Explore some of the mysteries of the cosmos. These news articles deal with all things science and astronomy. Black holes, gamma ray bursts, supernovas etc.
Scientists said Friday they had found remains of a meteor that illuminated the sky before falling to earth in western Canada earlier this month.
University of Calgary scientist Alan Hildebrand and graduate student Ellen Milley found several meteor fragments near the Battle River along the rural Alberta-Saskatchewan border, near the city of Lloydminster late Thursday.
They said there could be thousands of meteorite pieces strewn over a 7-square-mile area of mostly flat, barren land, with few inhabitants.
A massive ball of fire that lit up the skies over two Western Canadian provinces on Thursday evening was likely among the biggest meteor events to be witnessed in Canada this year, one expert said.
The fireball, which streaked through the darkening skies over Alberta and Saskatchewan at about 5:30 p.m. Calgary time, likely weighed between 1 and 10 tons and shone brightly enough to be seen over an area 435 miles (700 kilometers) wide. "It was somewhere between the size of a chair to the size of a desk," said Alan Hildebrand, a planetary scientist at the University of Calgary and a coordinator of a fireball reporting service.
Long before New York City was the Big Apple, or even New Amsterdam, a giant tsunami crashed ashore.
It was 2,300 years ago. The Palisades that frame the Hudson River were whisper-quiet, the sandy beaches of Long Island and New Jersey empty, and Manhattan was still just an unbroken sylvan carpet.
Then came the mammoth wave, roaring into the serenity. No one knows for sure what caused it, but new clues found in the Hudson's silt suggest an asteroid 100 meters (330 feet) in diameter slammed into the Atlantic Ocean nearby.
Deep in Mars' past, an asteroid struck the planet with such titanic force that it could've killed off the planet's entire magnetic field, according to a new study.
When the Red Planet formed, it is thought to have been much like a young Earth — hot, full of water, and roaring with a molten, churning core and mantle. The liquid rock and metal formed a magnetic dynamo that helped protect its surface and thick atmosphere from cosmic radiation.
Then, beginning around 4.2 billion years ago, it was suddenly pummeled with at least 20 asteroids between 124 and 311 miles in diameter, each leaving a crater. By contrast, the object thought to have killed of the dinosaurs on Earth is estimated to have been five to six miles wide.
If you think the Wall Street meltdown is bad, consider this: Chicken Little was right.
Giant rocks from space are hurtling toward us, on track to clobber our planet. But don't panic. Scientists say the next killer asteroid - unlike those that pummeled us in the past - can be deflected if we know about it far enough in advance.
So while many of us sleep, two Bay Area astronomers have recently begun standing sentinel against the cosmic cannonballs that could smash into Earth . Their big eye is "Nellie," the 36-inch reflecting telescope at the Chabot Space & Science Center in the Oakland hills.
The LHC has been in construction for some 13 years
Scientists have hailed a successful switch-on for an enormous experiment which will recreate the conditions a few moments after the Big Bang.
They have now fired two beams of particles called protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The £5bn machine on the Swiss-French border is designed to smash protons together with cataclysmic force.
Scientists hope it will shed light on fundamental questions in physics.
The first - clockwise - beam completed its first circuit of the underground tunnel at just before 0930 BST. The second - anti-clockwise - beam successfully circled the ring after 1400 BST.
Be a bit of a pain if it did, wouldn't it? And the most frustrating thing is that we won't know for sure either way until the European laboratory for particle physics (Cern) in Geneva switches on its Large Hadron Collider the day after tomorrow.
If you think it's unlikely that we will all be sucked into a giant black hole that will swallow the world, as German chemistry professor Otto Rössler of the University of Tübingen posits, and so carry on with your life as normal, only to find out that it's true, you'll be a bit miffed, won't you?
If, on the other hand, you disagree with theoretical physicist Prof Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith of the UK Atomic Energy Agency, who argues that fears of possible global self-ingestion have been exaggerated, and decide to live the next two days as if they were your last, and then nothing whatsoever happens, you'd feel a bit of a fool too.
Yes, but what is it? That has been many people's reaction to the furore over the Large Hadron Collider, due to be switched on this Wednesday. The biggest, most expensive experiment in history is attracting both scientific hyperbole and hysteria. Some say it will reveal the universe's secrets and lead to the elusive Theory of Everything. A few fear that unleashing unimaginable power beneath the Swiss countryside will result in the end of the world. But how? And what do all these words mean?
