and whether the top-secret Area 51 test range in Nevada is actually a hospitality center for extraterrestrials r
Since each molecule in the universe absorbs light at different optical frequencies, an odor has its own unique signature. ather than sniffing out a variety of smells as a dog would,
and return to Earth using a parachute to slow its decent through the atmosphere about 8 days later.
which is essential for surviving a high-speed re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. The country is following a path blazed by other major spacefaring nations:
Bone and muscle loss in microgravity is a major health issue in orbit astronauts are checked usually before and after missions.
Their gravity is so strong that nothing not even light can escape from their edge a boundary called the event horizon.
These images show the carbon monoxide gas detected in neighbouring galaxies 40 to 600 million light years from Earth in their final stages of merging.
However most of the galaxies in the universe are shaped pancake disc galaxies such as lenticular galaxies and our own spiral Milky way.
and universe expansion Astronomers have had long a dark secret: one of the cornerstones of the Nobel prizewinning discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating had never been tested directly.
The discovery hinged on the assumption that certain kinds of supernovae detonate in thermonuclear explosions that have fixed a amount of energy
In 1998 astronomers used measurements of the distances of various type IA supernovae to show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating
Astrophysicists theorised that the reason all type IA supernovae have the same brightness is that they are thermonuclear detonations in
At 11.4 million light years away SN 2014j is the closest such explosion in decades. Eugene Churazov of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching Germany and colleagues observed SN 2014j with the INTEGRAL gamma-ray telescope.
They found the classic signature of a thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf. The process begins with the compression of the white dwarf leading to the formation of nickel-56
Miguel Pérez-Torres of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalucia in Granada Spain and colleagues used the European VLBI Network of radio telescopes spread across Europe and China to study SN 2014j.
#Spot ET's waste heat for chance to find alien life RATHER than searching for aliens phoning home scientists are looking for signs of the homes themselves.
The best-known technique used to search for tech-savvy aliens is eavesdropping on their communications with each other.
and physics that govern the universe says astronomer Geoff Marcy of the University of California Berkeley.
Even if the effort doesn't discover intelligent aliens it is still doing solid science says Marchis.
The dense atmospheres of gas giants Jupiter and Saturn contain carbon. Chemical modelling suggests pressure deep inside the planets would crush it into a rain of diamond chips
A frigid world about 3000 light years away offers the first evidence that rocky planets can form in Earthlike orbits even
Jean-Philipe Beaulieu at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics in France called the newfound planet an important discovery.
Microlensing detects planets by watching how their gravity affects the light of a distant background star.
But if the foreground star hosts a planet the world's gravity can sometimes eliminate one of these images.
It's just that the mathematics of focusing is disrupted by the planet's gravity he says.
Earth and Planetary science Letters DOI: 10.1016/j. epsl. 2014.05.03 3
#How to cash in on cheap Earth-watching satellites THERE ARE some big plans brewing for small satellites. With hordes of cheap orbiters filling the skies researchers
when life was emerging our young planet had an atmosphere oceans and primordial continents. But it did not yet have an ozone layer to shield the surface from the sun's harshest ultraviolet rays.
In 2002 a team led by astrobiologist Charles Cockell at the University of Edinburgh UK discovered a unique group of cyanobacteria in Haughton crater in northern Canada.
The team's findings provide the first direct evidence that crystal cocoons formed by impacts might have been radiation-proof cradles for early life (International Journal of Astrobiology doi. org/tcs.
The planet orbits a star that is about 560 light years away from us. It has a radius slightly more than double that of Earth's a size that led astronomers to assume it was a shrunken version of gassy planet Neptune
Now Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge Massachusetts and his colleagues have used the HARPS-N telescope in the Canary islands to pin down Kepler-10c's mass.
Calculations by geophysicists previously suggested that gravity should compress planets so much that rocky worlds can't get bigger than twice Earth's size says Kepler team member Geoff Marcy at the University of California Berkeley.
and will be the subjects of various experiments on the long-term effects of microgravity on mammal physiology.
#Baby model cosmos grows up to look like the real thing A supercomputer simulation has tracked the evolution of the universe from a mere 12 million years after the big bang until the present day.
