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Diamonds and precious metals found in the eastern United States might have rained down during the last Ice Age after a comet shattered over Canada and set North America ablaze, all leading to a mass die-off of animals and humans. New chemical analyses of diamond, gold and silver found in Ohio and Indiana reveal the minerals were transported there from Canada several thousand years ago. The question is, how?

Fortunately, the odds are good that the next one will fall over one of our oceans, which take up more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, or the planet’s still-vast stretches of uninhabited lands. How much in taxpayer dollars should be invested to pinpoint such hazards is one of the toughest risk-management exercises around.

Hurtling through space 31 years after its launch, the Voyager 2 spacecraft has sent back the most detailed view yet of the shock wave that marks the thinning of the solar wind, the charged particles streaming from the sun. Researchers say the crossing confirms that the heliosphere—the region swept out by the solar wind—is actually lopsided, perhaps due to a tilted magnetic field in local interstellar space. The shock wave, or heliospheric termination shock, occurs when the supersonic wind thins to the point that it can no longer rebuff the denser haze of charged particles flowing through interstellar space. Instead,...

Exploding asteroid theory strengthened by new evidence located in Ohio, Indiana Space & Earth science / Earth Sciences Ken Tankersley seen working in the field in a cave in this publicity photo from the National Geographic Channel. Geological evidence found in Ohio and Indiana in recent weeks is strengthening the case to attribute what happened 12,900 years ago in North America -- when the end of the last Ice Age unexpectedly turned into a phase of extinction for animals and humans -- to a cataclysmic comet or asteroid explosion over top of Canada. A comet/asteroid theory advanced by Arizona-based geophysicist...

Almighty smash left record crater on Mars 25 June 2008 From New Scientist Print Edition. David Shiga A giant impact explains why Mars's two hemispheres are so different (Illustration: Jeff Andrews-Hanna) Five minutes after Mars was hit by an asteroid travelling at 40 times the speed of sound, pieces of the planet's crust (orange blobs) are flung into space, while a shock wave propagates into the planet's molten core (yellow) (Illustration: Francis Nimmo) A suspected crater in the planet's northern hemisphere forms a kidney shape (blue region at left), but when researchers studied the variations in the strength of gravity...

Planet hunters say it's just a matter of time before they lasso Earth's twin, which almost surely is hiding somewhere in our star-studded galaxy. Momentum is building: Just last week, astronomers announced they had discovered three super-Earths — worlds more massive than ours but small enough to most likely be rocky — orbiting a single star. And dozens of other worlds suspected of having masses in that same range were found around other stars. "Being able to find three Earth-mass planets around a single star really makes the point that not only may many stars have one Earth, but they...

Abstract: The heat generated inside our planet is predominantly of radionic (nuclear) origin. Hence, Earth in its entirety can be considered considered a slow nuclear reactor with its solid ”inner core” providing a major contribution to the total energy output. Since radionic heat is generated in the entire volume and cooling can only occur at the surface, the highest temperature inside Earth occurs at the center of the inner core. Overheating the center of the inner core reactor due to the so-called greenhouse effect on the surface of Earth may cause a meltdown condition, an enrichment of nuclear fuel and...

A newfound extrasolar planet is the smallest yet discovered orbiting a star smaller than our sun, astronomers announced today. The find may increase the chances of finding life-supporting "exoplanets," they added... The planet, dubbed MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb, is just three times more massive than Earth and orbits what is most likely a brown dwarf -- a "failed" star that is so small its core may not be massive enough to maintain nuclear reactions for very long. The planet is 3,000 light-years from Earth and has a close-in orbit similar to Venus's. But because the newfound body's parent is so much cooler than...

NANTES, France (AFP) - European scientists on Monday said they had located five 'super-Earths', each of them between four and 30 times bigger than our planet, in a trio of distant solar systems. The discovery suggests that at least one third of stars similar to our own Sun host these difficult-to-detect celestial bodies, multiplying previous estimates by five. It also brings astronomers closer to finding planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets, that could potentially duplicate the conditions that gave rise to life on Earth. "In a year or two, it is likely that we will find habitable planets circling...

Cassini Nears Four-year Mark RSS|Archives Archives June 2008 May May 30, 2008 04:16 PM NASA's Cassini Spacecraft is now reaching the end of its four-year....extended mission. What a nice excuse for a retrospective of some of the great images sent back home.... (12 photos total: The rest can be found here) The Sun is on the opposite side, so all of Saturn is backlit. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech================================== Swirls in Saturn's cloud-tops. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech=========================== The surface of Saturn's moon Dione, up close. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech ========================= Tiny moon Janus, seen before Saturn's rings, with massive moon Titan beyond. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech ========================= Saturn's moon...

