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August 02, 2013

Gravitational tide the secret of Saturn's weird moon
Paris, France (AFP) July 31, 2013
Enceladus, a white moon of Saturn with ice-spewing volcanoes, owes its strangeness to tides of gravitational forces exerted by its mother, a study said on Wednesday. Discovered in 1789 by William Herschel, Enceladus measures only 504 kilometres (315 miles) across yet is one of the great oddities of the Solar System. Its surface is a gorgeous white shell of ice, rather than asteroid-pocked rock and dust, and the surface is pristine except for a network of fractures near its south pole. These cracks - du ... read more

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Dawn's Arrays Keep It Powering Along Powering its way through the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Dawn continues on course and on schedule for its 2015 appointment with dwarf planet Ceres. After spending more than a year o ... more		NASA Completes First Internal Review of Concepts for Asteroid Redirect Mission NASA has completed the first step toward a mission to find and capture a near-Earth asteroid, redirect it to a stable lunar orbit and send humans to study it. In preparation for fiscal year 20 ... more		Perseid Fireballs In astronomy, there's nothing quite like a bright meteor streaking across the glittering canopy of a moonless night sky. The unexpected flash of light adds a dash of magic to an ordinary walk under ... more
				Making big 'Schroedinger cats' Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objec ... more		Pulsating star sheds light on exoplanet A team of researchers has devised a way to measure the internal properties of stars-a method that offers more accurate assessments of their orbiting planets. The research, which appears in Proceedin ... more

Experimental quest to test Einstein's speed limit Albert Einstein's assertion that there's an ultimate speed limit - the speed of light - has withstood countless tests over the past 100 years, but that didn't stop University of California, Berkeley ... more		NASA Sees Enthusiastic Response to Asteroid Call for Ideas NASA has received more than 400 responses to its request for information (RFI) on the agency's asteroid initiative, Deputy Administrator Lori Garver announced Friday. "Under our plan, we're in ... more		Russia regularly targeting UK satellites: space command boss French navy boards Russia 'shadow fleet' ship, arrests two Defense contractors brace for climate threats despite Trump's denials		Removing complexity layers from the universe's creation Complicated statistical behaviour observed in complex systems such as early universe can often be understood if it is broken down into simpler ones. Two physicists, Petr Jizba (currently affiliated ... more
				Chandra Sees Eclipsing Planet in X-rays for First Time For the first time since exoplanets, or planets around stars other than the sun, were discovered almost 20 years ago, X-ray observations have detected an exoplanet passing in front of its parent sta ... more		US Lawmaker Seeks to Partner with Russia to Clean Up Space A prominent US lawmaker and advocate of the United States' role in space told a conference on the commercialization of space that the US and Russia should team up for extraterrestrial projects - and ... more

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When fluid dynamics mimic quantum mechanics In the early days of quantum physics, in an attempt to explain the wavelike behavior of quantum particles, the French physicist Louis de Broglie proposed what he called a "pilot wave" theory. Accord ... more		Sony, Panasonic mulling 300-gigabyte Blu-ray format Japan's Sony and Panasonic say they're working on a successor to Blu-ray, hoping to offer optical discs holding at least 300 gigabytes of data by 2015. ... more		USF study: Ancient plankton hint at steadier future for ocean life Researchers wake up microbes trapped in permafrost for thousands of years China's 'Great Green Wall' brings hope but also hardship		Elementary Physics in a Single Molecule A team of physicists has succeeded in performing an extraordinary experiment: They demonstrated how magnetism that generally manifests itself by a force between two magnetized objects acts within a ... more
				What if quantum physics worked on a macroscopic level? Quantum physics concerns a world of infinitely small things. But for years, researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have been attempting to observe the properties of quantum ... more		Rice researchers part of new LHC discovery A discovery facilitated by Rice University's contribution to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will impact scientists' search for dark matter in the universe. CERN, the European Organization for Nucle ... more

SciTechTalk: Grab your erasers, there are more moons than we thought

NASA Hubble Finds New Neptune Moon

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Mars Rover Opportunity Nears Solander Point

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NASA's Wise Finds Mysterious Centaurs May Be Comets		Bad night's sleep? The moon could be to blame		World's largest gamma telescope to study cosmic rays from Siberia		NASA's Hubble: Galaxies, Comets, and Stars! Oh My!		Spitzer Observes Gas Emission From Comet ISON

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Mystery of the Missing Waves on Titan

NASA's IRIS Telescope Offers First Glimpse of Sun's Mysterious Atmosphere

NASA Comet ISON Observing Campaign

Researcher Seeks New Way to Study Asteroid and Comet Interiors

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Moon Base and Beyond

Large Coronal Hole Near the Sun's North Pole

First-ever lunar south pole mission could be attempted by 2016

Revealed: How galaxies go from burst to bust

Catalog of cosmic X-Ray sightings will aid astronomers

Protons hop from one water molecule to another given suitable energy conditions

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NASA's Hubble Shows Link Between Stars' Ages and Their Orbits

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