The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago by at least two meteorite impacts, rather than a single strike, a new study suggests.

Previously, scientists had identified a huge impact crater in the Gulf of Mexico as the event that spelled doom for the dinosaurs.

Now evidence for a second impact in the Ukraine has been uncovered. This raises the possibility that the Earth may have been bombarded by a whole shower of meteorites.

The new findings are published in the journal Geology by a team lead by Professor David Jolley of Aberdeen University.

When first proposed in 1980, the idea that a meteorite impact had killed the dinosaurs proved hugely controversial. Later, the discovery of the Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico, US, was hailed as "the smoking gun" that confirmed the theory.

Several US media outlets have reported that NASA was warning the massive flare this month was just a precursor to a massive solar storm building that had the potential to wipe out the entire planet's power grid.

Despite its rebuttal, NASA's been watching out for this storm since 2006 and reports from the US this week claim the storms could hit on that most Hollywood of disaster dates - 2012.

Similar storms back in 1859 and 1921 caused worldwide chaos, wiping out telegraph wires on a massive scale. The 2012 storm has the potential to be even more disruptive.

"The general consensus among general astronomers (and certainly solar astronomers) is that this coming Solar maximum (2012 but possibly later into 2013) will be the most violent in 100 years," News.com.au quoted astronomy lecturer and columnist Dave Reneke as saying.

A galactic "super-volcano" in the massive galaxy M87 is erupting and blasting gas outwards, as witnessed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NSF's Very Large Array. The cosmic volcano is being driven by a giant black hole in the galaxy's center and preventing hundreds of millions of new stars from forming

Astronomers studying this black hole and its effects have been struck by the remarkable similarities between it and a volcano in Iceland that made headlines earlier this year.

At a distance of about 50 million light years, M87 is relatively close to Earth and lies at the center of the Virgo cluster, which contains thousands of galaxies. M87's location, coupled with long observations over Chandra's lifetime, has made it an excellent subject for investigations of how a massive black hole impacts its environment. [ SCIENCE DAILY ]

The proposal is dubbed ATLAS short for the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System and calls for two telescopes to serve as an early warning system against incoming asteroids. Scientists hope such a system could provide many hours or days notice of an impending Earth impact.

Leading the ATLAS effort here are space scientists John Tonry and Robert Jedicke of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii.

As sketched out, the proposed ATLAS project would include two observatories separated by about 60 miles that can simultaneously scan the entire night sky visible from their locations twice a night. Each observatory would be composed of four commercially available telescopes, with two at each site observing the same region of the sky. ( 5 reasons to care about asteroids.) [ MSNBC ]

The 2010 Perseid meteor shower lived up to its promise of a meteor per minute just before dawn Friday, providing an excellent celestial spectacle for people around the globe who had dark and clear skies.

"In Iran, the Perseid meteor shower was great," Mohammad Reza Zaman Sani told Spaceweather.com.

Another observer, Anthony in Florida, was one of several who noticed that the meteors sometimes came in bursts. "There would be a few minutes of nothing, then 1, 2, 3 in a row," he said, writing (without his last name) on Meteorobs, a website that tracks meteor observations.

"We had a nice show in Norway even though the sky was still not completely dark," said Runar Sandnes on Spaceweather.com. "Meteors came sometimes in showers of 2 or 3." [ MSNBC ]

An amazing display from the Perseid meteor shower is expected in the coming days offering one of the best opportunities in years to see the night sky lit up with fragments of Comet Swift-Tuttle. A lack of moonlight this year will allow stargazers to easily view the annual event with the naked eye.

Every 133 years Comet Swift-Tuttle makes a pass through the inner solar system spewing dust and gravel behind it. According to NASA, the debris zone is so wide that the Earth spends weeks inside of it.