Photo 1 -- The blackness of space, Planet Earth and the International Space Station (ISS) as seen from NASA's Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-124) on 11 June 2008 after Space Shuttle Discovery and the ISS undocked on 11 June 2008.Large, medium, and the above smaller photo via http://ChamorroBible.org/gpw/gpw-20050822.htm (photo 32). Photo 2 -- Another splendid view, also photographed from NASA's Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-124) on 11 June 2008, of Earth and the ISS.Large, medium, and the above smaller photo via http://ChamorroBible.org/gpw/gpw-20050822.htm (photo 33).

The mineral, a manganese silicide named Brownleeite, was discovered within an interplanetary dust particle, or IDP, that appears to have originated from comet 26P/Grigg-Skjellerup. The comet originally was discovered in 1902 and reappears every 5 years. The team that made the discovery is headed by Keiko Nakamura-Messenger, a space scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston... The Earth accretes about 40,000 tons of dust particles from space each year, originating mostly from disintegrating comets and asteroid collisions. This dust is a subject of intense interest because it is made of the original building blocks of the solar system, planets,...

Two teenage boys who fell asleep while stargazing in the middle of a street in Danville were run over early this morning by a woman delivering newspapers from her car. The 15-year-olds were trapped for a time under the driver's Nissan Sentra before being extricated by rescuers from the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District, said Sgt. Phillip Wisotsky of the Danville Police Department. One teen suffered a punctured lung and a broken bone, while the other youth's injuries consisted mostly of "road rash," Wisotsky said. They were taken to John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, where police questioned...

The Maunder Minimum and Climate Change: Have Historical Records Aided Current Research? John E. Beckman, and Terence J. Mahoney Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, E-38200 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain 1. Introduction: the Solar Cycle and its Variation We are all familiar with the 11-year sunspot cycle. One familiar factor is the effect of solar activity on short-wave radio communications. During sunspot maximum high-energy protons and alpha particles from the Sun affect the ionosphere, reducing its effectivity as a mirror from which short radio waves are reflected round the world, disrupting transmissions for days at a time. The association with the...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The Ulysses solar probe will cease operations around July 1 after nearly 18 years in outer space, NASA announced Thursday. The U.S.-European spacecraft has been suffering from a decline in its plutonium power for some time. Despite conservation measures by ground controllers, the power has dwindled to the point where thruster fuel soon will freeze up. Ulysses already has surpassed its expected lifetime by almost four times, traveling 5.4 billion miles since its launch aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1990. "When the last bits of data finally arrive, it surely will be tough to say goodbye,"...

The International Astronomical Union has decided on the term "plutoid" as a name for Pluto and other objects that just two years ago were redefined as "dwarf planets."

PALMDALE - A stubby, star-spangled spacecraft made history in June 2004 in the skies over Mojave as the first privately funded manned space program. The story of SpaceShipOne and the people behind its success - notables such as aerospace designer Burt Rutan and mogul Sir Richard Branson - has been told in a variety of forums, but a new book brings it all together and offers a look at the more technical aspects of the program. "SpaceShipOne: An Illustrated History" chronicles the development and successful spaceflights of the Mojave-based project which ushered in the possibility of space travel for the...

The sun's surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun's 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century. Could a new sunspot drought plunge us into another decades-long cold spell? It's not very likely, says David Hathaway a solar physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The question came up after an international solar conference held last week at Montana State University, where scientists discussed the dearth of solar...

A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang. The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old. Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow.

This image, one of the first captured by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, shows the vast plains of the northern polar region of Mars. The flat landscape is strewn with tiny pebbles and shows polygonal cracking, a pattern seen widely in Martian high latitudes and also observed in permafrost terrains on Earth. The polygonal cracking is believed to have resulted from seasonal contraction and expansion of surface ice. Phoenix touched down on the Red Planet at 4:53 p.m. Pacific Time (7:53 Eastern Time), May 25, 2008, in an arctic region called Vastitas Borealis, at 68 degrees north latitude, 234 degrees east...

Just wondering. I am looking to go back to college and follow my passion. I'm currently in IT doing pretty much everything from Cisco to servers. It's just something I don't find myself doing the rest of my life. Anyways, just curious if there are any in here and what school did you go to, what specific field are you in, daily activities, etc.

ST. LOUIS — Quark stars, exotic objects that have yet to be directly observed, are part of a new theory to explain some of the brightest stellar explosions recorded in the universe. Super-luminous supernovae, which produce more than 100 times more light energy than normal supernovae and occur in about one out of every 1,000 supernovae explosions, have long baffled astrophysicists. The problem has been finding a source for all of that extra energy. University of Calgary astrophysicists Denis Leahy and Rachid Ouyed think they have a possible source — the explosive conversion of a neutron star into a quark...

