The study also suggests butterflies are the ancestral group to the tens of thousands of moth species on the planet
when bats spread across the planet as a means of escaping these and other nocturnal predators Kawahara says.
#Spinach leaves vibrate to kick off photosynthesis Vibrations deep within spinach leaves enhance the efficiency of photosynthesishe energy conversion process that powers life on our planet.
Through photosynthesis, plants and some bacteria turn sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into food for themselves and into oxygen for animals to breathe.
Solar panels can only generate power when the sun shining, and wind turbines can only generate power when the wind blows.
#Solar cell spikes let in 99%of sunlight The more light absorbed by a solar panel active elements,
A new one-step process to etch nanoscale spikes into silicon lets the maximum amount of sunlight reach a solar cell,
Collecting sunlight using these tiny colloidal quantum dots depends on two types of semiconductors: n-type which are rich in electrons and p-type
#Material snags CO2 from natural gas Rice university rightoriginal Studyposted by Mike Williams-Rice on June 9 2014scientists have created an Earth-friendly way to separate carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas from natural gas right
#Exoplanet weather forecast calls for clouds University of Chicago rightoriginal Studyposted by Steve Koppes-Chicago on December 31 2013a team of scientists report they have characterized definitively the atmosphere of a super-Earth class
planet orbiting another star for the first time. Today s forecast: cloudy. Tomorrow: overcast. Extended outlook: more clouds.
The scrutinized planet which is known as GJ1214B is classified as a super-Earth type planet because its mass is intermediate between those of Earth and Neptune.
Recent searches for planets around other stars (xoplanets have shown that super-Earths like GJ 1214b are among the most common type of planets in the Milky way galaxy.
Because no such planets exist in our solar system the physical nature of super-Earths is largely unknown.
Previous studies of GJ 1214b yielded two possible interpretations of the planet s atmosphere. Its atmosphere could consist entirely of water vapor
or some other type of heavy molecule or it could contain high-altitude clouds that prevent the observation of what lies underneath.
But now a team of astronomers led by Laura Kreidberg and Jacob Bean of the University of Chicago has detected clear evidence of clouds in the atmosphere of GJ 1214b from data collected with the Hubble space telescope.
This was the largest Hubble program ever devoted to studying a single exoplanet. An artist s rendering of extrasolar planet GJ 1214b.
Credit: NASA ESA and G. Bacon (STSCL) via U. Chicago) The researchers describe their work as an important milestone on the road to identifying potentially habitable Earthlike planets beyond our Solar system.
The results appear in the January 2 issue of the journal Nature. e really pushed the limits of
and first author of the new paper. his advance lays the foundation for characterizing other Earths with similar techniques.?
and really nail down some property of a small planet orbiting a distant starexplains Bean an assistant professor and the project s principal investigator.
GJ 1214b is located just 40 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.
Because of its proximity to our solar system and the small size of its host star GJ 1214b is the most easily observed super-Earth.
It transits or passes in front of its parent star every 38 hours which gives scientists an opportunity to study its atmosphere as starlight filters through it.
Kreidberg Bean and their colleagues used Hubble to precisely measure the spectrum of GJ 1214b in near-infrared light finding what they consider definitive evidence of high clouds blanketing the planet.
The planet was discovered in 2009 by the MEARTH Project which monitors two thousand red dwarf stars for transiting planets.
The planet was targeted next for follow-up observations to characterize its atmosphere. The first spectra which Bean obtained in 2010 using a ground-based telescope suggested that the planet s atmosphere either was predominantly water vapor
or hydrogen-dominated with high-altitude clouds. More precise Hubble observations made in 2012 and 2013 allowed the team to distinguish between these two scenarios.
The news is about what they didn t find. The Hubble spectra revealed no chemical fingerprints whatsoever in the planet s atmosphere.
This allowed the astronomers to rule out cloud-free atmospheres made of water vapor methane nitrogen carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide.
The best explanation for the new data is that there are high-altitude clouds in the atmosphere of the planet
Models of super-Earth atmospheres predict clouds could be made out of potassium chloride or zinc sulfide at the scorching temperatures of 450 degrees Fahrenheit found on GJ 1214b. ou would expect very different kinds of clouds to form than you would expect say on Earthkreidberg says.
of this telescope will allow us to peer through the clouds on planets like GJ 1214b.
