The Sky Tonight

April 01, 2015

Comet dust: Planet Mercury's 'invisible paint'
Providence RI (SPX) Apr 01, 2015
A team of scientists has a new explanation for the planet Mercury's dark, barely reflective surface. In a paper published in Nature Geoscience, the researchers suggest that a steady dusting of carbon from passing comets has slowly painted Mercury black over billions of years. Mercury's dark surface has long been a mystery to scientists. On average, Mercury is much darker than its closest airless neighbor, our Moon. Airless bodies are known to be darkened by micrometeorite impacts and bombardment o ... read more

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Stop blaming the moon "It must be a full moon" is a common refrain when things appear more hectic than usual. The moon is even blamed when things get crazy at hospital emergency rooms or birth wards. "Some nurses ascribe ... more		As stars form, magnetic fields influence regions big and small Stars form when gravity pulls together material within giant clouds of gas and dust. But gravity isn't the only force at work. Both turbulence and magnetic fields battle gravity, either by stirring ... more		Super sensitive measurement of magnetic fields There are electrical signals in the nervous system, the brain and throughout the human body and there are tiny magnetic fields associated with these signals that could be important for medical scien ... more
				Brief moon eclipse coming April 4 A brief total eclipse of the Moon may be visible on April 4 to skywatchers in western North America, Australia and East Asia, astronomers say. ... more		NSF-Funded Physics Frontiers Center Expands Hunt for Gravitational Waves The search for gravitational waves-elusive ripples in the fabric of space-time predicted to arise from extremely energetic and large-scale cosmic events such as the collisions of neutron stars and b ... more

Human 2 Mars Conference Mat 5-7 2015 - Washington DC

Nuclear Decommissioning Conference Europe May 2015

Saturn Spacecraft Returns to the Realm of Icy Moons A dual view of Saturn's icy moon Rhea marks the return of NASA's Cassini spacecraft to the realm of the planet's icy satellites. This follows nearly two years during which the spacecraft's orbits ca ... more		Earthlike 'Star Wars' Tatooines may be common Luke Skywalker's home in "Star Wars" is the desert planet Tatooine, with twin sunsets because it orbits two stars. So far, only uninhabitable gas-giant planets have been identified circling such bin ... more		EU states to hold talks on 'drone wall' to protect bloc Denmark military intel fails to identify source of drone flights Lithuania eases rules on shooting down drones		MESSENGER Completes 4,000th Orbit of Mercury On March 25, the MESSENGER spacecraft completed its 4,000th orbit of Mercury, and the lowest point in its orbit continues to move closer to the planet than ever before. The orbital phase of the MESS ... more
				Astronomers Upgrade Their Cosmic Light Bulbs The brilliant explosions of dead stars have been used for years to illuminate the far-flung reaches of our cosmos. The explosions, called Type Ia supernovae, allow astronomers to measure the distanc ... more		Black hole winds pull the plug on star formation Astronomers using ESA's Herschel space observatory have found that the winds blowing from a huge black hole are sweeping away its host galaxy's reservoir of raw star-building material. Found at the ... more

NASA's Hubble, Chandra Find Clues that May Help Identify Dark Matter Using observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have found that dark matter does not slow down when colliding with itself, meaning it interacts with ... more		Science: Theory of the strong interaction verified The fact that the neutron is slightly more massive than the proton is the reason why atomic nuclei have exactly those properties that make our world and ultimately our existence possible. Eighty yea ... more		NASA ISRO radar satellite beams first Earth images from space Morocco High Atlas whistle language strives for survival China warns Papua New Guinea over Australian defence deal		Best view yet of dusty cloud passing galactic center black hole A supermassive black hole with a mass four million times that of the Sun lies at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. It is orbited by a small group of bright stars and, in addition, an enigmatic dust ... more
Dark matter not as sticky as once thought Astronomers using observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory have found that dark matter does not slow down when colliding with each other. This means that it inte ... more		Help Name New Features on Pluto In partnership with NASA's New Horizons mission and the SETI Institute, the IAU is endorsing a campaign that will allow the public to participate in naming newly discovered features on Pluto and its ... more		Supermassive black hole clears star-making gas from galaxy's core Many nearby galaxies blast huge, wide-angled outpourings of material from their center, ejecting enough gas and dust to build more than a thousand stars the size of our sun every year. Astronomers h ... more		NASA-Funded Mission Studies the Sun in Soft X-Rays At any given moment, our sun emits a range of light waves far more expansive than what our eyes alone can see: from visible light to extreme ultraviolet to soft and hard X-rays. Different wavelength ... more

	Automation offers big solution to big data in astronomy It's almost a rite of passage in physics and astronomy. Scientists spend years scrounging up money to build a fantastic new instrument. Then, when the long-awaited device finally approaches completi ... more		Engineers speed up simulations in computational grand challenge Engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have developed a new family of methods to significantly increase the speed of time-resolved numerical simulations in computational grand challen ... more

JUNO begins decade-long mission to probe neutrino mysteries

SFL Missions to Deliver Spacecraft Buses for HawkEye 360 RF Signal Detection Expansion

Voyager debuts first space based multi cloud region to advance orbital data processing

Physicists solve low-temperature magnetic mystery		Quantum experiment verifies Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance'		Thousands of atoms entangled with a single photon		A new spin on Saturn's peculiar rotation		Chemical Fingerprints of Ancient Supernovae Found
Explosions of Jupiter's aurora linked to extraordinary planet-moon interaction		Behind the dogmas of good old hydrodynamics		Satellites Catch 'Growth Spurt' from Newborn Protostar		Colliding stars explain enigmatic 17th century explosion		I Zw 18 - The Galaxy that Reveals the Universe's History

NASA plans to bring boulder into moon orbit

Next Steps on Journey to Mars: Progress on Asteroid Initiative

Have Researchers Discovered the Sound of the Stars

An explanation for the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam system problem

Quantum correlation can imply causation

Better debugger

HAWC Observatory to Study Universe's Most Energetic Phenomena

Europa's Elusive Water Plume Paints Grim Picture For Life

Comet 67P's Speed of Rotation Shows Signs of Slowing Down

Surviving in hostile territory

Processing Paradigms That Accelerate Computer Simulations

Want to snag a satellite? Try a net

Short circuit delays particle hunter machine restart

Planets in the habitable zone around most stars, calculate researchers

Black holes and the dark sector explained by quantum gravity

Our Solar System May Have Once Harbored Super-Earths

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence extends to new realms

Ground broken for Space Fence installation

Rosetta makes first detection of molecular nitrogen at a comet

Unusual Asteroid Suspected of Spinning to Explosion

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