More than 800,000 snapshots from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have been stitched together to create a new "coming of age" portrait of stars in our inner Milky Way galaxy. The image depicts an area of sky 120 degrees wide by two degrees tall. It was unveiled today at the 212th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Mo. "This is the highest-resolution, largest, most sensitive infrared picture ever taken of our Milky Way," said Sean Carey of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. Carey is lead investigator for one of two teams...

I found this from Youtube on it... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QG0q0EpRpA The eyes of the world are on Denver today for the showing of a video that purports to show a space alien. Live transmissions and recordings of the video were not allowed. The Rocky's Bill Scanlon is blogging live. 12:33 p.m. Shannon Mundell, of Arvada, said she wanted to see the video because she's known people who have had contact with aliens and "when you look in their eyes you know that what they saw was real." She said that other countries are more accepting of ET's, but that "in America, we...

Jeff Peckman, who is pushing a ballot initiative to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver to prepare the city for close encounters of the alien kind, said the video is authentic and convinced him that aliens exist. “As impressive as it is, it’s still one tiny portion in the context of a vast amount of peripheral evidence,” he said Wednesday. “It’s really the final visual confirmation of what you already know to be true having seen all the other evidence.”

An x-ray pulsar pulls matter from its stellar companion. Artistic rendition: NASA/Dana Berry May 26, 2008 Predictions, Falsifiability and the Standard Model of Stellar EvolutionNew information about an odd pair of stars has contradicted the expectations of astronomers and called into question the Standard Model.Several Thunderbolts Pictures of the Day articles have covered the topics of variable stars, neutron stars and magnetars from the standpoints of electrical engineering and plasma physics. Reports have repeatedly demonstrated the surprise and bewilderment exhibited by astronomers at heavenly objects that have defied various theoretical expectations.Now it seems that the discovery of a pulsar...

Home Mission Overview Mission Overview Mission Objectives News News & Features Media Room Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Podcasts VIDEOS ALL 5/26/2008 -- Video: Phoenix Landing - Nerves and Joy This video includes highlights from the entry, descent and landing phase as Mars Phoenix Lander touched down on the Red Planet on May 25, 2008. › Play video 5/25/2008 -- Video: Mars Landing Challenge -- Big Science Ahead Scientists plan intriguing research, once Phoenix lands safely on Mars. › Play video 5/24/2008 -- Video: Drop Tests of Phoenix Parachute and Radar This video shows testing of two systems that are critical...

New red spot appears on Jupiter Feature may be an indicator of global climate change on the planet. In what's beginning to look like a case of planetary measles, a third red spot has appeared next to its cousins — the Great Red Spot and Red Spot, Jr. — in the turbulent jovian atmosphere. This spot, which is a fraction of the size of the two other features, lies to the west of the Great Red Spot in the same latitude band of clouds. The new spot was previously a white, oval-shaped storm. The change to a red color indicates...

Hoag’s Object glares balefully across the light-years. Credit: Hubble Heritage May 19, 2008 Is Hoag’s Object a Dense Plasma Focus? What force swept away the stars and formed this 120,000 light-year-wide ring in space? This could be one of electrical energy’s protean forms.There are places in the cosmos where stars form up into ranks that stretch in lines for thousands of light-years. Elsewhere, rings of stars can be found encircling compact structures that have been measured at over 10,000 light-years in diameter.Art Hoag discovered the galaxy that bears his name in 1950 and by conventional redshift-equals-distance calculations, it is approximately...

Rilles through Crater De Gasparis. Credit: ESA SMART-1/Space-X, Space Exploration Institute May 20, 2008 Back to the Moon China and Japan have placed satellites in lunar orbit, with India and the United States to follow. Will new data confirm the Electric Universe hypothesis?On September 14, 2007, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched the Selenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE) on a multi-year lunar orbit mission. Otherwise known as Kaguya, a nickname from Japanese folktales, the SELENE spacecraft is designed to provide data for future landing sites and to analyze the surface.Upon lunar orbit insertion, Kaguya released two sub-satellites, Okina and...