But more than that it may open the door to studies of Earthlike planets around nearby stars. he NASA the National Science Foundation the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
which they were extractedsays Robert J. Moon a researcher from the US Forest Service s Forest Products Laboratory
Gravitational lensing it has long been predicted can twist E modes into B modes as photons pass by galaxies and other massive objects on their way toward earth.
The molecule argon hydride was seen in the crab nebula the remains of a star that exploded 1000 years agothe noble gases
Such chemical compounds have only ever been studied in laboratories On earth leading astronomers to assume the right conditions simply do not occur in space. he crab nebula was formed only 1000 years ago
when a massive star explodedsays Haley Gomez of Cardiff University s School of Physics and Astronomy. ot only is it very young in astronomical terms
what happens in these stellar explosions. ast year we used the European space agency s Herschel Space observatory to study the intricate network of gas filaments to show how exploding stars are creating huge amounts of space dust. urther measurements
of the crab nebula were made using Herschel s SPIRE instrument. Its development and operation was led by Professor Matt Griffin from the School of Physics and Astronomy.
With hot gas still expanding at high speeds after the explosion a supernova remnant is a harsh hot and hostile environment
and one of the places where we least expected to find a noble-gas based molecule. t now seems the crab nebula provides exactly the right conditions to form such molecules.
(or isotope) of argon we discovered in the crab nebulasays Gomez. e now know that it is different from argon we see in rocks on the Earth.
#Craters within crater hint at moonâ#diversity Brown University right Original Studyposted by Kevin Stacey-Brown on December 9 2013 Small craters on the moon that are within one of the largest
craters in the solar system may offer clues as to how the moon formed. A massive impact on the moon about 4 billion years ago left the 2500-mile crater.
Comparing the spectra of light reflected from the peaks of those later craters may yield clues to the composition of the Moon'#lower crust
Data from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper that flew aboard India'#Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter shows a diverse mineralogy in the subsurface of the giant South pole Aitken basin.
If that'#true then the South pole Aitken (SPA) basin could hold important information about the Moon'#interior and the evolution of its crust and mantle.
At 2500 kilometers across the SPA is the largest impact basin on the Moon and perhaps the largest in the solar system.
Planets the study looked at smaller craters within the larger SPA basin made by impacts that happened millions of years after the giant impact that formed the basin.
Using Moon Mineralogy Mapper data the researchers looked at the light reflected from each of the four central peaks.
and found significant compositional differences between these central peaks The Moon Mineralogy Mapper has very high spatial and spectral resolution.
We haven'##t really been able to look at the moon in this kind of detail before. he next step is figuring out where that diversity comes from.
If indeed the diversity reflects preexisting material the SPA could hold important clues about the composition of the Moon'#lower crust
and it doesn'##t contain olivine that would have substantial implications for models of how the Moon was formed Moriarty says.
#Russian meteor was a wake-up call University of California Davis rightoriginal Studyposted by Andy Fell-UC Davis on November 18 2013consumer video cameras
and advanced laboratory techniques gave scientists an unprecedented opportunity to study the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk Russia in February. f humanity does not want to go the way of the dinosaurs we need to study an event like this in detailsays Qing-zhu Yin professor
in the department of earth and planetary sciences at University of California Davis. Saying it was a ake-up callyin says the Chelyabinsk meteorite the largest strike
since the Tunguska event of 1908 belongs to the most common type of meteorite an rdinary chondrite. f a catastrophic meteorite strike were to occur in the future it would most likely
be an object of this type. ur goal was to understand all circumstances that resulted in the damaging shock wave that sent over 1200 people to hospitals in the Chelyabinsk Oblast area that daysays Peter Jenniskens meteor astronomer at SETI Institute.
Their findings are published in the journal Science. The explosion was equivalent to about 600 thousand tons of TNT 150 times bigger than the 2012 Sutter s Mill meteorite in California.
Based on viewing angles from videos of the fireball researchers calculated that the meteoroid entered Earth s atmosphere at just over 19 kilometers per second slightly faster than had previously been reported. ur meteoroid entry modeling showed that the impact was caused by a 20-meter sized
single chunk of rock that efficiently fragmented at 30 km altitudesays Olga Popova of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
A meteoroid is the original object; a meteor is the hooting starin the sky; and a meteorite is the object that reaches the ground.