It is the first to produce realistic-looking galaxies by the thousands and a triumph for our current understanding of the history of the universe.
so complete now that we can make models that predict a universe that just looks like ours.
He and his colleagues modelled a cube of space with sides that stretched to 347 million light years a fraction of the size of the observable universe today.
and distant galaxy have created together a cosmic magnifying glass that could improve our understanding of the universe's expansion and dark matter.
whether and by how much the light from the supernova is being messed with by other things like nearby galaxies or the expansion of the universe.
For example the gravity from a massive object like a galaxy can magnify light from another object like a supernova bending its light waves
Schmidt used type 1a supernovae to deduce that the universe's expansion was accelerating a finding that won him the 2011 Nobel prize in physics along with Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter.
The finding could help investigate dark matter the stuff thought to make up over 80 per cent of our universe's matter.
Such systems could also help in the search to understand dark energy the mysterious entity thought to be behind the acceleration of the universe's expansion.
The ultimate fate of the universe is thought to depend on whether the acceleration is changing. Type 1a supernovae are used already to measure the rate of expansion over time
#Star dust casts doubt on recent big bang wave result An imprint left on ancient cosmic light that was attributed to ripples in spacetime
On 17 march researchers led by John Kovac of Harvard university announced that gravitational waves from the early universe had been found by a telescope called BICEP2 at the South pole.
which suggests that space expanded faster than the speed of light in the first moments after the universe's birth.
or align the electromagnetic fields of photons they came into contact with in the infant universe.
For sure this BICEP2 result will put even more pressure on Planck's next release says Fabio Finelli a Planck team leader at Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics in Bologna.
#NASA'flying saucer'for Mars to land in Hawaii In June while beachgoers in Hawaii sit blissfully unaware a flying saucer will descend over the island of Kauai.
The inflatable technology is intended to help slow down vehicles after they enter the thin Martian atmosphere at supersonic speeds.
Such weight can't be slowed adequately by parachutes in the Martian air which is just 1 per cent as dense as Earth's. Unfortunately rocket-powered landings are out of the question too as the atmosphere is still just thick enough to buffet incoming spacecraft with more turbulence than thrusters can accommodate.
The LDSD design solves this quandary using a balloon-like decelerator and a giant parachute twice the size of Curiosity's. The decelerator would attach to the outer rim of a capsule-like entry vehicle.
To simulate Mars's thin atmosphere On earth the team in Hawaii will first lift a test vehicle fitted with the LDSD system to about 37 kilometres above the Pacific ocean using a high-altitude balloon.
and fire a small rocket to reach a height of 55 kilometres about halfway to the edge of space.
Cassini scientist Luciano Iess at the Sapienza University of Rome Italy and colleagues have mapped now Enceladus's gravity
New gravity readings suggest it hosts a subsurface sea the size of Lake superior at its south pole
and watched how the spacecraft was accelerated by the moon's gravity. This allowed them to map the distribution of mass in the moon's interior.
because it wouldn't be in contact with the rock says team member Jonathan Lunine at Cornell University in Ithaca New york. This gravity map hinting at a much larger ocean is a more favourable model for having some sort of life in Enceladus's interior.
However Cassini team member Carolyn Porco at the Space science Institute in Boulder Colorado has written a paper (soon to appear in the journal Astrobiology) arguing for a mission to collect samples from Enceladus and return them to Earth.
The subsurface-sea idea is just the simplest possible interpretation of the gravity data cautions William Mckinnon at Washington University in St louis who was involved not in the work.
Some future extraterrestrials visiting our solar system will be able to look at the naked rocky core of
The fist-sized robot, a product of Virtual Incision in Lincoln, Nebraska, will have its first zero gravity test in an aircraft flying in parabolic arcs in the next few months.
Without gravity, it is easy for bodily fluids like blood to float free and contaminate the cabin.
Earth is surrounded always by a bubble of magnetism called the magnetosphere which protects us from the bulk of the solar wind a stream of high-energy particles constantly flowing from the sun
. But sometimes the sun's magnetic field lines can directly link up with Earth's in a process called magnetic reconnection which opens up cracks in the magnetosphere.
