Astronomers find clouds of primordial gas from the early universe.
And in related news, a new computer simulation suggests that the very first stars were not the giant monsters scientists had predicted.
A new analysis of data suggests that the asteroid Lutetia is a leftover fragment from the same original material that formed the Earth, Venus and Mercury.
An evening pause:
According to GPS data gathered over the past two decades, it appears that the New Madrid fault in Missouri might be shutting down.
The Dutch scientists who faked the data on dozens of papers has given up his doctoral degree.
Lightning! With pictures and video.
Russia has two weeks to save Phobos-Grunt.
As it does every month, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center today released its monthly update showing the ongoing changes of the Sun’s solar cycle sunspot activity. I have posted the graph below the fold.
For the fourth month in a row the Sun’s sunspot activity has leaped upward. In fact, for the first time since I have been tracking sunspot activity, beginning in 2008, the Sun’s sunspot activity exceeds the predicted activity by a significant amount. Since the end of the previous maximum, the Sun had consistently failed to meet the expectations of solar scientists by producing far fewer sunspots than expected.
In the past few months, however, the Sun has recovered, its activity firing upward, including some of the most active and largest sunspots in years.
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Phobos-Grunt appears to be in trouble in Earth orbit.
In a posting to an online forum for the Phobos-Grunt mission, Anton Ledkov of the Russian Space Research Institute reported that there was “no telemetry” from the spacecraft.
Another report suggests that a variety of engine thrusters did not fire as planned.
To leap or not to leap: Scientists are considering abandoning the solar year as their method for synchronizing their atomic clocks.
At issue is whether to abolish the ‘leap second’ — the extra second added every year or so to keep [Coordinated Universal Time] (UTC) in step with Earth’s slightly unpredictable orbit. UTC — the reference against which international time zones are set — is calculated by averaging signals from around 400 atomic clocks, with leap seconds added to stop UTC drifting away from solar time at a rate of about one minute every 90 years.
Mars Express takes a close look at one of Mars’ giant volcanoes, Tharsis Tholus.
At least two large sections have collapsed around its eastern and western flanks during its four-billion-year history and these catastrophes are now visible as scarps up to several kilometers high. The main feature of Tharsis Tholus is, however, the caldera in its center. It has an almost circular outline, about 32 x 34 km, and is ringed by faults that have allowed the caldera floor to subside by as much as 2.7 km.