The fragments from the comet slam into our atmosphere at an astounding 144,000 miles per hour and light up the night sky as they burn up. Most of these meteoroids are the size of grains of sand but some can be as large as marbles. Called Perseids because they seem to fly out of the constellation Perseus in the northeast August sky, the end result is a bevy of shooting stars across the night sky. .

For the 2010 show, the moon will not be up during the pre-dawn hours allowing a very dark sky to show off the meteors as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. At its peak, observers this year may see as many as 100 Perseids per hour. [ EXAMINER ]

Stephen Hawking has warned that unless the human race colonizes space within the next two centuries it will disappear forever.

The famous astrophysicist says that our only chance for long-term survival is to move away from Earth and begin to inhabit new planets.

In an interview with website Big Think, Hawking said he was an ‘optimist’ but the next few hundred years had to be negotiated carefully if the human race is to survive.

He said: 'I see great danger for the human race. There have been a number of times in the past when survival has been a question of touch and go. The Cuban missile crisis in 1963 is one of these. ‘The frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future. We shall need great care and judgment to negotiate them all successfully.’

Scientists using NASA's THEMIS mission have come across a new form of space weather. They have dubbed it a "spacequake"

A spacequake - a strong vibration in the planet's magnetic field - can affect auroras and generate "space twisters" powerful enough to bring down power lines.

In general, Earth's magnetic field lines can be thought of as rubber bands stretched taut by the solar wind, which is actually charged particles flowing in all directions from the sun, said study co-author Vassilis Angelopoulos, a space physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Earth's magnetic tail is the part of the field that's stretched out like a windsock by the sun's steady bombardment.

One of the fastest big solar eruptions in years has been observed streaking away from the sun at more than 2.2 million mph by two NASA spacecraft.

The flare occurred Aug. 1 and created a massive sun eruption called a coronal mass ejection that struck Earth's magnetic field Tuesday, creating dazzling aurora displays. NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft recorded the eruption and beamed images of the sun storm back to Earth. ( Photo of the sun eruption.)

The material ejected from the sun was seen speeding toward Earth at more than 1,000 kilometers per second, or just over 2.2 million mph. Another wave from the event was expected to hit Earth's magnetic field on Wednesday. NASA's two STEREO spacecraft, which monitor the sun's weather in 3-D, also recorded a video of the sun eruption.

Astronomers have for the first time obtained a 3D view of the aftermath of a star exploding (which is known as a supernova).

The team used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to study the supernova 1987A, which lies 168,000 light-years away.

The results show the original blast was very powerful and concentrated in one particular direction.

Seen in 1987, it was the first supernova visible with the naked eye to have been observed for some 383 years.

The 3-D view shows the explosion was stronger and faster in some directions than others, leading to an irregular shape with some parts stretching further out into space.

Earth is bracing for a cosmic tsunami Tuesday night as tons of plasma from a massive solar flare head directly toward the planet. 

The Sun's surface erupted early Sunday morning, shooting a wall of ionized atoms directly at Earth, scientists say. It is expected to create a geomagnetic storm and a spectacular light show -- and it could pose a threat to satellites in orbit, as well. 

"This eruption is directed right at us and is expected to get here early in the day on Aug. 4," said Leon Golub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "It's the first major Earth-directed eruption in quite some time."

The solar eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, was spotted by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory , which captures high-definition views of the sun at a variety of wavelengths. SDO was launched in February and peers deep into the layers of the sun, investigating the mysteries of its inner workings. [ FOX NEWS ]

That's because of two minor solar storms that flared on Sunday and are shooting tons of plasma directly at Earth.

Scientists said residents of northern regions — from Maine to Michigan and anywhere farther north around the globe — may see unusual northern lights.

Usually only regions closer to the Arctic can see the aurora of rippling reds and greens, but solar storms pull them south.

The federal Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., said the plasma will likely arrive late Tuesday night or early Wednesday. The storms are not much of a threat to satellites or power grids.