Charged particles can flow along these lines into Earth's atmosphere leading to dazzling auroras as well as geomagnetic storms that can wreak havoc on navigation systems and power grids.
Gas in Earth's upper atmosphere is ionised by ultraviolet light from the sun and the resulting plasma becomes trapped by magnetic fields in a doughnut-shaped ring around the planet.
In January 2013 GPS sensors on the ground mapped electrons in the upper atmosphere and saw a tendril of increased electron density curling away from the north pole indicating that a plume of plasma was veering off towards the sun. At the same time three of NASA's THEMIS spacecraft
For the first time we were able to monitor the entire cycle of this plasma stretching from the atmosphere to the boundary between Earth's magnetic field
This problem isn't confined to the Oscar-nominated space thriller Gravity#scientists are struggling with it in real life.
The worst-case scenario is the Kessler syndrome proposed by astrophysicist Donald Kessler in the 1970s.
and deorbit allowing the debris spacecraft and net to burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere.
JAXA thinks the net's main advantage is its simplicity#it's lightweight and doesn't require any propellant to move.
One concern is that the net will work very slowly taking several months or even a year to deorbit.
before spiralling in and burning up in Earth's atmosphere. Although they have made space accessible to groups who wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford it most recently a team of high-school students Cubesats haven't done much cutting-edge science."
A fleet of Cubesats with propulsion in orbit around a planet or moon can do a lot of things that big expensive satellites cannot, such as monitoring several locations in the atmosphere at once.
It will carry five scientific instruments including a methane sensor to try to pick up the gas in Mars's atmosphere.
On earth methane is produced mainly by life so there was a stir when Earth-based instruments and a European probe detected traces of it in Mars's atmosphere a decade ago.
Some are sceptical of those results believing they were triggered by methane in Earth's atmosphere
MOM may also help reveal how Mars became a cold dry planet with an atmosphere too thin to support liquid water for long periods.
Gaping canyons and river-like channels point to large amounts of water and therefore a thick warming atmosphere in the past.
Astrobiologists have wondered long whether life or its ingredients could have travelled to Earth on the back of a comet or asteroid.
Earth's atmosphere including clouds can also thwart laser signals. To maximise the chance of cloudless skies LLCD will be able to beam its light to any of three detectors in New mexico California or Spain.
About an hour later the Spectroscopic Planet Observatory for Recognition of Interaction of Atmosphere (SPRINT-A) separated from the launch rocket.
The Spectroscopic Planet Observatory for Recognition of Interaction of Atmosphere or Sprint-A will look at Venus
and Mars to find out why some worlds lose their atmospheres while others manage to keep a grip on their gases.
This will in turn help exoplanet hunters figure out which distant worlds are capable of hosting atmospheres that might support life.
Sprint-A will also peer at Jupiter's moon Io the most volcanically active body in the solar system to see how the tiny moon influences Jupiter's mighty auroras.
Extreme UV is a range of light suitable for observing planetary atmospheres says Shujiro Sawai of the Japan aerospace exploration agency (JAXA.
Extreme UV from the sun gets bent at the boundary where a planet's atmosphere meets space
But extreme UV radiation coming from space is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere so it is not observable from the ground says Sawai.
So far our best clues to the original atmospheres of Mars and Venus come from the composition
and Venus probably had similar atmospheres long ago. But we also know that the sun pumps out a constant stream of charged particles called the solar wind
which can ionise gases in a planet's upper atmosphere and pick up the newly charged particles effectively sweeping them away.
Because Venus is closer to the sun the solar wind might have stripped gaseous water from its early atmosphere leaving a thick haze of mostly carbon dioxide that turned the planet's surface into a hellish desert.
It is thought the solar wind thinned the Red planet's atmosphere over time making it cold and dry.
It turns out that most atmospheres have lost a lot of gas over their lifetimes. On Mars it may be as much as 99 per cent.
For instance others have suggested that Mars lost its atmosphere all of a sudden during a powerful collision with an asteroid or comet.
A NASA probe called Maven due to launch in November will orbit Mars to study its atmosphere up close to try to solve the puzzle.
