The Sky Tonight

April 19, 2016

In these microbes, iron works like oxygen
Madison WI (SPX) Apr 19, 2016
A pair of papers from a UW-Madison geoscience lab shed light on a curious group of bacteria that use iron in much the same way that animals use oxygen: to soak up electrons during biochemical reactions. When organisms - whether bacteria or animal - oxidize carbohydrates, electrons must go somewhere. The studies can shed some light on the perennial question of how life arose, but they also have slightly more practical applications in the search for life in space, says senior author Eric Roden, a pr ... read more

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Little Lander That Could: The Legacy of Philae Philae, the little lander that was declared lost by the European Space Agency (ESA), has achieved pretty much despite of its relatively short operational life on the surface of the comet 67P/Churyum ... more		NASA's Fermi telescope poised to pin down gravitational wave sources Last year on Sept. 14, waves of energy traveling for more than a billion years gently rattled space-time in the vicinity of Earth. The disturbance, produced by a pair of merging black holes, was cap ... more		Y Marks the Spot A sinuous feature snakes northward from Enceladus' south pole like a giant tentacle. This feature, which stretches from the terminator near center, toward upper left, is actually tectonic in nature, ... more
				Comets in the "X"-treme For millennia, people on Earth have watched comets in the sky. Many ancient cultures saw comets as the harbingers of doom, but today scientists know that comets are really frozen balls of dust, gas, ... more		SDO captures images of a mid-level solar flare The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 8:29 pm EDT on April 17, 2016. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar fl ... more

Human 2 Mars Conference May 17-19 2016 - Washington DC

Meteorites arrive at NASA's Johnson Space Center Nearly 570 meteorite samples collected during a two-month Antarctic expedition arrived at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) on April 14 to be curated for distribution to scientists around the world, ... more		Europa's heaving ice might make more heat than scientists thought Jupiter's moon Europa is under a constant gravitational assault. As it orbits, Europa's icy surface heaves and falls with the pull of Jupiter's gravity, creating enough heat, scientists think, to su ... more		Russia offers to extend nuclear arms limits with US Saudi Arabia and Pakistan sign mutual defense pact Brazil, Chile sign defense agreement		A Space Spider Watches Over Young Stars A nebula known as "the Spider" glows fluorescent green in an infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). The Spider, officially named IC 417, lies n ... more
				University of Massachusetts Lowell PICTURE-B Mission Completed Designed to significantly advance the science and technology supporting exoplanet research, the PICTURE-B mission of the Lowell Center for Space Science and Technology at the University of Massachus ... more		Probing the transforming world of neutrinos Every second, trillions of neutrinos travel through your body unnoticed. Neutrinos are among the most abundant particles in the universe, but they are difficult to study because they very rarely int ... more

The World's Largest Commercial Drone Conference and Expo - Sept 7-9 - Las Vegas

Directed Energy And Next Generation Munitions - 20-22 June - Washington DC

Military Network Modernization 2016 - Washington DC - April 25-27

Space Tech Expo - Design - Build - Test - Pasadena CA - May 24-26, 2016

Inside the fiery furnace Galaxies, it seems, are sociable animals and they like to gather together in large groups, known as clusters. Actually it's gravity that holds the galaxies in the cluster close together as a single ... more		UCF gets grant to plan for space mining on NASA mission UCF physics professor Dan Britt has been named to the New Horizons mission team as the spacecraft heads to the Kuiper Belt. He's also just landed a grant to help create fake asteroid material, which ... more		Ex-US climate envoy: Trump threatening 'consensus science' worldwide How did an Indian zoo get the world's most endangered great ape? Australian scientists grapple with 'despicable' butterfly heist		Hidden galaxy found in ALMA gravitational lens image Researchers have uncovered the existence of a dwarf "dark galaxy" lurking nearly 4 billion light-years away from Earth. The discovery was made when a team of researchers, including astronomers at th ... more
Russia to shift all Lunar launches to Vostochny Cosmodrome Russia will stop using the Soviet-era Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for lunar launches, according to Russian-based Rocket and Space Corporation (RSC Energia). Moscow made the decision to s ... more		Saturn Spacecraft Samples Interstellar Dust NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected the faint but distinct signature of dust coming from beyond our solar system. The research, led by a team of Cassini scientists primarily from Europe, is publi ... more		Supernova iron found on the moon A dying star ends its life in a cataclysmic explosion, shooting the majority of the star's material, primarily new chemical elements created during the explosion, out into space. One or more such su ... more		New hypervelocity binary star challenges dark matter, stellar acceleration models A team of astronomers at the Friedrich Alexander University led by Peter Nemeth has discovered a binary star moving nearly at the escape velocity of our galaxy. There are about two dozen so-called h ... more

	Study finds unexpected long-range particle interactions Moving bodies can be attracted to each other, even when they're quite far apart and separated by many other objects: That, in a nutshell, is the somewhat unexpected finding by a team of researchers ... more		Three-way battles in the quantum world When water in a pot is slowly heated to the boil, an exciting duel of energies takes place inside the liquid. On the one hand there is the interaction energy that wants to keep the water molecules t ... more

What to look for in China and Europe's climate plans

Chinese firms pay price of jihadist strikes against Mali junta

EU states agree broad UN emissions target avoiding 'embarrassment'

A single ion impacts a million water molecules		Calcium isotope holds the secret to the mass of neutrinos		Stars strip away atmospheres of nearby super-Earths		Quantum effects affect the best superconductor		ORNL neutron 'splashes' reveal signature of exotic particles
Exotic quantum effects can govern the chemistry around us		Are cosmic rays the key to galaxy formation		The Missing Brown Dwarfs		Mysterious alignment of black holes discovered		Artificial comet holds clues to the origin of life

Changing the color of single photons in a diamond quantum memory

1917 astronomical plate has first-ever evidence of exoplanetary system

How to reach Alpha Centauri in just 20 years

New tool refines exoplanet search

Solar storm researchers prepare for the 'big one' with new urgency

Cooked planets shrink due to radiation

Lunar lava tubes could help pave way for human colony

More accurately measuring distances between planetary nebulae and Earth

Behemoth black hole found in an unlikely place

Glass beads, meteorite fragments hold secret to working on asteroids

When will a neutron star collapse to a black hole

Saturn spacecraft not affected by hypothetical Planet 9

SwRI-led team identifies clathrate ices in comet 67P

Gravitational waves offer insights into galaxy evolution and mergers

Space weather satellite ICON on course for summer 2017 launch

The colour-changing comet

Young, unattached Jupiter analog found in solar neighborhood

GenDyn completes Space Fence radar array structure

The 'R' in RNA is likely abundant in space, scientists say

An Oasis in the brown dwarf desert - astronomers surprised, relieved

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