The strongest evidence yet of water on mars was announced by NASA Monday afternoon.
“Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. “This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water — albeit briny — is flowing today on the surface of Mars.”
Although scientists are not sure where the water comes from, liquid water runs down the crater walls over the summer months and leave dark stains on the Martian terrain that have been measured hundreds of meters downhill before they dry up in the autumn when temperatures drop.
Researchers say the discovery raises the chances of this being home to some form of life.
Two black holes in Virgo are heading for a “massive collision,” Columbia University astronomer Zoltan Haiman said in a Columbia news release posted on Science Daily. Haiman and his colleagues believe the pair of black holes will collide in about 100,000 years, which is virtually tomorrow in cosmic time. The holes are incredibly large: combined, the size of a billion suns,
The pair of black holes orbiting each other in quasar PG 1302-102, about 3.5 billion light-years away are about a light-week or two apart — less than 200 billion miles. Understanding that a light-year is the distance light travels in a year, what astronomers are seeing in PG 1302-102 actually occurred when life had just emerged on Earth.
Black hole mergers are considered to be the most violent events in the universe. When they finally meet, they converge in a type of “death spiral.” Their merger, the astronomers calculated, could release as much energy as 100 million supernova explosions, mostly in the form of violent ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves that would blow the stars out of that hapless galaxy like leaves off a roof.
A meteor that NASA estimates hit the atmosphere at 45,000 miles per hour lit up the Pennsylvania sky Tuesday morning.
The meteor broke up over Kittanning and Brendan Mullen of the Carnegie Science Center said the rock was close to 500 pounds when it blew apart.
“Usually, the whole thing burns up, and that’s what causes shooting stars and things like that. But it’s possible that pieces of this meteor fragmented off, and shattered and scattered all across Kittanning,” he said.
Mullen speculated the asteroid came from the belt that circles the solar system.
“A lot of chunks of space rocks and debris are gravitationally tugged out of their orbit within that ring up there, and find their way into the atmospheres of planets,” Mullen said.
“There’s a lot of meteoroids out there, a lot of space garbage,” Mullen told CBS Pittsburgh. “And a lot of it gets tugged around gravitationally by the planets. And sometimes they get tugged into orbits that intersect the orbits of the planets, like earth.”
An asteroid about 1/3 of a mile in width will rush past earth on January 26th and mark the closest an asteroid of its size will come to Earth until 2027.
The asteroid, 2004 BL86, will pass the planet at a range of 745,000 miles, or three times the distance between the Earth and the moon. That will be the closest this asteroid will come to Earth in our lifetime according to NASA.
“While 2004 BL86 poses no threat to Earth for the foreseeable future, it’s a relatively close approach by a relatively large asteroid, so it provides us a unique opportunity to observe and learn more,” Don Yeomans, of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.
NASA will track the asteroid from the Deep Space Network in Goldstone, California and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
The asteroid was first detected January 30, 2004 in New Mexico by the LINEAR telescope. NASA says it should be visible in the Northern Hemisphere with small telescopes and strong binoculars.
The current weather front in the northern part of the U.S. may have many residents signing up for a mission to Mars.
The high temperature on the red planet on Thursday was 17.6 degrees, warmer than the high temperatures in 14 northern U.S. states.
Residents of northern states have been fighting bitter cold and wind chills that have caused major outbreaks of frostbite. Hospitals have been reporting people coming in for treatment who didn’t realize how bad the bitter cold would impact their bodies.
Winter Storm Gorgon is moving off the U.S. east coast this weekend and warmer temperatures are expected to cover the northern states. However, the resulting front could bring massive amounts of snow to the Great Lakes region with some models showing up to three feet of snow in some areas.
Wind chill readings of below zero were reported as far south as Alabama, Mississippi and North Carolina.
Many school districts around the nation cancelled their classes Thursday because of the dangerous cold. Detroit reported a high of 3 degrees. Green Bay, Wisconsin, where the Packers are to play a playoff football game this weekend, had a high of 6 degrees. International Falls, historically one of the coldest spots in the continental U.S., reached a high of -1.
