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- NASA Announces Televised Chandra News Conference - NASA will hold a news conference at 12:30 p.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 15, to discuss the Chandra X-ray Observatory's discovery of an exceptional object in our cosmic neighborhood.

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 August 12 X-Rays from Stephan's Quintet Credit: X-ray: G.Trinchieri (INAF-Brera) et al., CXC, NASAOptical: Palomar Digital Sky Survey Explanation: Stephan's Quintet is a picturesque but clearly troubled grouping of galaxies about 300 million light-years away toward the high-flying constellation Pegasus. Spanning over 200,000 light-years at that distance, this composite false-color image illustrates the powerful nature of this multiple galaxy collision, showing x-ray data from the Chandra Observatory...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2004 February 3 X-Rays From Antennae Galaxies Credit: G. Fabbiano (CfA) et al., CXC, SAO, NASA Explanation: A bevy of black holes and neutron stars shine as bright, point-like sources against bubbles of million degree gas in this false-color x-ray image from the orbiting Chandra Observatory. The striking picture spans about 80 thousand light-years across the central regions of two galaxies, NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, locked in...

Like gluttonous piranhas, supermassive black holes in young galaxy clusters gorge on bountiful gas until little fuel is left, and then they fade away, a new study suggests.Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers tallied the number of rapidly growing supermassive black holes, called active galactic nuclei, or AGN, in two populations of galaxy clusters. One group consisted of young-looking clusters located very far from Earth, and the other consisted of an older group located closer to us. The results of the survey, detailed in the July 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, showed that the more distant, younger clusters...

MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-157 NASA Announces Televised Chandra News Conference WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 12:30 p.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 15, to discuss the Chandra X-ray Observatory's discovery of an exceptional object in our cosmic neighborhood. The news conference will originate from NASA Headquarters' television studio, 300 E St. SW in Washington and carried live on NASA TV. Media representatives may attend the conference, join by phone or ask questions from participating NASA locations. To RSVP or obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to Trent Perrotto at: trent.j.perrotto@nasa.gov by...

WASHINGTON—After a week of jury selection, a panel of 12 women and four men has been chosen to serve on the Chandra Levy murder trial. The panel includes four alternates. Ingmar Guandique, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, is charged with the attempted sexual assault and murder of Levy back in 2001. The Washington intern's disappearance made headlines when she was romantically linked to then-Rep. Gary Condit, D-Calif. Condit was once a suspect but police no longer believe he had anything to do with Levy's death. While the defense had worried pretrial publicity would contaminate the jury pool, it turned...

WASHINGTON — The mother of murdered intern Chandra Levy is asking a judge's permission to attend the trial of the accused killer. In a new legal filing, Modesto resident Susan Levy states she wants the opportunity to be in the courtroom "for the entire trial," set to start Oct. 4. She requires permission to watch because she could also be called to testify. "I'm a mother," Susan Levy explained in a telephone interview Friday. "As hard as it's going to be, it's something a mother has to do."

You would think that in the midst of the liberal media's fight to rip Arizona's Immigration Law, that the phrase ‘illegal immigrant' would be fairly easy to use in an appropriate manner. Yet that is seemingly only the case when the phrase is used to cast common-sense immigration enforcement as discriminatory. But when it comes to a story that could shed light on why enforcement is a necessity for the safety and security of a nation and its people, then the phrase - no matter how accurate - is quickly forgotten.

Scientists have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton to detect a vast reservoir of gas lying along a wall-shaped structure of galaxies about 400 million light years from Earth. In this artist's impression, a close-up view of the so-called Sculptor Wall is depicted. Spiral and elliptical galaxies are shown in the wall along with the newly detected intergalactic gas, part of the so-called Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM), shown in blue. This discovery is the strongest evidence yet that the "missing matter" in the nearby Universe is located in an enormous web of hot, diffuse gas. The X-ray...

"Two held with fake papers" Manju V , TNN, 23 January 2010, 04:48am IST SNIPPET: "MUMBAI: Hours before Indian intelligence agencies put all flights operating from India on a high alert against possible hijack attempts, two Sri Lankan nationals — one flying to New York and the other to London — were arrested by immigration officials at the Kochi airport on Thursday for carrying forged Indian passports and travel documents." The two Sri Lankan nationals were being assisted by two employees of a private multinational ground-handling company. SNIPPET: "One of the employees fled the scene when the passengers were caught."...