Until recently, the sun was in a phase with few storms. [ YAHOO NEWS ]

The potentially hazardous asteroid '(101955) 1999 RQ36' has a one-in-a-thousand chance of impacting the Earth, and more than half of this probability indicates that this could happen in the year 2182, based on a global study in which Spanish researchers have been involved. Knowing this fact may help design in advance mechanisms aimed at deviating the asteroid's path.

"The total impact probability of asteroid '(101955) 1999 RQ36' can be estimated in 0.00092 -- approximately one-in-a-thousand chance -- but what is most surprising is that over half of this chance (0.00054) corresponds to 2182," explains María Eugenia Sansaturio, co-author of the study and researcher of Universidad de Valladolid (UVA). The research also involved scientists from the University of Pisa (Italy), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (USA) and INAF-IASF-Rome (Italy).

Scientists have estimated and monitored the potential impacts for this asteroid through 2200 by means of two mathematical models (Monte Carlo Method and line of variations sampling). Thus, the so called Virtual Impactors (VIs) have been searched. VIs are sets of statistical uncertainty leading to collisions with the Earth on different dates of the XXII century. Two VIs appear in 2182 with more than half the chance of impact.

Like an earthquake in space, so-called spacequakes are temblors in Earth's magnetic field caused by plasma flying off the sun that could help generate the colorful auroras that dance high in Earth's atmosphere, a new study suggests.

While felt most strongly in Earth orbit, these quakes can also reach all the way down to the surface of Earth itself.

"Magnetic reverberations have been detected at ground stations all around the globe, much like seismic detectors measure a large earthquake," said Vassilis Angelopoulos of UCLA, principle investigator of NASA's THEMIS spacecraft. And these rumbles can pack a punch.

Scientists celebrated Sunday after finding more than 700 suspected new planets -- including up to 140 similar in size to Earth -- in just six weeks of using a powerful new space observatory.

Early results from NASA’s Kepler Mission, a small satellite observing deep space, suggested planets like Earth were far more common than previously thought.

Past discoveries suggested most planets outside our solar system were gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn -- but the new evidence tipped the balance in favor of solid worlds.

A camera riding on the world's first deep space solar sail has caught managed to observe a violent gamma-ray burst, one of the most powerful explosions in the universe, Japanese space officials have announced.

The Ikaros solar sail detected the first gamma-ray burst with its onboard Gamma-ray burst Polarized light detector (GAP) on July 7, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in an announcement.

Gamma-ray bursts are the dying explosion of large stars that have run out of fuel. The collapsing star cores can form either black holes or neutron stars, and emit an intense burst of high-energy gamma-rays. [ MSNBC ]

In this negative image of the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101), red squares mark the positions of "super-soft" X-ray sources. The Pinwheel should contain hundreds of accreting white dwarfs on which nuclear fusion is occurring, which should produce prodigious X-rays. Yet detected are only a few dozen super-soft X-ray sources.

Why certain stars explode in supernovas is a mystery to scientists, and a new study finds the situation is even murkier than thought because some of the light from these stars may be blocked.

To understand more about these cosmic explosions, astronomers are hunting for ticking time bombs stars that are on the track toward becoming supernovas. Yet the missing light could make the search even harder.

Death of a star

Supernovas mark the death of a star, when it stops shining light created through nuclear fusion and instead collapses into an extremely dense black hole.

A subset of supernovas called Type Ia supernovas are the gold standard in astronomy. They are thought to erupt when a dense, dim star called a white dwarf hits a certain upper limit in mass and explodes.

Thus, each white dwarf erupting in a Type Ia supernova will shine at roughly the same brightness. This allows astronomers to spot them across the universe and tell how far away they are by how bright they appear, compared to their known intrinsic luminosity. (They are called "standard candles," for this special distance measuring feature.)

But astronomers are still confused by just what cases white dwarfs to hit that mass limit and explode. MSNBC

Scientists say the sun's volative behavior could cause widespread problems on Earth.