Sprint-A will help from afar by looking for the extreme UV radiation generated as the solar wind slams into the upper atmospheres of both Mars
By observing this phenomenon we will investigate how the solar wind affects the upper atmosphere of planets and how the planetary atmosphere escapes into outer space.
However this technique known as asteroseismology can be used only on bright stars because it requires teasing out subtle periodic variations in a star's light.
whose size and mass were known already thanks to asteroseismology measurements made by Kepler. They found a clear pattern:
and mass of about 1000 stars that do not have asteroseismology measurements and it could be used to gauge the sizes of 50000 more stars already studied by Kepler Stassun says.
or asteroseismology signals from sun-like stars says Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard of Aarhus University in Denmark who leads a consortium of researchers who analyse Kepler's starquake data.
but a list of ideas from the developers includes tracking meteorites and making a 3d model of Earth's magnetosphere.
and build Cubesats for planetary science. This definitely is helping open up space both to all people
#Three habitable worlds found around the same star Aliens could be watching aliens watching aliens.
Located about 22 light years away Gliese 667c is itself part of a triple-star system making this one of the most crowded planetary neighbourhoods yet.
which can detect how a star is tugged back and forth by the gravity of an orbiting planet.
This discovery adds more targets to the many exciting worlds we are discovering out there says Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge Massachusetts.
Astronomy & Astrophysics in pres h
#Tabletop accelerator shoots cheap antimatter bullets Make way for the antimatter gun. A tabletop device just 10 square metres in size can spit out energetic bursts of positrons as dense as those kicked out by the giant particle-factories at CERN.
or a crewed Martian trek may not be beyond China's reach. In a press conference Monday a spokeswoman for the Chinese human space programme Wu Ping announced that Shenzhou-10 will lift off at 0938 UTC according to the Chinese news service Xinhua.
and the interpretation of the dust clump as a vortex is plausible says Philip Armitage an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
and disintegrate upon reentering the atmosphere. The dummy contains instruments that will collect data about the launch to be transmitted back to mission managers before re-entry.
and will burn up in Earth's atmosphere. Orbital's agreement with NASA includes this trial launch and a full demonstration mission in
#Curiosity's discoveries hint at life's cradle on Mars NASA's Curiosity rover has found what it was looking for in its very first taste of Martian rock much to everyone's surprise.
But at some point Mars dried out and lost much of its atmosphere. The planet also only briefly had a magnetic field to protect its surface from cosmic radiation
Instead the discovery came from the rover's first sample of the insides of a Martian rock drilled on 9 february near an ancient stream bed in an area called Yellowknife Bay.
I have an image now of possibly a freshwater lake on a Mars with a thicker atmosphere maybe a snowcapped Mount Sharp said NASA science administrator John Grunsfeld.
#Curiosity's first drilling hints at Martian mining NASA's Curiosity rover bored into a Martian rock on 9 february and pulled out its first sample of the planet's insides to ingest
The aurora would have been seen up to tropical latitudes says Valeri Hambaryan of the University of Jena Germany.
They suggest looking for a neutron star between 3000 and 12000 light years away left over from such a merger.
#Largest structure challenges Einstein's smooth cosmos A collection of galaxies that is a whopping four billion light years long is the biggest cosmic structure ever seen.
The group is roughly one-twentieth the diameter of the observable universe big enough to challenge a principle dating back to Einstein that on large scales the universe looks the same in every direction.
Roger Clowes of the University of Central Lancashire in Preston UK and colleagues discovered the structure using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey the most comprehensive 3d map of the universe.
and measures roughly one billion light years across (red crosses) so it is dwarfed by Huge-LQG. The discovery of Huge-LQG joins a collection of observations that seem to challenge the cosmological status quo.
When Albert Einstein first applied his theory of general relativity to the universe as a whole to make the calculations workable he was forced to assume that one large part looks much like any other large part.
Previous calculations gave a value of one billion light years as the maximum possible size of a cluster.
But other evidence such as a controversial stream of galaxies that seem to be moving in the same direction dubbed dark flow is also poking holes in the uniformity of the universe.