A giant sunspot on the sun has erupted for the sixth time in a week.
The sunspot, which is 14 times larger than Earth, has erupted with three flares in the last 48 hours.
‘A giant active region on the sun erupted on Oct. 26, 2014, with its sixth substantial flare since Oct. 19,’ NASA said. ‘This flare was classified as an X2-class flare and it peaked at 6:56 a.m. EDT. This is the third X-class flare in 48 hours, erupting from the largest active region seen on the sun in 24 years.”
Christopher Balch of the Space Weather Prediction Center said that the flare had an impact on radio signals that used the upper atmosphere. A few radio communications systems were completely blacked out by the flare for a short time.
The sun has been in an aggressive time of activity after months of almost silence.
The sunspot, which continues to grow, has been described as “menacing” by astronomy experts.
Scientists are tracking an asteroid that is on a collision course with Earth and could end all life on the planet in 2880.
The asteroid apparently is continuing a collision course despite any gravitational factors that should be weighing on it as it passes other celestial objects. Researchers at the University of Tennessee are tracking the object called 1950 DA.
The scientists have already calculated that attempting to blow up the asteroid would not be effective because it would break into smaller pieces that would have the same trajectory and thus cause more significant impacts.
The scientists say that the asteroid’s impact would have the same force as 44,800 megatons of TNT. Tsunamis would swamp the globe and the climate change would be devastating to human life.
The University of Tennessee team found that the asteroid is rotating so rapidly that it “defies gravity”. The forces holding the asteroid together have never been previously detected by scientists.
The findings were published in the journal Nature.
Scientists tracking the sun’s activity say the star has gone quiet and the solar maximum for Solar Cycle 24 has likely ended as one of the weakest in over a century.
The weaker than normal solar cycle means that “space weather” has been relatively benign with geomagnetic storms that were much less than feared in early predictions of the solar maximum.
Scientists are warning, however, that in the downturn of weak solar cycles there is a significant possibility of serious solar storms. Strong solar flares are still possible as the sun begins to wind down over the next few years to the solar minimum.
History also shows that a weaker solar cycle means that temperatures on the Earth will be lower than average.
In the last two major periods of low solar activity, 1645 to 1715 and 1790 to 1830, the Earth recorded below-normal temperatures with the latter era being called a “Little Ice Age.” The weaker solar winds can lead to more clouds that keep the Earth cooler by blocking more solar rays.
Some solar scientists say the next cycle, Cycle #25, could be weaker than this one.
A bright blue and orange object that plunged from the sky and struck the ground with the force of a bomb startled residents of Queensland, Australia.
A resident of Mount Isa, Australia old ABC News that the object was a “blazing light” that was “falling straight down.”
“I am actually flabbergasted at the attention at the moment because it was just a complete fluke,” Virginia Hills said.
Residents of the area say the moment of impact was unusual in that despite looking like a bomb there was no audible sound.
“It was like an explosion but without a sound,” Kim Vega said. “It was like an atomic bomb effect when it would have hit the ground and all the trees and the skies lit up.”
Astronomers suggest the object was not an asteroid but rather a satellite that fell out of orbit. The colors of the object seemed to indicate a metallic object rather than a space rock.
A new report from three former NASA astronauts shows that asteroid impacts on Earth are up to ten times more common than previously believed by scientists.
The report, scheduled to be issued to the public on Earth Day April 22nd, presents evidence that it’s been a miracle no major city has been decimated by a major asteroid strike.
“This network has detected 26 multi-kiloton explosions since 2001, all of which are due to asteroid impacts,” Ed Lu of the B612 Foundation said. “It shows that asteroid impacts are NOT rare—but actually 3-10 times more common than we previously thought. The fact that none of these asteroid impacts shown in the video was detected in advance is proof that the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a ‘city-killer’ sized asteroid is blind luck. The goal of the B612 Sentinel mission is to find and track asteroids decades before they hit Earth, allowing us to easily deflect them.”
The B612 Foundation is building a special infrared satellite that once launched in 2017 will allow scientists to detect hundreds of near-Earth objects that cannot be currently seen by telescope and satellite systems.