"Some scientists, on the other hand, went to the European Court for Human Rights to try to stop the collider being turned on. They fear it may create a black hole – which would certainly violate our rights by sucking the planet into... well we don't really know. Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith of Cern says: "The chance we produce a black hole is minuscule." Which is not all that reassuring. But he adds: "Even if we do, it can't swallow up the Earth." It would be too small, and disappear in moments. In any case, they will only send the hadrons in one direction this week. The collisions start in October. Until then, at least, we're not all doomed. "
Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on earth.
The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.
The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth.According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.
New Orleans evacuees scattered across the country were eager to return home after their city was largely spared by Hurricane Gustav, but Mayor Ray Nagin warned they may have to wait in shelters and motels a few days longer.
The city's improved levee system helped avert a disaster like Hurricane Katrina, which flooded most of the city, and officials got an assist from a disorganized and weakened Gustav, which came ashore about 72 miles southwest of the city Monday morning. Eight deaths were attributed to the storm in the U.S. after it killed at least 94 people across the Caribbean.
But New Orleans was still a city that took a glancing blow from a hurricane: A mandatory evacuation order and curfew remained in effect. And though few people were left in the city, nearly 80,000 homes remained without power after the storm damaged transmission lines that snapped like rubber bands in the wind and knocked 35 substations out of service.The city's sewer system was damaged, and hospitals were working with skeleton crews on backup power. Drinking water continued to flow in the city and the pumps that keep it dry never shut down - two critical service failings that contributed to Katrina's toll.
Gustav was downgraded to a tropical depression early Tuesday, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said. At 5 a.m. EDT, the storm's maximum sustained winds had decreased to near 35 mph, but forecasters issued flood warnings for northern Louisiana and East Texas, where up to 8 inches of rain was expected. The storm's center was located about 135 miles northwest of Lafayette and was moving northwest at about 10 mph.
Astronomers are battling to work out the trajectory of an asteroid that will cause havoc if it hits the Earth in 2036. Called Apophis, the giant meteor is hurtling through space at 10km per second. Scientists are warning that an impact would be far more devastating than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of WW2. At the Zvenigorod Observatory near Moscow, space researchers keep watch on cosmic bodies and study known meteorites to understand their size and inner structure. They are tracking the path of the asteroid Apophis as well. They aim to determine how real the danger is but that will only be clear in a decade's time.
Astronomer Sergey Barabanov explains the predicted course of events: “The critical moment will be in 2029, when Apophis passes so close to Earth that it will be visible to the naked eye. The consequence of this fly-by will tell us whether it will come back again and collide with us in 2036,” he said.
If Apophis passes through a particular point in space called a keyhole the Earth's gravity may change its course for the worst. In ancient Egypt, Apophis was the spirit of evil and destruction, a snakelike demon determined to plunge the world into eternal darkness. A fitting name, then, for a menace that could potentially cause devastating global damage. Nasa estimates the blast caused by Apophis would be a 100,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of WW2.
The solar superstorm of 1859 was the fiercest ever recorded. Auroras filled the sky as far south as the Caribbean, magnetic compasses went haywire and telegraph systems failed.
Ice cores suggest that such a blast of solar particles happens only once every 500 years, but even the storms every 50 years could fry satellites, jam radios and cause coast-to-coast blackouts.
The cost of such an event justifies more systematic solar monitoring and beefier protection for satellites and the power grid.
The impact of the 1859 storm was muted only by the infancy of our technological civilization at that time. Were it to happen today, it could severely damage satellites, disable radio communications and cause continent-wide electrical blackouts that would require weeks or longer to recover from. Although a storm of that magnitude is a comfortably rare once-in-500-years event, those with half its intensity hit every 50 years or so. The last one, which occurred on November 13, 1960, led to worldwide geomagnetic disturbances and radio outages. If we make no preparations, by some calculations the direct and indirect costs of another superstorm could equal that of a major hurricane or earthquake .
June 30, 1908, 7:14 a.m., central Siberia—Semen Semenov, a local farmer, saw “the sky split in two. Fire appeared high and wide over the forest.... From ... where the fire was, came strong heat.... Then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few yards.... After that such noise came, as if . . . cannons were firing, the earth shook ...”
Such is the harrowing testimony of one of the closest eyewitnesses to what scientists call the Tunguska event , the largest impact of a cosmic body to occur on the earth during modern human history . Semenov experienced a raging conflagration some 65 kilometers (40 miles) from ground zero, but the effects of the blast rippled out far into northern Europe and Central Asia as well. Some people saw massive, silvery clouds and brilliant, colored sunsets on the horizon, whereas others witnessed luminescent skies at night—Londoners, for instance, could plainly read newsprint at midnight without artificial lights. Geophysical observatories placed the source of the anomalous seismic and pressure waves they had recorded in a remote section of Siberia. The epicenter lay close to the river Podkamennaya Tunguska, an uninhabited area of swampy taiga forest that stays frozen for eight or nine months of the year. Ever since the Tunguska event, scientists and lay enthusiasts alike have wondered what caused it. Although most observers generally accept that some kind of cosmic body, either an asteroid or a comet, exploded in the sky above Siberia , no one has yet found fragments of the object or any impact craters in the affected region. The mystery remains unsolved, but our research team, only the latest of a steady stream of investigators who have scoured the area, may be closing in on a discovery that will change our understanding of what happened that fateful morning.