On Friday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Fernando Campoamor told a judge in D.C Superior Court that accused murderer and gang member Ingmar Guandique, 28, along with members of the MS-13 gang threatened to kill a witness and his family, if he testifies at Guandique’s January trial.A Salvadoran national in this country illegally, Guandique was arrested last April for the murder of missing intern Chandra Levy, who disappeared in 2001. Her skeletal remains were discovered a year later in D.C.’s Rock Creek Park.At the time of his arrest for the Levy murder, he was already in prison for the assault of two...

A group of criminal justice students at a small Atlanta college are preparing to launch their own investigation into the 2001 disappearance and slaying of Modesto resident Chandra Levy in Washington, D.C. Since 2005, students at Bauder College have sifted through old evidence and case files from unsolved crimes as part of the school's Cold Case Investigative Research Institute, according to institute director Sheryl McCollum. This year, Levy's homicide and the disappearance three years ago of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba are on their agenda.

Black holes are weird. Well, duh, right? But they do something that surprises most people: besides hoovering down almost everything nearby, they can also eject material as well. And by eject, I mean send it out screaming at nearly the speed of light and heated to a bazillion degrees. Picture from Chandra of the active galaxy pair 3C321 The image above is from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and it’s all about this scary scenario. Let’s take a walk down the gravity well, shall we? Basically, as matter swirls down into the maw of the hole, it forms a flattened disk...

Although he is no longer an FBI agent, Brad Garrett still visits the steep, wooded hillside in a Washington, D.C., park where the skeletal remains of Chandra Levy, a federal intern from Modesto, were found five years ago this week, a year after she disappeared. No one has been charged in the killing of the 24-year-old, whose disappearance generated enormous publicity after authorities revealed that she had been having a relationship with her married hometown congressman, Gary Condit. Condit was defeated in 2002 by his former aide, Dennis Cardoza. Read more at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/22/CHANDRA.TMP

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured the largest data set yet of Jupiter's colorful lights called aurora, yielding a pretty picture that could help solve some mysteries about the phenomenon. The phenomenon is similar to the Northern Lights seen on Earth, thought on a much larger scale. "Jupiter has auroras bigger than our entire planet," said Randy Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. In a NASA statement today, Gladstone called the purple rings in a new colorized image "Northern Lights on steroids. They're hundreds of times more energetic than auroras on Earth." Unlike Earth's auroras, Jupiter's...

Astronomers have found a black hole where few thought they could ever exist, inside a globular star cluster. The finding has broad implications for the dynamics of stars clusters and also for the existence of a still-speculative new class of black holes called 'intermediate-mass' black holes. The discovery is reported in the current issue of Nature. Tom Maccarone of the University of Southampton in England leads an international team on the finding, made primarily with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite. Globular clusters are dense bundles of thousands to millions of old stars, and many scientists have doubted that black...

Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. The discovery, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, gives direct evidence for the existence of dark matter. "This is the most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, which we know about," said team member Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. These observations provide the strongest evidence yet that most of the matter in the universe is dark. Despite considerable evidence for dark matter, some scientists have proposed alternative theories for gravity where it...

NASA Announces Dark Matter DiscoveryAstronomers who used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 21, to announce how dark and normal matter have been forced apart in an extraordinarily energetic collision. Reporters must call Megan Watzke at the Chandra Press Office at: 617- 496-7998 or e-mail: mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu for participation information. Shortly before the start of the briefing, images and graphics about the research will be posted at: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/1e0657/Briefing participants: - Maxim Markevitch, astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass. - Doug Clowe, postdoctoral fellow, University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz. - Sean Carroll,...

WASHINGTON - With gasoline hitting $3 per gallon, scientists have just found the most energy-efficient engines in the universe — black holes, those whirling super-dense centers of galaxies that suck in nearly everything. The jets of energy spurting out of older ultra-efficient black holes also seem to be playing a crucial role as zoning cops in large galaxies, preventing too many stars from sprouting. That explains why there aren't as many burgeoning galaxies chock full of stars as previously expected, said scientists citing results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory that were released Monday. For the first time, scientists measured both...