The meteor s brightness peaked at an altitude of 29.7 km (18.5 miles) as the object exploded.
For nearby observers it briefly appeared brighter than the sun and caused some severe sunburns.
The team estimated that about three-quarters of the meteoroid evaporated at that point. Most of the rest converted to dust
and only a small fraction (4000 to 6000 kilograms or less than 0. 05 percent) fell to the ground as meteorites.
The dust cloud was so hot it glowed orange. The largest single piece weighing about 650 kilograms was recovered from the bed of Lake Chebarkul in October by a team from Ural Federal University led by Professor Viktor Grokhovsky.
Shockwaves from the airburst broke windows rattled buildings and even knocked people from their feet.
These veins would have weakened the original meteoroid. Yin s laboratory carried out chemical and isotopic analysis of the meteorites and Ken Verosub professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences measured the magnetic properties of metallic grains in the meteorite.
Doug Rowland project scientist in the Center for Molecular and Genomic Imaging in the department of biomedical engineering contributed X-ray computed tomography scanning of the rock.
and that it last went through a significant shock event about 115 million years after the formation of the solar system 4567 million years ago.
Jenniskens calculates the object may have come from the Flora asteroid family in the asteroid belt but the chunk that hit the Chelyabinsk area was broken apparently not up in the asteroid belt itself.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University in Japan found that the rock had been exposed to cosmic rays for only about 1. 2 million years unusually short for rocks originating in the Flora family.
Chelyabinsk belonged to a bigger ubble pileasteroid that broke apart 1. 2 million years ago possibly in an earlier close encounter with Earth Jenniskens speculates.
The rest of that rubble could still be around as part of the near-earth asteroid population.
Major meteorite strikes like Tunguska or Chelyabinsk occur more frequently than we tend to think Yin says.
For example four tons of material were recovered from a meteor shower in Jilin China in 1976. helyabinsk serves as unique calibration point for high energy meteorite impact events for our future studies. he work was supported by the Russian Academy of Sciences the Office
and more efficient at harvesting energy from the sun. For solar panels wringing every drop of energy from as many photons as possible is imperative.
and most of the energy from the sun is in the visible and infrared spectrum. â#Finding a material that exhibits the bulk photovoltaic effect for visible light would greatly simplify solar cell construction.
Moreover it would be a way around an inefficiency intrinsic to interfacial solar cells known as the Shockley-Queisser limit where some of the energy from photons is lost as electrons wait to make the jump from one material to the other. hink of photons coming from the sun
and earth-abundant elements unlike compound semiconductor materials currently used in efficient thin-film solar cell technology. he research was supported by the Energy Commercialization Institute of Ben Franklin Technology Partners the Department of energy's Office of Basic Sciences
but not all applications. or observations of rare objects like optical pulsars and high redshift galaxies ARCONS small field of view (20 arc seconds by 20 arc seconds
which data was collected on optical pulsars compact binaries high redshift galaxies and planetary transits. RCONS is very sensitive
and take spectra of planets around nearby stars. Source: UC Santa Barbar
#Wireless device grabs lost energy from Wi-fi Using inexpensive materials configured and tuned to capture microwave signals researchers have designed a power harvesting device with efficiency similar to that of modern solar panels.
The component converts heat from the sun into infrared light which can be absorbed by solar cells to make electricity a technology known as thermophotovoltaics.
A typical solar cell has a silicon semiconductor that absorbs sunlight directly and converts it into electrical energy.
Instead of sending sunlight directly to the solar cell thermophotovoltaic systems have an intermediate component that consists of two parts:
an absorber that heats up when exposed to sunlight and an emitter that converts the heat to infrared light
#Signs of water detected in exoplanet s debris University of Warwick rightoriginal Studyposted by Anna Blackaby-Warwick on October 11 2013the remains of a water-rich rocky exoplanet have been discovered outside
our solar system orbiting a white dwarf star 170 light years away. Using observations obtained with the Hubble Space Telescopeâ
By contrast only approximately 0. 023 percent of the Earth s mass is water. Evidence for water outside our solar system has previously been found in the atmosphere of gas giants
but this is the first time it has been pinpointed in a rocky body making it of significant interest in understanding of the formation and evolution of habitable planets and life.
