2015 Nobel Science Prizes Announced
The 2015 Nobel Prizes for Physiology or Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry were announced this week in Sweden. On Monday (10/5/15) the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet said this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine has been awarded to three scientists who developed unique therapies for fighting parasitic diseases that especially impact the world’s […]
Stephen Hawking: There May Be a Way Out of a Black Hole
Yesterday, renowned physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, speaking to attendees of a conference being held at Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, proposed a new idea that addresses a forty-year old cosmological mystery called the Black Hole Information Paradox. Simply put, the basis for the paradox is the conflict between quantum mechanics and the theory […]
Close Call for ISS; Threat to Polar Bears; Binary System Cannibal
ISS Crewmembers Back to Work after Close Call with Space Junk Fear that a floating piece of space junk could impact the ISS sent astronauts the station’s crew scrambling onto a docked Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft on Friday (07/17). Luckily, the debris passed the station harmlessly, and the crew was back at work. Houston’s Mission Control […]
June 2015 Science Images
Ultra-Dark Galaxies; Exoplanet With Comet-Like Tail; New Dinosaur Species
Astronomers Find Huge Treasure Trove of Ultra-Dark Galaxies U.S. and Japanese researchers have discovered 854 “ultra dark galaxies” located within the Coma Cluster, about 321 million light years from Earth. Dark galaxies are described as those that are totally composed of or are mostly filled with dark matter, which cannot be seen by telescopes. Nevertheless, […]
Science Scanner: Monster Galaxy; Mars Missions On Vacation
Monster Galaxy Found Near Edge of Universe A group of researchers imaged a “monstrous galaxy” – SDP.81, located some 11.7 billion light-years from Earth, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile and a natural magnification method called “gravitational lensing.” The researchers used the gravity of a massive galaxy 3.4 billion light-years away to […]
Science Images from May 2015
Astronomers Observe Exoplanet Temperatures Swinging Wildly
For the first time ever, scientists in the United Kingdom detected temperature fluctuations on a super-Earth exoplanet – 55 Cancri e, the so-called “diamond planet.” Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to study the rocky exoplanet’s thermal radiation over a two-year period, researchers led by the University of Cambridge found that the temperature on the side […]
Calling ET: NASA Expands Search for Alien Life
The search for life beyond our own solar system has taken a major step forward with a new interdisciplinary research coalition devoted to the search for life in the cosmos. Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) will be made up of research teams from several NASA facilities, 10 U.S. universities and two research institutions, according […]