storage and help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in coming years, a recent study concludes, if they are managed primarily for that purpose ...

Forest service carves new experimental forest out of Tongass NF

Space & Earth / Environment

Jul 02, 2009 | 5 / 5 (2) | 0

The USDA Forest Service established a new experimental forest in Alaska on June 25. The 25,000-acre Héen Latinee Experimental Forest is located inside the Tongass National Forest, and is easily accessible ...

The least sea ice in 800 years

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

Jul 01, 2009 | 4.2 / 5 (62) | 59

New research, which reconstructs the extent of ice in the sea between Greenland and Svalbard from the 13th century to the present indicates that there has never been so little sea ice as there is now. The ...

Intense heat killed the Universe's would-be galaxies, researchers say

Space & Earth / Astronomy

Jul 01, 2009 | 3.4 / 5 (21) | 27

(PhysOrg.com) -- Our Milky Way galaxy only survived because it was already immersed in a large clump of dark matter which trapped gases inside it, scientists led by Durham University's Institute for Computational ...

New class of black holes discovered

Space & Earth / Astronomy

Jul 01, 2009 | 5 / 5 (20) | 15

A new class of black hole, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers.

Plants Save the Earth from an Icy Doom (w/ Podcast)

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

Jul 01, 2009 | 3.8 / 5 (9) | 5

(PhysOrg.com) -- Fifty million years ago, the North and South Poles were ice-free and crocodiles roamed the Arctic. Since then, a long-term decrease in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has cooled the Earth. ...

Earth's most prominent rainfall feature creeping northward

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

Jul 01, 2009 | 4.4 / 5 (12) | 3

The rain band near the equator that determines the supply of freshwater to nearly a billion people throughout the tropics and subtropics has been creeping north for more than 300 years, probably because of ...

A Super-Efficient Particle Accelerator

Space & Earth / Astronomy

Jul 01, 2009 | 4.5 / 5 (4) | 1

This image of data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope shows a part of the roughly circular supernova remnant known as RCW 86.

Astronomers discover pair of solar systems in the making

Space & Earth / Astronomy

Jul 01, 2009 | 4.5 / 5 (4) | 1

Two University of Hawai'i at Mānoa astronomers have found a binary star-disk system in which each star is surrounded by the kind of dust disk that is frequently the precursor of a planetary system. Doctoral ...

Astronomer's new guide to the galaxy: Largest map of cold dust revealed

Space & Earth / Astronomy

Jul 01, 2009 | 4.8 / 5 (4) | 0

This new guide for astronomers, known as the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL) shows the Milky Way in submillimetre-wavelength light (between infrared light and radio waves). Images ...