Sacajawea Patera, Venus. Credit: NASA/JPL Magellan Mission May 22, 2008Aphrodite's Blazing ManeLightning bolts have "unexpectedly" been discovered arcing through the atmosphere of Venus. Electric Universe advocates predicted such activity long ago.A recent announcement by the European Space Agency (ESA) has called attention to the "surprising" electrical activity taking place on the planet Venus. Electric discharges were detected in the planet's upper atmosphere by the Venus Express orbiter that has been circling the cloud-shrouded orb since April 11, 2006. The discovery was completely unexpected because, until now, the density of the Venusian atmosphere was thought to prevent the formation of...

picture of the day             archive             subject index           Solar flare seen through a hydrogen-alpha filter. Credit: Big Bear Solar Observatory May 23, 2008 Colossal Flare Erupts from EV LacertaeAn explosion thousands of times greater than anything seen on our Sun has been detected bursting from a neighboring star. In a March 19, 2008 press release, NASA officials from the Goddard Space Flight Center announced that their SWIFT satellite detected a stellar flare with x-ray emissions larger than anything they expected to witness from...

The first images of Jupiter since it came out from behind the sun show that the turbulence and storms that have plagued the planet for the past two years continue. Whether or not this is a sign of global warming, the turbulence does seem to be spawning new spots. As Red Spot Jr. and the Great Red Spot approach a June conjunction, a new third spot may merge with the GRS in August. http://www.biblicalastronomy.com/07May.htm Jupiter's Tumultuous Changes “Times, they are a-changin' on Jupiter. The planet is now shining in fine view in the southern sky before dawn, and as first...

While peering at her computer screen four months ago, astronomer Alicia Soderberg expected to see the small glowing smudge of a month-old supernova. But what she and her colleague saw instead was a strange, extremely bright, five-minute burst of X-rays. With that observation, they became the first astronomers to catch a star in the act of exploding. "For years we have dreamed of seeing a star just as it was exploding, but actually finding one is a once-in-a-lifetime, event," said Soderberg, a Hubble and Carnegie Princeton Fellow at Princeton University. The discovery, detailed in the May 22 issue of the...

  Origins of Myth 05/18/08 When Saturn was King When Saturn ruled the skies alone (That golden age, to gold unknown,) This earthly globe to thee assign'd Receiv'd the gifts of all mankind.-- Johnathan Swift, A Panegyric on the Dean Of the five visible planets today, none is more enchanting than the ringed gas giant Saturn, now the object of intense investigation by NASA’s Cassini probe. Data returned by the earlier Voyager probes, and now by Cassini, have left NASA scientists in a state of awe, as one surprise after another has re-defined our picture of Saturn and its...

MOJAVE - Take a few shouted choruses of the traditional launch countdown. Add the hiss of a model rocket engine, a streak of white smoke and a small, dark object in a clear desert sky. Throw in the enthusiasm of more than 400 elementary school students, complete with team shirts, banners and cheers, and you have the Intermediate Space Challenge. The challenge, conducted Friday morning at the Mojave Air and Space Port, pits classroom teams of fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders from Mojave and California City schools in a competition to build a high-flying model rocket as well as to create...

Enlarge ImageYounger than it looks. Astronomers compared radio (left, blue) and x-ray images (red) of this supernova remnant to determine that the explosion had occurred only 100 years before.Credit: NRAO (radio)/Chandra (x-ray) U.S. and British astronomers have located the youngest known remnant of an exploding star in the Milky Way. The discovery might help researchers understand why our galaxy seems to have so few supernovas and where the raw materials of planets and life came from. The Milky Way is a perfectly ordinary spiral galaxy, except for a shortage of supernova activity. These titanic explosions, which mark the deaths...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers are baffled after finding an exotic type of star called a pulsar apparently locked in an elongated orbit around a star much like the sun -- an arrangement defying what had been known about such objects. The rapidly spinning pulsar -- an extraordinarily dense object created when a massive star exploded as a supernova -- is called J1903+0327 and is located about 21,000 light years from Earth, the astronomers said. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. "The big question is -- how in the heck did this...

According to a report in New Scientist, the youthful looking family of objects were found in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy objects beyond Neptune. They appear puzzlingly fresh-faced, despite the fact that they probably formed in a collision more than a billion years ago. The largest member of the family, a rapidly tumbling blimp-shaped object called 2003 EL61, was discovered in 2005. In 2007, astronomers found five smaller objects travelling in similar orbits. Their paths suggested they all formed a single object that was broken apart in a collision more than a billion years ago. Now, a team...

International scientists have used flowing water to simulate a black hole, testing Stephen Hawking's theory that black holes are not black after all. The researchers, led by Professor Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St Andrews and Dr Germain Rousseaux at the University of Nice, used a water channel to create analogues of black holes, simulating event horizons. An event horizon is the place in the channel where the water begins to flow faster than the waves. The scientists sent waves against the current, varied the water speed and the wavelength, and filmed the waves with video cameras. Over several...

