The mysterious spokes in Saturn’s rings, discovered by the Voyager craft back in the 1980s, still persist today in Cassini images.
Scientists think they occur as the ring particles interact with Saturn’s magnetic field, but that remains largely an as yet unproven theory.
Archeologists think they have located the wreck of Christopher Columbus flagship, the Santa Maria, from his 1492 voyage.
The U.S.’s most capable deep-sea unmanned research sub has been lost more than six miles deep in the Pacific.
The creation in the lab of an as yet unnamed superheavy element adds weight to the theory that there might exist even heavier elements that are stable in nature.
The scientists did not observe element 117 directly. Instead, they searched for its daughter products after it radioactively decayed by emitting alpha particles—helium nuclei with two protons and two neutrons. “The heavy nuclei makes an alpha decay to produce element 115, and this also decays by alpha decay,” says Jadambaa Khuyagbaatar of GSI, lead author of a paper reporting the results published on 1 May in Physical Review Letters.
After a few more steps in this decay chain, one of the nuclei produced is the isotope lawrencium 266—a nucleus with 103 protons and 163 neutrons that had never been seen before. Previously known isotopes of lawrencium have fewer neutrons, and are less stable. This novel species, however, has an astonishingly long half-life of 11 hours, making it one of the longest-lived superheavy isotopes known to date. “Perhaps we are at the shore of the island of stability,” Düllmann says.
If these superheavy elements could be created, they would be the stuff of science fiction. They might have properties that we would find extremely useful.
The uncertainty of science: It turns out that the object dubbed G2 that is zipping past the Milky Way’s central black hole is behaving not like a cloud but more like a star.
The latest observations by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii show that the gas cloud called “G2” was surprisingly still intact, even during its closest approach to the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers from the UCLA Galactic Center Group reported today that observations obtained on March 19 and 20, 2014 show the object’s density was still “robust” enough to be detected. This means G2 is not just a gas cloud, but likely has a star inside.
When I wrote a piece about this object for Sky & Telescope I found that among astronomers there was great skepticism about it being just a gas cloud that would be ripped apart when it flew past the black hole. The early data was not conclusive, but enough of it suggested G2 was a star, not a cloud. It turns out here that the skeptics were right.
For the first time astronomers think they have measured the rotation rate of an exoplanet, thus determining the length of its day.
Ignas Snellen and his colleagues at Leiden University in the Netherlands report in Nature1 that a gaseous planet orbiting the star β Pictoris rotates at 25 kilometres per second at its equator — faster than any planet in the Solar System and about 50 times faster than Earth. A day on the planet, called β Pictoris b, lasts just over eight hours, even though the planet has a diameter more than 16 times that of Earth’s and carries more than 3,000 times Earth’s heft.
This result falls under my category of “the uncertainty of science.” Though quite cool, and based on real data, the uncertainties are great. Don’t bet the house that this result will stand up to closer observations in the future.
A brown dwarf star has been discovered only 7.2 light years away.
This makes it the fourth closest interstellar neighbor to the Sun.
Chicken Little was wrong! A new study confirms that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide lengthens the plant growing season.
Previous studies have documented a lengthening of the growing season in many parts of the world. In the United States, the time between the last spring frost and the first autumn freeze has gone up by nearly two weeks since 19002; in Europe, a study of more than 540 plant species found that, on average, spring events such as flowering had shifted about a week earlier from 1971 to 2000, and the onset of autumn had been pushed back by about four days3.
Such shifts have long been attributed to warming temperatures. But CO2 also plays a part, says study co-author Heidi Steltzer, an ecosystem ecologist at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.
Putting aside the uncertainty about whether carbon dioxide can even cause global warming, the assumption that global warming itself will be a bad thing has never been demonstrated clearly, while there is evidence that it might actually be beneficial.
Penny wise, pound foolish: Budget issues continue to threaten a number of successfully functioning science spacecraft, including Opportunity on Mars and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the Moon.
Don’t be surprised if NASA announces soon that they are shutting down these spacecraft so they can save some money. Or as the article notes, “Money not spent on these extended missions will probably slide into [the Science Mission Directorate’s] Black Hole of Funding (the James Webb Space Telescope) or be dissipated on new paperwork, committee meetings and concept studies.”
According to a new study, Chelyabinsk-scale meteorite impacts happen more often than we have been aware.
The bright flare of the Russian meteor was hard to miss, and left 1,200 people injured in February 2013. What the human eye missed was two separate high-altitude explosions that occurred over Argentina and the North Atlantic Ocean just months later. That’s according to data from an infrasound network used to track nuke tests, released Tuesday by the B612 Foundation.
The data shows that there were 26 comparable events since 2000.
Having completed more than 3,000 orbits around Mercury, Messenger’s orbit is now being lowered to just under 125 miles from the surface.
