New Studies Propose Two New Planets Beyond Pluto

New calculations from an international team of researchers suggest that there could be two unknown planets beyond Pluto.

In two new studies, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists from the University of Madrid and the University of Cambridge posit that two, or more, unknown planets are responsible for unusual behaviour beyond Neptune.

Objects, in that far-flung part of the Solar System, don’t act like we believe they should: the paths they move along do not have the orbital inclinations and axes that astronomers would expect to see, based on current theory of what researchers call "trans-Neptunian objects."

Unless, the astrophysicists posit, there’s something else out there, and, after considering the effects of the “Kozai mechanism,” the effect an object orbiting further out from a gravitational source can have one orbiting futher in, they now believe there are at least two mysterious planets at play.

“Our results may be truly revolutionary for astronomy,” says co-author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos in a news release, but the team says this is still a hypothesis.

To prove it, scientists will have to overcome two hurdles. Not only does the new theory challenge astrophysicists' current thinking about how the solar system came to be, but the sample size used in the study’s calculations contains only 13 objects.

However, the team promises that with a larger sample size, coming soon, and new research (a recently-discovered planet-in-process is much further away from a star than scientists suspected to be possible), they’ll soon have even more evidence that our solar system may be even bigger than thought.

More Information
'Flipping minor bodies: what comet 96P/Machholz 1 can tell us about the orbital evolution of extreme trans-Neptunian objects and the production of near-Earth objects on retrograde orbits' published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society - 10.1093/mnras/stu2230

ESA Releases Bad and Good News from Earth's Atmosphere Studies

Carbon dioxide emissions increased in East Asia (right) at an average rate of 9.8% per year from 2003 to 2011, but nitrogen oxides increased by ‘only’ 5.8% per year.  

This indicates a use of cleaner technology in East Asia. 

North America and Europe, however, show slightly decreasing trends for both gases. 

The maps show the corresponding spatial pattern as obtained from the satellite data: red corresponds to regions with high values of NOx and CO2, while blue indicates background values.

Credit: ESA

While Europe and North America show a decrease in emission trends between 2003 and 2011, emissions related to economic growth in East Asia continue to rise, but with a reduction in nitrogen oxides emitted per amount of carbon dioxide.

This demonstrates the use of cleaner technology in East Asia.

Nitrogen oxides are generated during the high-temperature combustion of fossil fuels in automobiles and industrial machinery.

They contribute significantly to a reduction of air quality and can be the cause of respiratory problems.

At the same time, these sources release large amounts of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is toxic only at very high concentrations, but is the most important man-made greenhouse gas, leading to global warming and its related consequences.

In a study published yesterday in Nature Geoscience, scientists from the University of Bremen in Germany used data from the Sciamachy instrument on ESA’s Envisat satellite to measure nitrogen dioxide and carbon dioxide trends from 2003 to 2011.

They also exploited  Sciamachy-based data products generated within the ‘GHG-CCI’ project under ESA’s Climate Change Initiative.

“Nitrogen dioxide has a relatively short lifetime, hours, compared to carbon dioxide, which lasts decades, and is a suitable tracer of recently emitted carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion,” explained Maximilian Reuter, lead author of the study.

“Sciamachy measured nitrogen dioxide and carbon dioxide simultaneously. We used a spatial high-pass filtering method to isolate the anthropogenic carbon dioxide signal from overlaying signals due to uptake and release of carbon dioxide by vegetation.”

Satellite-derived CO2 concentrations proportional to local anthropogenic emissions in North America and Europe. 

The green line shows the mean value and the grey-shaded area its variability and uncertainty. 

This indicates that less CO2 is emitted during weekends compared to week days.

Using this method, the scientists were able to better see where and when carbon dioxide was emitted.

For example, it showed that less carbon dioxide from local anthropogenic sources is emitted during weekends in Europe and North America compared to week days.

“This has never been observed from space before and shows how accurate the used method is,” said Dr Reuter.

Although Envisat’s mission ended in 2012, a decade of data from its 10 instruments is still being exploited for studies on Earth’s atmosphere, land, oceans and ice caps.

“Unfortunately, none of the existing nor any of the planned near-future satellites are designed to directly observe carbon dioxide emissions of cities, power plants, volcanoes or other important emission hot spots,” said Michael Buchwitz, co-author of the study and GHG-CCI scientific leader.

“This will only be possible with the proposed mission CarbonSat.”

CarbonSat is one of the two candidates for ESA’s eighth Earth Explorer satellite.

Using the unique spectroscopic fingerprint of carbon dioxide and methane, CarbonSat aims to image these two strong greenhouse gases at very high resolution.

The mission would lead to a better understanding of the sources and sinks of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane.