Computer users now can fly through the universe, viewing stars, planets and celestial bodies as an astronomer would, with Tuesday's introduction of the Worldwide Telescope by Microsoft. The virtual service combines images and databases from every major telescope and astronomical organization in the world. Microsoft says it is providing the resource for free in memory of Jim Gray, the Microsoft researcher who disappeared last year while sailing his boat to the Farallon Islands on a trip to scatter his mother's ashes. The project is an extension of Gray's work. "I never imagined (the telescope) would be so beautiful," said Alexander...

Astronomers have found a piece of the universe's puzzle that's been missing for awhile: a type of extremely hot, dense matter that is all but invisible to us. Engaging in something like cosmic accounting, astronomers have tried to balance the scant amount of matter that has been directly observed with the vast amount that remains unobserved directly. The latter constitutes about 90 percent of the universe's matter. Galaxies, the stars within them, the planet we live on and the chairs we sit on are made up of normal matter — the protons, electrons and neutrons that are collectively called baryons....

If David J. Tholen (University of Hawaii) is right, Pluto was probably hit by a small Kuiper Belt object in the not-too-distant past. One consequence of that collision, he argues, is seen in the planet's motion -- Pluto and its satellite Charon now waltz around each other in slightly out-of-round orbits. And since tidal forces in the tight planet-moon system should damp out any deviations from purly circular orbits within 10 million years or so, the impact must have occurred relatively recently. "It could have happened a century ago," Tholen says... Tholen and Marc W. Buie (Lowell Observatory)... found an...

A student at the University of Mississippi will leap into the final frontier of the legal system Saturday when he receives the first-ever space law certificate in the United States. Michael Dodge of Long Beach, Calif., earned the special distinction along with his law degree through the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air and Space Law at the university's law school. "The professors and personnel here are the highest quality that can be found anywhere in the world, and I have learned from them the necessary skills I will need to effectively practice space law," Dodge said in a statement....

People got very excited in 2004 when NASA's rover Opportunity discovered evidence that Mars had once been wet. Where there is water, there may be life. After more than 40 years of human exploration, culminating in the ongoing Mars Exploration Rover mission, scientists are planning still more missions to study the planet. The ­Phoenix, an interagency scientific probe led by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, is scheduled to land in late May on Mars's frigid northern arctic, where it will search for soils and ice that might be suitable for microbial life (see "Mission to...

In a distant galaxy, a star orbiting a massive central black hole strays too close to the insatiable giant and is torn apart. But before it can be devoured, the star lets out one last scream in a flare of light that slowly echoes across the galaxy. Astronomers on Earth pick up this faint call and use it to map the nucleus of the galaxy from which it emanated. This scenario is no bit of science fiction …quot; a team of astronomers discovered one of these rare and dramatic events while combing through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey last December....

...planets are the most diverse and intricate class of object in the universe. No other celestial bodies support such a complex interplay of astronomical, geologic, and chemical and biological processes... The worlds of our solar system... hardly prepared us for the discoveries of the past decade, during which astronomers have found more than 200 planets. The sheer diversity of these bodies' masses, sizes, compositions and orbits challenges those of us trying to fathom their origins. When I was in graduate school in the 1970s, we tended to think of planet formation as a well-ordered, deterministic process -- an assembly line...

Garching, Germany (SPX) Apr 30, 2008 By an enormous burst of gravitational waves that accompanies the merger of two black holes the newly formed black hole was ejected from its galaxy. This extreme ejection event, which had been predicted by theorists, has now been observed in nature for the first time. The team led by Stefanie Komossa from the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) thereby opened a new window into observational astrophysics. The discovery will have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution in the early Universe, and also provides observational confirmation of a key...

PALMDALE - Technicians at the NASA Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale have removed the German-built primary mirror assembly from the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy - a telescope carried in a modified Boeing 747 - in preparation for the final finish coating of the mirror. Technicians employed a high-precision crane and other equipment to lift the more than two-ton mirror assembly from its cavity in the rear fuselage of the aircraft, NASA said in an update on the observatory, called SOFIA. After it was removed, the assembly was moved to a clean room where it is being prepared for...

Moffett Field CA (SPX) Apr 28, 2008 The prevailing thinking is that Mars is a planet whose active climate has been confined to the distant past. About 3.5 billion years ago, the Red Planet had extensive flowing water and then fell quiet - deadly quiet. It didn't seem the climate had changed much since. Now, in a research article that graces the May cover of Geology, scientists at Brown University think Mars' climate has been much more dynamic than previously believed. The findings could have important implications in determining whether or not Mars was ever a suitable habitat for life...