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Stormy Stars? NASA’s Spitzer Probes Weather on Brown Dwarfs

By Guest PostJanuary 8, 2014Scienceatmosphere, brown dwarfs, daniel apai, davin flateau, earth, gravity, great red spot, jupiter, mark marley, NASA, other worlds, solar system, spitzer, stanimir metchev, stormy stars, thermal glow, undiscovered planet, university of arizona, weather

Swirling, stormy clouds may be ever-present on cool celestial orbs called brown dwarfs. New observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that most brown dwarfs are roiling with one or more planet-size storms akin to Jupiter’s “Great Red Spot.”

“As the brown dwarfs spin on their axis, the alternation of what we think are cloud-free and cloudy regions produces a periodic brightness variation that we can observe,” said Stanimir Metchev of the University of Western Ontario, Canada. “These are signs of patchiness in the cloud cover.” (more…)

NASA’s Kepler Provides Insights on Enigmatic Planets

By Guest PostJanuary 7, 2014Sciencedoppler data, earth, exoplanet systems, Galaxy, gaseous, geoff marcy, gravitational tug, ji wei xie, kepler, kepler spacecraft, NASA, neptune, orbiting planet, rocky, solar system, transit timing variations, ttv, university of california, university of toronto

More than three-quarters of the planet candidates discovered by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft have sizes ranging from that of Earth to that of Neptune, which is nearly four times as big as Earth. Such planets dominate the galactic census but are not represented in our own solar system. Astronomers don’t know how they form or if they are made of rock, water or gas.

The Kepler team today reports on four years of ground-based follow-up observations targeting Kepler’s exoplanet systems at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington. These observations confirm the numerous Kepler discoveries are indeed planets and yield mass measurements of these enigmatic worlds that vary between Earth and Neptune in size. (more…)

Decade-Old Rover Adventure Continues on Mars and Earth

By Guest PostJanuary 4, 2014Scienceancient environment, austin, bekah sosland, brett williams, columbia hills, earth, endeavour crater, Facebook, fredericksburg, high school teacher, image, john callas, jpl, mars, mars rovers, mars spacecraft, martian history, NASA, opportunity, red surface, rover adventure, rover project, spirit, Twitter, university of texas, water rich

Eighth graders didn’t have Facebook or Twitter to share news back then, in January 2004. Bekah Sosland, 14 at the time, learned about a NASA rover landing on Mars when the bouncing-ball video on the next morning’s Channel One news in her Fredericksburg, Texas, classroom caught her eye.

“I wasn’t particularly interested in space at the time,” she recalled last week inside the spacecraft operations facility where she now works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “I remember I was talking with friends, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed this thing bouncing and rolling on a red surface. I watched as it stopped and opened up, and it had this rover inside.” (more…)

UChicago researchers use Hubble Telescope to reveal cloudy weather on alien world

By Guest PostJanuary 2, 2014Sciencealien world, astronomers, atmosphere, bjorn benneke, clouds, constellation ophiuchus, drake deming, earth, exoplanets, gj 1214b, heavy molecule, high altitude clouds, hubble telescope, jacob bean, jacob l bean, jean michel desert, laura kreidberg, milky way galaxy, NASA, neptune, university of chicago, water vapor

Weather forecasters on exoplanet GJ 1214b would have an easy job. Today’s forecast: cloudy. Tomorrow: overcast. Extended outlook: more clouds.

That’s the implication of a study led by researchers in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago who have definitively characterized the atmosphere of a super-Earth class planet orbiting another star for the first time. (more…)

Scientists solve a decades-old mystery in the Earth’s upper atmosphere

By Guest PostDecember 28, 2013Sciencebinbin ni, chorus, craig kletzing, data driven, decades old mystery, earth, electron acceleration, emfisis, extremely energetic particles, geoff reeves, global wave model, inward, jacob bortnik, james van allen, local stochastic acceleration, low frequency, planetary magnetospheres, qianli ma, radial diffusive transport, radiation belts, radio wave, scientists, solve, space scientist, ultra relativistic electrons, university of iowa, upper atmosphere, van allen

New research published in the journal Nature resolves decades of scientific controversy over the origin of the extremely energetic particles known as ultra-relativistic electrons in the Earth’s near-space environment and is likely to influence our understanding of planetary magnetospheres throughout the universe.

Discovering the processes that control the formation and ultimate loss of these electrons in the Van Allen radiation belts — the rings of highly charged particles that encircle the Earth at a range of about 1,000 to 50,000 kilometers above the planet’s surface — is a primary science objective of the recently launched NASA Van Allen Probes mission. Understanding these mechanisms has important practical applications, because the enormous amounts of radiation trapped within the belts can pose a significant hazard to satellites and spacecraft, as well astronauts performing activities outside a craft. (more…)

Hard rock life

By Guest PostDecember 27, 2013Scienceamerican geophysical union, bigelow laboratories, biofuel, biotechnology research, breakthrough, caribbean ocean, dco, earth, geomicrobiologist, hard rock life, hardened rock, hydrothermal vent, julie huber, matthew schrenk, merja itavaara, michigan state university, microbial denizen, phenomena, ramunas stepanauskas, South Africa, underground in california, vtt finland

Scientists are digging deep into the Earth’s surface collecting census data on the microbial denizens of the hardened rocks. What they’re finding is that, even miles deep and halfway across the globe, many of these communities are somehow quite similar.

The results, which were presented at the American Geophysical Union conference Dec. 8, suggest that these communities may be connected, said Matthew Schrenk, Michigan State University geomicrobiologist. (more…)

A Roly-Poly Pika Gathers Much Moss

By Guest PostDecember 26, 2013Environment, Natureasia, caecal, cascade range, columbia river gorge, denise dearing, douglas fir, earth, eastern europe, energy, forest, great basin, high elevation habitat, high quality protein, jo varner, journal of mammalogy, lagomorpha, low elevation pikas, moss, mountain ranges, nevada, North America, ochotona princeps, oregon, oregon zoo, pellets, rabbit relative, recycling factory, roly poly pika, university of utah, volcanoe, warming climate

High-Fiber Salad Bar May Help Lagomorphs Survive Climate Change

In some mountain ranges, Earth’s warming climate is driving rabbit relatives known as pikas to higher elevations or wiping them out. But University of Utah biologists discovered that roly-poly pikas living in rockslides near sea level in Oregon can survive hot weather by eating more moss than any other mammal.

“Our work shows pikas can eat unusual foods like moss to persist in strange environments,” says biology professor Denise Dearing, senior author of the new study, published online on Dec. 18, 2013 in the February 2014 issue of Journal of Mammalogy. “It suggests that they may be more resistant to climate change than we thought.” (more…)

NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft Obtains Best Views of Saturn Hexagon

By Guest PostDecember 7, 2013Scienceandrew ingersoll, antarctic ozone hole, atmosphere, ball of gas, best views, cassini spacecraft, cloud structures, earth, european space agency, hampton university, hexagon boundary, hurricane, ice caps, italian space agency, kunio sayanagi, motion, NASA, north pole, ozone destroying chemical, rotating storm, saturn, saturn hexagon, saturn summer, scott edgington, solar system, the hexagon, types of particles, virginia, weather patterns

Embedded video from
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution movie yet of a unique six-sided jet stream, known as the hexagon, around Saturn’s north pole. (more…)

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