The search for such large structures is key to furthering our understanding of the universe
which the universe is supposed to be boring he says. But the cosmological principle is ingrained so that it is hard for researchers to shake.
This means antennas of similar size to today's can be made of lighter materials as they will only have to support their own weight in microgravity, rather than On earth's surface.
Instead of building large satellites On earth and then fighting gravity to get them in orbit, the components themselves would be launched,
As an analogy Weitzner says imagine trying to shape environmental policy without any way of measuring carbon levels in the atmosphere
and other packets of data between continents, all at the speed of light. A rip or tangle in any part of this network can significantly slow telecommunications around the world.
With conventional spacesuits you re essentially in a balloon of gas that s providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere of pressure to keep you alive in the vacuum of space says Newman who has worked for the past decade to design a formfitting flexible spacesuit of the future.
That force they reasoned should be enough for the robot to push up against the downward force of gravity
I need to apply to compensate for the gravitational force Kim says. Now we re able to control bounding at many speeds.
the material can even direct water upward against gravity. Each microhair made of nickel is about 70 microns high and 25 microns wide about one-fourth the diameter of a human hair.
They rely on gravity or other forces to move fluids or particles. Varanasi s team decided to use external fields such as magnetic fields to make surfaces active exerting precise control over the behavior of particles
Water will condense out from the atmosphere it happens naturally he says. The atmosphere is a huge source of power
and all you need is a temperature difference between the air and the device he adds allowing the device to produce condensation
and water that s extracted is put in large tanks to allow separation by gravity; the oil gradually floats to the top where it can be skimmed off.
#Inexpensive nano-camera can operate at the speed of light A $500 ano-camerathat can operate at the speed of light has been developed by researchers in the MIT Media Lab. The three-dimensional camera,
Since the speed of light is known, it is then simple for the camera to calculate the distance the signal has travelled
Don Boroson on NASA s record-breaking use of laser communications Last week NASA announced that the Lunar Laser communication Demonstration (LLCD) on its Lunar Atmosphere
It includes signaling approaches that allow it to give errorfree performance through our turbulent atmosphere.
and light materials especially those that could help to protect the atmosphere including lighter more fuel efficient
In addition graphene membranes could be used to sieve hydrogen gas out of the atmosphere where it is present in minute quantities,
For example it would take the lifetime of the universe for hydrogen the smallest of all atoms to pierce a graphene monolayer.
The Manchester group also demonstrated that their one-atom-thick membranes can be used to extract hydrogen from a humid atmosphere.
but also carbon dioxide greenhouse gas byproduct which escapes into the atmosphere. Argonne's early-stage generator, composed of many tiny assemblies,
and light along the same tiny wire a finding that could be a step towards building computer chips capable of transporting digital information at the speed of light.
and stacking it in ambient atmosphere. Water between the two layers was removed by heating the layer structure once again.
How much of the universe is black holes? More information: www. surreynanosystems. com/news/19 9
#Researchers demonstrate novel tunable nanoantennas A research team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed a novel,
By contrast the new process does not require an inert atmosphere or high temperatures to grow the active device layers
#Is it a#true#simulacrum of a blocky quantum universe? Ha no. But considering just how strange the field is that probably wouldn't make for a fun game.
Playing Devil's advocate since 1978the only constant in the universe is change-Heraclitus of Ephesus 535 BC-475 BCREALLY neat
and blast out of the atmosphere like a rocket. On the return trip Skylon would touch down on the same runway it launched from.
Bond's Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket engine (Sabre) part chemical rocket part jet engine will make Skylon possible.
Later on sky cities wafting through the Venusian atmosphere (oxygen is a lifting gas on that planet so technically a simple Nitrogen/Oxygen atmosphere
(which is what we breathe) would be sufficient to provide bouyancy in the atmosphere. An enclosed city will eventually happen.
and then dive back into the atmosphere to reach Ram Air induction speed again? Or am I missing something?
It will carry an oxygen supply to work outside of the atmosphere. Basically it's a rocket engine that can utilize oxygen out of the air only
This saves on the weight of oxygen that would otherwise be needed for the flight through the atmosphere.
The trust vector must go through the center of gravity otherwise the air/spacecraft will pitch.
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