science / Space
ESA launches new satellite for monitoring climatePlesetsk, Russia/Paris - Europe's space agency ESA on Monday launched a new satellite which is hoped to help provide new insights on global water circulation. Launched from Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome at 0150 GMT, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinit...
Earth Times Monday, November 02, 2009Atlantis receives green light for new missionNasa engineers have given the go-ahead for the shuttle Atlantis to launch on November 16, carrying six astronauts to the International
space station.
iol.co.za Monday, November 02, 2009Russia launches European satellitesRussia has successfully launched a Rokot rocket carrying two European satellites into space from its military spacedrome of Plesetsk.
iol.co.za Monday, November 02, 2009The Long-Lost Siblings of the Sun (preview)People have often sought solitude in the starry night sky, and it is an appropriate place for that. The night is dark because, in cosmic terms, our sun and its family of planets are very lonely. Neighboring stars are so far away that they look like mere specks of light, and more distant stars blur together into a feeble glow. Our fastest space probes will take tens of thousands of years to cross the distance to the nearest star. Space isolates us like an ocean around a tiny island.Yet not all stars are so secluded. About one in 10 belongs to a cluster, a swarm of hundreds to tens of thousands of stars with a diameter of a few light-years. In fact, most stars are born in such groups, which generally disperse over billions of years, their stars blending in with the rest of the galaxy. What about our sun? Might it, too, have come into existence in a star cluster? If so, our location in the galaxy was not always so desolate. It only became so as the cluster dispersed in due time. [More]
Scientific American Monday, November 02, 2009Saturn's Equinox Leaves Rings in Long, Cold NightCassini spacecraft sees long night for Saturn's rings during planet's equinox.
SPACE.com Monday, November 02, 2009Ropes of plasma: onset and stagnation of 3-D magnetic reconnection(American Physical Society) Magnetized plasmas occupy a large fraction of our cosmic universe; they exist on our sun, in the earth's magnetosphere, and in astrophysical plasmas.
Eurekalert.org Monday, November 02, 2009Upping the power triggers an ordered helical plasma(American Physical Society) If you keep twisting a straight elastic string, at some moment it starts kinking in a wild way.
Eurekalert.org Monday, November 02, 2009Scientists Detect Most Distance Object Ever SeenOnly 630 million years after the creation of the Universe a super-massive star exploded in a violent supernova. The energy from this explosion has been traveling across the Universe ever since, more than 13 billion years. This event marks the most distance object ever observed. These types of events, known as a gamma-ray burst or GRB, typically occur at least twice a week on average. However, this is the oldest event ever recorded, besting the previous mark by 150 million years. GRBs are important to understanding the Universe as they allow us to "see" events that occured billions of years ago. Normally, celestial events are difficult to observe when they are that far away, but GRBs emit so much light, particularly in the gamma-ray band (hence the name), that
scientists can easily detect them. Scientists Detect Most Distance Object Ever Seen originally appeared on About.com Space / Astronomy on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 14:09:11.Permalink | Comment | Email this
About Monday, November 02, 2009High-precision measurements confirm cosmologists' standard view of the universe(DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) A detailed picture of the seeds of structures in the universe has been unveiled by an international team co-led by Sarah Church of KIPAC, jointly located SLAC and Stanford
university, and by Walter Gear, of Cardiff
university. These measurements put limits on proposed alternatives to the standard model of cosmology and provide further support for the standard cosmological model, confirming that dark matter and dark energy make up 95 percent of everything in existence.
Eurekalert.org Monday, November 02, 2009'Ultra-primitive' particles found in comet dust(Carnegie Institution) Dust samples collected from the stratosphere have yielded an unexpectedly rich trove of relicts from the ancient cosmos, report
scientists from the Carnegie Institution. The dust includes presolar grains and material from interstellar molecular clouds. This "ultra-primitive" material likely wafted into the atmosphere after the Earth passed through the trail of an Earth-crossing comet in 2003, giving scientists a rare opportunity to study cometary dust in the laboratory.
Eurekalert.org Monday, November 02, 2009 1 2
Archived space news stories.
Available news archives.