The dwarf planet Ceres contains ice buried beneath an outer crust and researchers have drawn a parallel between the two bodies.
Itâ#believed that bodies like Ceres were the source of the bulk of our own water On earth.
In the study published in Science researchers suggest it is most likely that the water detected around the white dwarf GD 61 came from a minor planet at least 90 kilometers (56 miles) in diameterâ
##but potentially much biggerâ##that once orbited the parent star before it became a white dwarf.
Like Ceres the water was most likely in the form of ice below the planet s surface.
From the amount of rocks and water detected in the outer envelope of the white dwarf the researchers estimate that the disrupted planetary body had a diameter of at least 90 kilometers.
However because their observations can only detect what is being accreted in recent history the estimate of its mass is on the conservative side.
It is likely that the object was as large as Vesta the largest minor planet in the solar system.
In its former life GD 61 was a star somewhat bigger than our Sun and host to a planetary system.
and became a white dwarf yet parts of its planetary system survived. The water-rich minor planet was knocked out of its regular orbit
and plunged into a very close orbit where it was shredded by the starâ#gravitational force. Researchers believe that destabilizing the orbit of the minor planet requires a so far unseen much larger planet going around the white dwarf. t this stage in its existence all that remains of this rocky body is simply dust
and debris that has been pulled into the orbit of its dying parent starâ#says Boris Gänsicke professor of physics at the University of Warwick. owever this planetary graveyard swirling around the embers of its parent star is a rich source
of information about its former life. Â In these remnants lie chemical clues which point towards a previous existence as a water-rich terrestrial body. hose two ingredientsâ##a rocky surface
and waterâ##are key in the hunt for habitable planets outside our solar system so itâ#very exciting to find them together for the first time outside our solar system.?
The finding of water in a large asteroid means the building blocks of habitable planets existedâ ##and maybe still existâ##in the GD 61 system and likely also around substantial number of similar parent starssays lead author Jay Farihi from the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. hese water-rich building blocks
and the terrestrial planets they build may in fact be commonâ##a system cannot create things as big as asteroids
and avoid building planets and GD 61 had the ingredients to deliver lots of water to their surfaces. ur results demonstrate that there was definitely potential for habitable planets in this exoplanetary system
. or their analysis the researchers used ultraviolet spectroscopy data obtained with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on board the Hubble space telescope of the white dwarf GD 61.
As the atmosphere of the Earth blocks the ultraviolet light such study can only be carried out from space.
Additional observations were obtained with both of the 10m telescopes of the W. M. Keck Observatory on the summit of Mauna kea Hawaii.
The Hubble and Keck data allows the researchers to identify the different chemical elements that are polluting the outer layers white dwarf.
Using a sophisticated computer model of the white dwarf atmosphere developed by Detlev Koester at the University of Kiel they were able to infer the chemical composition of the shredded minor planet.
To date observations of 12 destroyed exoplanets orbiting white dwarves have been carried out but this is the first time the signature of water has been found.
or search for such formations on Mars and other planets to determine where water once existed.
These deep earthquakes occur in older and colder areas of the oceanic plate that gets pushed into the earth s mantle.
because seismologists could not find a seismic signal in the Earth that could confirm the results.
The ability to do such experiments allows scientists like Green to simulate the appropriate conditions within the Earth
and found the arthquakesonly within a narrow temperature range that simulates conditions where the real earthquakes occur in Earth. sing synchrotron X-rays to aid our observations we found that fractures nucleate at the onset of the olivine to spinel transitiongreen says. urther these fractures propagate dynamically
#Densest galaxy is jam-packed with stars Michigan State university right Original Studyposted by Tom Oswald-Michigan State on September 25 2013 Astronomers have discovered the densest galaxy in the nearby universe.
The stars are about 25 times closer than those in the Milky way. Imagine the distance between the sun and the star nearest to itâ##a star called Alpha centauri.
That's a distance of about 4 light years. Now imagine as many as 10000 of our suns crammed into that relatively small space. his galaxy is more massive than any ultra-compact drawfs of comparable sizesays Jay Strader assistant professor of physics
and astronomy at Michigan State university nd is arguably the densest galaxy known in the local universe. s detailed in the recent edition of the publication Astrophysical Journal Letters the ultra-compact dwarf galaxy was found in near
the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 4649 also called M60 about 54 million light years from Earth.
