It's a mystery of earthquakes that takes a deadly toll on humans: faults buried several miles deep in Earth's crust breed more damaging earthquakes than their surface counterparts. Over the years, unusually powerful shaking born from these "blind" faults has brought cities from California to Japan to their knees, without explanation. Until now.
Jul 3, 2009 - 12:51:11 AM
Using a worldwide combination of diverse telescopes, astronomers have discovered that a giant galaxy's bursts of very high energy gamma rays are coming from a region very close to the supermassive black hole at its core. The discovery provides important new information about the mysterious workings of the powerful "engines" in the centers of innumerable galaxies throughout the Universe.
Jul 3, 2009 - 12:26:03 AM
It snows on Mars. This occurs, at least in the northern arctic region where the Phoenix lander set up camp in 2008. Science teams from Phoenix were able to observe water-ice clouds in the Martian atmosphere and precipitation that fell to the ground at night and sublimate into water in the morning.
Jul 3, 2009 - 12:14:21 AM
Ulysses, a joint NASA and European Space Agency mission, officially ceased operations on 30 June 2009, after receiving commands from ground controllers to do so. The spacecraft, which operated for more than 18 years, charted the unexplored regions of space above the poles of the Sun.
Jul 3, 2009 - 12:07:04 AM
A new class of pulsars detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is solving the mystery of previously unidentified gamma-ray sources and helping scientists understand the mechanisms behind pulsar emissions.
Jul 3, 2009 - 12:05:47 AM
PASADENA, California - Favorable chemistry and episodes with thin films of liquid water during ongoing, long-term climate cycles may sometimes make the area where NASA's Phoenix Mars mission landed last year a favorable environment for microbes.
Jul 3, 2009 - 12:01:46 AM
Besides new observations, mining old photographic plates and CCD image archives represents an opportunity to recover and secure newly discovered asteroids, also to improve the orbits of Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs), Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) and Virtual Impactors (VIs).
Jul 2, 2009 - 5:25:14 PM
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has transmitted its first images since reaching the moon on June 23. The spacecraft's two cameras, collectively known as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, were activated June 30. The cameras are working well and have returned images of a region in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds).
Jul 2, 2009 - 5:19:57 PM
El Niño years typically result in fewer hurricanes forming in the Atlantic Ocean. But a new study suggests that the form of El Niño may be changing potentially causing not only a greater number of hurricanes than in average years, but also a greater chance of hurricanes making landfall, according to climatologists at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Jul 2, 2009 - 5:09:18 PM
Astronomers have unveiled an unprecedented new atlas of the inner regions of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, peppered with thousands of previously undiscovered dense knots of cold cosmic dust — the potential birthplaces of new stars.
Jul 2, 2009 - 12:24:51 AM
The Ariane 5's 31st consecutive mission success was another record-setting flight for this workhorse Arianespace launcher - lofting the world's largest commercial satellite, TerreStar-1, from the Spaceport in French Guiana today.
Jul 2, 2009 - 12:15:57 AM
A new class of black hole, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers. The finding in a distant galaxy approximately 290 million light years from Earth is reported today in the journal Nature.
Jul 1, 2009 - 9:57:07 PM
Our Milky Way galaxy only survived because it was already immersed in a large clump of dark matter which trapped gases inside it, scientists led by Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) found.
Jul 1, 2009 - 6:31:02 AM
Warm weather near the Martian equator may have melted the ice in ice-rich soils as recently as 2 million years ago, according to a paper published yesterday in "Earth and Planetary Science Letters." This indicates that the Red Planet was warmer and more life-friendly much later in its history than previous studies show.
Jul 1, 2009 - 4:32:51 AM
Robert C. Reedy, a senior scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, is mapping the moon's surface elements using data gathered by an advanced gamma-ray spectrometer (GRS) that rode aboard the Japanese Kaguya spacecraft.
Jul 1, 2009 - 3:18:50 AM