The sun's erratic and sometimes volatile behavior has the potential to cause real problems here on Earth, and protecting our planet will require an international effort - according to scientists who gathered recently for a meeting about the effects of solar activity.

Streams of charged particles that fly off the sun can interfere with electronics on Earth and satellites orbiting our planet. For example, during a particularly intense solar storm in 1989, power to an entire Canadian province was knocked out. Since then, other storms have knocked a handful of satellites out of service.

With Earth becoming more and more dependent on technology, the risk from solar flares is only going up, according to experts.

More than 25,000 new asteroids have been discovered in just six months by Nasa’s newest space telescope.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has discovered 95 of these asteroids are classified as ‘near-Earth' objects , meaning roughly 30 million miles from the planet. WISE completed its first survey of the entire sky on Saturday and has generated more than one million images so far, of everything from asteroids to distant galaxies.

Life on Earth is wiped out every 27 million years - and we have about 16 million years left until the next extinction, according to scientists.

Research into so-called ‘extinction events ’ for our planet over the past 500 million years  - twice as long as any previous studies  - has proved that they crop up with metronomic regularity.

Scientists from the University of Kansas and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC are 99 per cent confident that there are extinctions every 27 million years.

In the 1980s scientists believed that Earth’s regular extinctions could be the result of a distant dark twin of the Sun, called Nemesis.

The theory was that Nemesis crashed through the Oort cloud every 27 million years and sent a shower of comets in our direction.

The Oort cloud is a vast  belt of dust and ice that is believed to lie around one light year from the Sun and is the origin of many of the comets that pass through our solar system.

But now scientists claim that the regularity of the mass extinctions actually disproves the Nemesis theory because its orbit would have changed over time as it interacted with other stars.

A powerful NASA spacecraft has caught a cluster of glowing magnetic loops bursting from the sun while watching a particularly active solar hotspot.

The new views of the sun were recorded by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in the extreme ultraviolet range of the light spectrum over several days, beginning July 6. A video still of the arcing magnetic loops was recently released by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The arcing solar material is blazing-white at the sun's surface, then fades to dull, hot orange near the apex. Smoky wisps blur the outlines of larger loops, while smaller ones appear to vanish among the bright, crowded others. The arcs are the routes taken by solar particles following the whipping loops ever-changing magnetic field lines on the surface of the sun. Small solar flares, hidden from SDO's view, also emerged from the sun in this area of intense activity. [ MSNBC NEWS ]

No one knows when the very first life on Earth appeared – though what little evidence scientists have indicates that life was present not very long after our planet formed.

Fossil hunters are continually scouring the globe for rocks betraying signs of even more ancient life forms, and controversy reigns over claims of the earliest evidence for life.

One such fossil hunter is Nora Noffke, a trace fossil sedimentologist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. Noffke and team recently found rocks in South Africa with evidence of cyanobacteria dating from 2.9 billion years ago, which is the oldest confirmed evidence of these life forms. Cyanobacteria is a type of single-celled bacteria – still thriving on the Earth today – that gains its energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.

The Earth itself is thought to be about 4.5 billion years old. [ LIVE SCIENCE ]

Why should we, as a race, support human spaceflight? This is one of the key questions hanging over the world's space agencies in these hard economic times. It turns out that one answer is very simple: to protect Earth from civilization-ending asteroid impacts .

Recently, President Obama spoke at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) to announce his new proposed direction for the US space agency: skip the moon, send man to a near-Earth asteroid (NEO) by the mid 2020's and use this new technological know-how to get humans to our ultimate goal — Mars.

Although the reasons for landing astronauts on asteroids are sound, NASA's proposed redirection has been met with fierce opposition. Most of this opposition is purely political, but the message is clear: We're no closer to replacing the space shuttle and there's no clear incentive to support an expensive manned space program. Just because we've proven we can live in space for long periods, for many policy makers, it doesn't mean we need to do it. Unfortunately, we probably won't understand the need to push into space until it is far too late . [ MSNBC ]