http://www.skynightly.com/index.html Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST en-us NASA announced Tuesday a Grand Challenge focused on finding all asteroid threats to human populations and knowing what to do about them. The challenge, which was announced at an asteroid initiative industry and partner day at NASA Headquarters in Washington, is a large-scale effort that will use multi-disciplinary collaborations and a variety of partnerships with other government agencies,]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST NASA announced a Grand Challenge on Tuesday to enlist government agencies, industry, academics and citizen astronomers in the hunt for asteroids that could cause massive destruction. The US space agency said the challenge would complement another recently announced project to use a robot to redirect an asteroid into the Moon's orbit so astronauts could visit the object and study it. "NAS]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST Australian scientists Tuesday said they had identified a possible 280 additional craters on the Moon, a finding they said could shed light on the history of the Earth's natural satellite. By combining gravity and topography data collected by satellites, the scientists from Curtin University in Western Australia were able to use computer modelling to at first identify two basins on the far s]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST An international team of astronomers (Note) from Taiwan, England, and Japan has used the Subaru Telescope to measure the distribution of dark matter in fifty galaxy clusters and found that its density gradually decreases from the center of these cosmic giants to their diffuse outskirts. This new evidence about the mysterious dark matter that pervades our Universe conforms to the predictions of c]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST It's not reruns of "The Jetsons", but researchers working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new microscopy technique that uses a process similar to how an old tube television produces a picture-cathodoluminescence-to image nanoscale features. Combining the best features of optical and scanning electron microscopy, the fast, versatile, and high-resoluti]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST A team of researchers has discovered evidence that an extrasolar planet may be forming quite far from its star-- about twice the distance Pluto is from our Sun. The planet lies inside a dusty, gaseous disk around a small red dwarf TW Hydrae, which is only about 55 percent of the mass of the Sun. The discovery adds to the ever-increasing variety of planetary systems in the Milky Way. The research]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST They lie dormant for years, but at the first sign of favorable conditions they awaken. This sounds like the tagline for a science fiction movie, but it describes the amazing life-cycles of microbial organisms that form the biological soil crusts (BSCs) of Earth's deserts. Now a research team with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found compelling evidence of a planet forming 7.5 billion miles away from its star, a finding that may challenge current theories about planet formation. Of the almost 900 planets outside our solar system that have been confirmed to date, this is the first to be found at such a great distance from its star. The suspected planet is orbiti]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST A new study by astronomers at NASA, Johns Hopkins University and Rochester Institute of Technology confirms long-held suspicions about how stellar-mass black holes produce their highest-energy light. "We're accurately representing the real object and calculating the light an astronomer would actually see," says Scott Noble, associate research scientist in RIT's Center for Computational Rel]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST It is a mystery that has stymied astrophysicists for decades: how do black holes produce so many high-power X-rays? In a new study, astrophysicists from The Johns Hopkins University, NASA and the Rochester Institute of Technology conducted research that bridges the gap between theory and observation by demonstrating that gas spiraling toward a black hole inevitably results in X-ray emissions. ]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST Researchers at the University of New South Wales have proposed a new way to distinguish between quantum bits that are placed only a few nanometres apart in a silicon chip, taking them a step closer to the construction of a large-scale quantum computer. Quantum bits, or qubits, are the basic building blocks of quantum computers - ultra-powerful devices that will offer enormous advantages fo]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST A Chinese supercomputer is the fastest in the world, according to survey results announced Monday, comfortably overtaking a US machine which now ranks second. Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, achieved processing speeds of 33.86 petaflops (1000 trillion calculations) per second on a benchmarking test, earning it the number one spot in t]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST The autonomous, solar-powered Zoe, which became the first robot to map microbial life during a 2005 field expedition in Chile's Atacama Desert, is heading back to the world's driest desert this month on a NASA astrobiology mission led by Carnegie Mellon University and the SETI Institute. This time, Zoe is equipped with a one-meter drill to search for subsurface life. As before, Zoe will be]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST Nearly a decade ago, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory caught signs of what appeared to be a black hole snacking on gas at the middle of the nearby Sculptor galaxy. Now, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), which sees higher-energy X-ray light, has taken a peek and found the black hole asleep. "Our results imply that the black hole went dormant in the past 10 years," said ]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST The module carrying the telescope and scientific instruments of ESA's Euclid 'dark Universe' mission is now being developed by Astrium in Toulouse, France. Euclid will be launched in 2020 to explore dark energy and dark matter in order to understand the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang and, in particular, its present accelerating expansion. Dark matter is invisible to our]]> Thu, 20 JUN 2013 00:53:31 AEST