Joomla! site syndication http://www.stellar-visions.org Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:48:24 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.stellar-visions.org/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png http://www.stellar-visions.org Joomla! site syndication http://www.stellar-visions.org/content/view/20/2/ The impactor believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs and other life forms on Earth some 65 million years ago has been traced back to a breakup event in the main asteroid belt.A joint U.S.-Czech team from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Charles University in Prague suggests that the parent object of asteroid (298) Baptistina disrupted when it was hit by another large asteroid, creating numerous large fragments that would later create the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula as well as the prominent Tycho crater found on the Moon. News - Astronomy Fri, 07 Sep 2007 07:23:26 +0100 http://www.stellar-visions.org/content/view/19/2/ ANNOUNCEMENT OF OPPORTUNITY The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Solar System Ambassadors Program invites you to apply to become an Ambassador to the public for calendar year 2008. Highly motivated individuals will be given the opportunity to represent JPL as volunteer Solar System Ambassadors to the public for a one-year, renewable term beginning January 1, 2008. Applications will be accepted from September 1 through September 30. The Solar System Ambassadors Program is an informal education effort accomplished by motivated volunteers across the nation who communicate NASA's exciting discoveries and plans for future exploration of the solar system and beyond to general public audiences. These volunteer Ambassadors become an extended part of each space exploration mission's team and an important interface between the NASA community and the populace at large. News - Astronomy Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:42:11 +0100 http://www.stellar-visions.org/content/view/18/2/ The High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) has confirmed that a dark pit seen on Mars in an earlier HiRISE image really is a vertical shaft that cuts through lava flow on the flank of the Arsia Mons volcano. Such pits form on similar volcanoes in Hawaii and are called pit craters. The HiRISE camera, orbiting the red planet on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, is the most powerful camera ever to orbit another planet. It is operated at The University of Arizona in Tucson. HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen of the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and his team released the new image of the dark pit on Arsia Mons and several other stunning images today on the HiRISE Web site, http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu (http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/). New HiRISE images are released on the site every Wednesday. News - Astronomy Wed, 29 Aug 2007 02:00:00 +0100 http://www.stellar-visions.org/content/view/17/2/ NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected enough water vapor to fill the oceans on Earth five times inside the collapsing nest of a forming star system. Astronomers say the water vapor is pouring down from the system's natal cloud and smacking into a dusty disk where planets are thought to form. The observations provide the first direct look at how water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it, begins to make its way into planets, possibly even rocky ones like our own. For the first time, we are seeing water being delivered to the region where planets will most likely form, said Dan Watson of the University of Rochester, N.Y. Watson is the lead author of a paper about this steamy young star system, appearing in the Aug. 30 issue of Nature. News - Astronomy Wed, 29 Aug 2007 02:00:00 +0100 http://www.stellar-visions.org/content/view/16/2/ Using European and Japanese/NASA X-ray satellites, astronomers have seen Einstein's predicted distortion of space-time around three neutron stars, and in doing so they have pioneered a groundbreaking technique for determining the properties of these ultradense objects.Neutron stars contain the densest observable matter in the universe.They cram more than a sun's worth of material into a city-sized sphere, meaning a few cups of neutron-star stuff would outweigh Mount Everest. Astronomers use these collapsed stars as natural laboratories to study how tightly matter can be crammed under the most extreme pressures that nature can offer. This is fundamental physics, says Sudip Bhattacharyya of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. and the University of Maryland, College Park. There could be exotic kinds of particles or states of matter, such as quark matter, in the centers of neutron stars, but it's impossible to create them in the lab. The only way to find out is to understand neutron stars. News - Astronomy Tue, 28 Aug 2007 02:00:00 +0100