The true impact of an asteroid or comet crashing near the Chesapeake Bay 35 million years ago has been examined in detail for the first time. The analysis reveals the resilience of life in the aftermath of disaster.
The impact crater, which is buried under 400 to 1,200 feet (120 to 365 meters) of sand, silt and clay, spans twice the length of Manhattan. The sprawling depression helped create what would eventually become Chesapeake Bay. About 10,000 years ago, ice sheets began to melt and once-dry river valleys filled with water. The rivers of the Chesapeake region converged directly over the buried crater, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Gregory Gohn of the USGS and his colleagues analyzed samples from two deep holes drilled into the crater near its center.
Within seconds of the object's touchdown, rocks were flung high into the air. The force of the impact carved a colossal cavity and caused temperatures to skyrocket, turning brittle rocks into taffy. Then, material along the cavity's rim surged downhill into the bowl-shaped depression like an avalanche. The extreme heat, the researchers say, killed off most life . However, they found abundant microbes living today in the deepest parts of the crater. Some of the ancient bacteria would have survived the impact, the researchers say, because their little hideouts didn't feel the brunt of the heat. The rest of the abundant and newly discovered microbial life is thought to have recolonized the zapped area possibly tens of thousands of years following the impact when temperatures dropped to habitable levels.
As fuel prices soar, Alaskan officials announced the exploration of the state's volcanoes, saying they could be exploited to provide energy for thousands of homes.
'High prices and climate change are definitely creating a renaissance in geothermal interest'
Companies are being invited to lease the rights to explore geothermal resources beneath Mount Spurr, a snowcapped 11,070-foot volcano that most recently erupted in 1992 showering much of Anchorage with volcanic ash.
The state Division of Oil and Gas hopes the lease sale, due to go ahead in August, will be the first of many. It is also considering allowing exploration of the 4,134-foot Augustine Volcano, 171 miles southwest of Anchorage.
The move echoes a trend underway across much of the US as fuel prices, worries about dependence on foreign oil and climate change trigger a surge in geothermal projects, particularly in the West and along the Gulf Coast.
According to experts, America is only just waking up to the ancient power source lying beneath dozens of states that has the potential to supply as much as 25 percent of the nation's energy needs.
"High prices and climate change are definitely creating a renaissance in geothermal interest, particularly on a state and local level," said Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association.
"There really is a tremendous amount going on right now."
The puzzle of why the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars look so different may now have been solved.
Mars' crust is thicker in the southern hemisphere, and magnetic anomalies are found in the south but not the north.
New studies in Nature magazine suggest that a massive space rock smashing into the planet could have created an abrupt disparity between the two halves.
This asteroid would have been close to the size of Earth's moon and hit Mars' northern regions, scientists say.
According to one group of researchers, the rock struck with an energy equivalent to one million billion atomic bombs like the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
Mars' northern hemisphere is an enormous lowland basin which might once have held a mighty ocean.
Our planet is not at risk from the world's most powerful particle physics experiment, a report has concluded.
The document addresses fears that the Large Hadron Collider is so energetic, it could have unforeseen consequences.
Critics are worried that mini-black holes made at the soon-to-open facility on the French-Swiss border might threaten the Earth's very existence.
But the report, issued the European Organization for Nuclear Research, says there is "no conceivable danger". The organization - known better by its French acronym, Cern - will operate the collider underground in a 27km-long tunnel near Geneva.
This Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a powerful and complicated machine, which will smash together protons at super-fast speeds in a bid to unlock the secrets of the Universe.
The building blocks of genes have been found in a meteorite, raising the prospect of life originating with the aid of extraterrestrial molecules that came from space more than 3.6 billion years ago.
Scientists have found that the meteorite contains complex organic chemicals which can be used to make self-replicating molecules that are the essential genetic ingredient of all known lifeforms – DNA and RNA.
Although organic molecules such as sugars and amino acids have been found in meteorites before, it is the first time scientists have found evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial compounds that can be used to make genes. The two substances are called uracil and xanthine and they are the precursors of the building-block molecules, known as nucleobases, that help store and transmit genetic information from one generation to the next – one of the vital signs of life.
