A best-fit color image/map of Pluto generated with the Hubble Space Telescope and advanced computers. Image: NASAA Williams College team of astronomers, headed by Bryce Babcock and Jay Pasachoff, have been in Hawaii, near Honolulu, to observe a rare double-double event about Pluto. On June 23rd, they observed an occultation, a hiding, when Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, only 755 miles across, went in front of (occulted) a star, revealing its size accurately as well as the absence of any atmosphere. About 11 minutes later, Pluto went in front of the same star, though the astronomers and their students have to analyze their observations to see if they detected that second event.
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(AP) -- Federal forest officials say a wind-driven wildfire has forced the evacuations of about 100 people in northern New Mexico and the closure of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
State-of-the-art climate models, as used in the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, could be giving a false sense of security in terms of upcoming abrupt change, suggests a Commentary by a University of Bristol scientist published online this week in Nature Geoscience.
(AP) -- A fast-moving wildfire just south of northern New Mexico's Los Alamos nuclear laboratory has destroyed at least 30 structures, including some homes, and has the potential to grow much larger, fire officials said Monday.
(AP) -- NASA is preparing to launch a Department of Defense satellite from the Wallops Flight Facility at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Most previous studies have indicated that people in cities have a smaller carbon footprint than people who live in the country. By using more complex methods of analysis than in the past, scientists at Aalto University in Finland have discovered that people's carbon emissions are practically the same in the city and in the rural areas. More than anything else, CO2 emissions that cause climate change are dependent upon how much goods and services people consume, not where they live.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A 'real-time data translator' machine converted a Mariner 4 digital image data into numbers printed on strips of paper.
(PhysOrg.com) -- As the Juno spacecraft is elevated by a rotation fixture, a technician at Astrotech's payload processing facility in Titusville, Fla., examines the installation of blankets on the aft deck. The image was taken on June 16, 2011.
Development of disease resistance among Chesapeake Bay oysters calls for a shift in oyster-restoration strategies within the Bay and its tributaries. That's according to a new study by researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS).
An asteroid the size of a tour bus has zipped harmlessly past Earth.
When we think of mass extinctions, we think of the dinosaurs. Nothing that could happen in the modern era, right?
The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite passed over Tropical Depression Meari as it neared a landfall in southwestern North Korea on June 26. TRMM did not observe any heavy rainfall, but did see moderate rainfall with the system.
Heavy rains in Canada caused historic flooding in Minot, N.D. Landsat satellite images taken before and during the flooding reveal the water's extent.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Although NASA's Mars Science Laboratory will not leave Earth until late this year nor land on Mars until August 2012, anyone can watch those dramatic events now in a new animation of the mission.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a bit of coincidental news, no sooner had earthquake scientists posted warnings about the instability of the southern part of the San Andreas Fault hidden beneath the Salton Sea, than an earthquake struck; albeit it, a rather small one, in just that part of southern California. The study, by the Scripps Institute for Oceanography, just published in Nature Geoscience, points out the alarming fact that the fault beneath the Salton Sea has a track record of producing serious earthquakes with regularity every 180 years or so, but has now gone without producing one for 325.
A painstaking examination of the first direct and detailed climate record from the continental shelves surrounding Antarctica reveals that the last remnant of Antarctic vegetation existed in a tundra landscape on the continent's northern peninsula about 12 million years ago. The research, which was led by researchers at Rice University and Louisiana State University, appears online this week and will be featured on the cover of the July 12 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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