This would make the density of stars about 15000 times greater than that found in Earth's neighborhood in the Milky way. raveling from one star to another would be a lot easier in M60-UCD1 than it is in our galaxystrader says. ince the stars are so much closer in this galaxy
but assumed they were either single stars or very-distant galaxies. Another intriguing aspect of this galaxy is the presence of a bright X-ray source in its center.
One explanation for this is a giant black hole weighing in at some 10 million times the mass of our sun. Astronomers are trying to determine
either as really jam-packed star clusters or if they are galaxies that get smaller because they have ripped stars away from them.
The possible massive black hole combined with the high galaxy mass and sun-like levels of elements found in the stars favor the latter idea.
A giant black hole at the center of M60-UCD1 helps tip the scales against the scenario where this galaxy was once a star cluster
since such large black holes are not found in these types of objects. The galaxy was discovered using NASA's Hubble space telescope.
Follow-up observations were done with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes including the Keck 10-meter telescope in Hawaii. wenty years ago we couldn't have done thisstrader says. e didn't have Hubble or Chandra.
That is roughly the same efficiency at which the best commercially available solar cells convert sunlight into electricity.
#Earth s inner core spins faster than rest of planet University of Leeds rightoriginal Studyposted by Ben Jones-U. Leeds on September 17 2013the Earth s
Although Edmund Halley who also discovered the famous comet showed the westward-drifting motion of the Earth s geomagnetic field in 1692 it is the first time that scientists have been able to link the way the inner core spins to the behavior of the outer core.
The planet behaves in this way because it is responding to the Earth s geomagnetic field.
The findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences help scientists to interpret the dynamics of the core of the Earth the source of our planet s magnetic field.
In the last few decades seismometers measuring earthquakes travelling through the Earth s core have identified an eastwards
or superrotation of the solid inner core relative to Earth s surface. he link is explained simply in terms of equal and opposite actionsays Philip Livermore of the School of Earth
and Environment at the University of Leeds. he magnetic field pushes eastwards on the inner core causing it to spin faster than the Earth
but it also pushes in the opposite direction in the liquid outer core which creates a westward motion. he solid iron inner core is about the size of the Moon.
It is surrounded by the liquid outer core an iron alloy whose convection-driven movement generates the geomagnetic field.
The fact that the Earth s internal magnetic field changes slowly over a timescale of decades means that the electromagnetic force responsible for pushing the inner and outer cores will itself change over time.
The authors used a model of the Earth s core that was run on the giant supercomputer Monte Rosa part of The swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano Switzerland.
Using a new method they were able to simulate the Earth s core with an accuracy about 100 times better than other models.
#Earth s wobble fixes food for ocean creatures Princeton university rightoriginal Studyposted by Catherine Zandonella-Princeton on September 16 2013the cyclic wobble of the Earth on its axis controls the production of ixednitrogen
and fell in a pattern that closely matched the changing orientation of Earth s axis of rotation or axial precession.
and arises because the Earth wobbles slightly as it rotates similar to the wobble of a toy top.
and geophysical sciences at Princeton university. y studying the response of nitrogen fixation to different environmental changes in the Earth s past we have found connections that may ensure that the ocean s fixed nitrogen level will always reboundsigman says. his suggests that an ocean over time has a relatively stable nutrient reservoir
#Ice may explain odd craters on Mars Brown University right Original Studyposted by Kevin Stacey-Brown on August 6 2013brown (US) More than 600 double-layer craters on Mars may have been caused by debris
These distinctive craters were documented first in data returned from the Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s
Recent discoveries by planetary geoscientists at Brown and elsewhere have shown that the climate of Mars has varied in the past says James W. Head professor of geological science at Brown University.
During these times ice from the polar caps is redistributed into the mid-latitudes of Mars as a layer about 50 meters thick in the same place that we see that the DLES have formed.
or high latitudes areas where scientists believe there may once have been glacial ice on Mars. Ultimately understanding how DLES
and other crater types are formed could lead to a better understanding of Mars past. There are over 600 DLES on the Martian surface
so reconciling how they formed with our knowledge of the climate of Mars is pretty important Weiss says.
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