Scientists found the two building blocks during analysis of a meteorite that fell near the Australian town of Murchison on 28 September 1969. The Murchison meteorite had already been shown to contain sugars and phosphates, two other essential ingredients of DNA and RNA.
A space telescope built to observe the most violent events in the universe has been given the all-clear to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida today.
Nasa's Glast mission will scour the universe for gamma rays, which are released by supermassive black holes, merging neutron stars and streams of hot gas that hurtle through space at tremendous speeds.
The $690m space observatory will take pictures of the gamma ray universe, shedding light on mysteries such as the source of cosmic rays and how black holes can accelerate immense jets of material to nearly the speed of light.
The US space agency has set a launch window for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (Glast) between 16.45 and 18.40 BST (11.45am and 1.40pm EDT), but said there was a 40% chance that bad weather would delay the mission.
To misquote the opening credits of Star Wars, these spectacular images show interstellar car-crashes happening a long time ago, in a place that's far, far away. Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, they capture various points in the collision process between two galaxies, which can take hundreds of millions of years to go from start to finish.
Galaxy mergers were more common in the early universe than they are now, and are thought to have been one of the principal driving forces for cosmic evolution, from the frenetic births of stars to their explosive deaths. Indeed, our own Milky Way galaxy is currently absorbing the smaller Sagittarius dwarf elliptical galaxy, and will in turn be merged with our bigger neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy.
The interaction of two galaxies is driven by the tidal pull of gravity, which draws the massive objects together (though actual collisions between stars are rare, as most of a galaxy is empty space). The billions of stars in each galaxy move individually, so that the interweaving tidal forces produce intricate and varied effects as the galaxies gradually coalesce.
Their work shows that the size of the meteorite that likely plummeted to Earth at the time of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary 65 million years ago was four to six kilometers in diameter. The meteorite was the trigger, scientists believe, for the mass extinction of dinosaurs and other life forms.
François Paquay, a geologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM), used variations (isotopes) of the rare element osmium in sediments at the ocean bottom to estimate the size of these meteorites. The results are published in this week's issue of the journal Science. When meteorites collide with Earth, they carry a different osmium isotope ratio than the levels normally seen throughout the oceans.
"The vaporization of meteorites carries a pulse of this rare element into the area where they landed," says Rodey Batiza of the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research along with NSF's Division of Earth Sciences. "The osmium mixes throughout the ocean quickly. Records of these impact-induced changes in ocean chemistry are then preserved in deep-sea sediments."
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs may not have been the whopper scientists thought.
Analysis of chemical remains of the asteroid that can still be found in sediments under the sea shows the rock was about 2.5 miles wide, according to Francois Paquay, a geology graduate student at the University of Hawaii.
That is significantly less than the up-to-12-mile-wide space boulder that past researchers have suggested was the dinosaur-killer, according to research published Friday in the journal Science.
Quasars are the most destructive forces in the universe – and a newly discovered one could be the most powerful of all.
It looks like an image from a Star Wars film – the destruction of the Death Star , perhaps. But in fact this is real. Published yesterday by the European Space Agency, it shows a vast quasar destroying a galaxy far, far away. It's certainly among the most powerful quasars ever discovered, and if, as thought, it proves to be the mightiest of all, then this image will represent the most awesome force ever witnessed in the universe.
Of all the strange objects in the heavens, quasars are among the most fascinating. Thought to number about 100,000 in total, they are among the most mysterious, distant and significant objects in the universe. First discovered in the 1950s, they are scenes of cataclysmic violence . They are also the most distant objects we have ever seen. When the universe was young, quasars were common, but due to the extraordinary distances involved, and the time their light takes to reach us, we can still see them, burning bright. Thankfully, quasars do not occur today. If they did, we wouldn't be here.
A quasar consists of a black hole surrounded by super-heated gas that gives off prodigious amounts of radiation. Just to hint at the scales involved, the black hole at the centre of the quasar pictured here is a billion times the mass of our own Sun. Quasars begin life as distant galaxies, and eventually they collapse, and the galaxy and gas is swallowed by the black hole .
'Tsunami' speeds through the Sun's atmosphere (Nasa Stereo Consortium)
Astronomers have captured the first footage of a solar "tsunami" hurtling through the Sun's atmosphere at over a million kilometres per hour. The event was captured by Nasa's twin Stereo spacecraft designed to make 3D images of our parent star. Naturally, this type of tsunami does not involve water; instead, it is a wave of pressure that travels across the Sun very fast.
Science + Astronomy 
Explore some of the mysteries of the cosmos. These news articles deal with all things science and astronomy. Black holes, gamma ray bursts, supernovas etc.