New Climate Change study shows Indonesia's disastrous deforestation

This photograph taken on February 24, 2014 during an aerial survey mission by Greenpeace in Central Kalimantan province on Indonesia's Borneo Island, shows cleared trees to make way for a palm oil plantation in a Borneo forest

Satellite images have found that Indonesia's ancient forests, a cradle of biodiversity and a buffer against climate change, have shrunk much faster than thought, scientists said on Sunday.

Between 2000 and 2012, Indonesia lost around 6.02 million hectares (14.4 million acres or 23,250 square miles) of primary forest, an area almost the size of Sri Lanka, they reported.

Primary or ancient forests are distinguished from managed forests, which are plantations of trees grown for timber and pulp.

The researchers found that primary forest loss accelerated during the period under review, reaching an annual 840,000 hectares by 2012, nearly twice the deforestation rate of Brazil, which was 460,000 hectares in the same year.

"Indonesia's forests contain high floral and faunal biodiversity, including 10 percent of the world's plants, 12 percent of the world's mammals, 16 percent of the world's reptile-amphibians and 17 percent of the world's bird species," said the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"Extensive clearing of Indonesian primary forest cover directly results in habitat loss and associated plant and animal extinctions."

Deforestation is also a blow to the fight against climate change, as ancient trees store more carbon emissions from the atmosphere than new ones do, and for a longer period, thus mitigating global warming.

The research, led by geographer Belinda Margono of the University of Maryland, looked at long-term satellite images.

During 2000-2012, total forest cover in Indonesia retreated by 15.79 million hectares, of which 6.02 million, or 38 percent, was primary forest, the investigation found.

Distinguishing between primary and managed forest is vital in the campaign to preserve biodiversity and combat climate change, the paper said.

"It is critically important to know the context of forest disturbance, whether of a high-biomass natural forest or a short-cycle plantation," it said.

"Similarly, the clearing of natural forest has very different implications on the maintenance of biodiversity richness."

It noted that in 2010, the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) put Indonesia's overall forest loss at 310,000 hectares per year from 2000-2005, and 690,000 hectares annually from 2005-2010.

Indonesia itself, in a report to the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2009, estimated forest loss of 1.1 million hectares annually from 2000-2005.

Margono's study found the biggest losers were lowland and wetland forests in Sumatra and Kalimantan, where trees are typically chopped down by loggers for use in farming.

In other islands or island groups, Papua, Sulawesi, Maluku, Java and Bali and Nusa Tenggara, primary forest cover fell back only slightly or remained stable from 2000-2012.

More information: Nature Climate Change, dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2277

SwRI chosen by NASA to study solar particles and space weather CuSPP

NASA has selected Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to develop CuSPP, a CubeSat mission to study Solar Particles over the Earth's Poles. SwRI will also lead mission science operations and data analysis.

During the five-year project, engineers and scientists will design, develop and integrate a CubeSat, a nano-satellite launched as a secondary payload on another satellite mission, carrying a novel miniaturized Suprathermal Ion Sensor (SIS) developed at SwRI.

The SIS will measure the sources and acceleration mechanisms of solar energetic particles that are harmful to astronauts as well as Earth-based technologies.

CuSPP can also be used to support space weather research by measuring particles that escape ahead of powerful shock waves in the solar wind.

Upon striking the Earth, solar particles and shock waves can cause severe electromagnetic storms, damage satellites, disrupt radio communication and navigation signals, damage electric power grids and corrode pipelines.

In addition, CuSPP is designed to measure the properties of ion populations entering the ionosphere, the uppermost portion of the Earth's atmosphere.

"Upon successful completion, we expect CuSPP to have achieved several key goals, such as increasing the technological readiness level and reducing the risks and costs of flying a new class of SwRI science instruments for studying heliophysics, the Sun's effects on the solar system," says Dr. Mihir Desai, CuSPP principal investigator and a staff scientist in the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division.

"We also expect to provide critical measurements that shed light on the origins of hazardous charged particle populations accelerated at the Sun and interplanetary space, as well as play a major role in developing reliable nano-satellites for NASA and other sponsors."

CuSPP will fly as a secondary payload as early as 2017. It will reside in a high-inclination (> 65 degrees) low-Earth orbit, approximately 500 km above Earth, for the duration of its mission.

The primary satellite on which CuSPP will launch will be named at a later date.

The CubeSat concept was developed in 1999 as an academic tool to provide students with an inexpensive way to gain hands-on experience in designing and building satellites.

More recently, they have been used for scientific research, exploration, technology development and operations.

A standard CubeSat is a 10 centimeter cube with a one-liter volume. CuSPP is 30 by 10 by 10 centimeters with a volume of three liters.

NASA has increased the reliability and functionality of CubeSats to extend the use of this miniaturized platform into deep space.

The agency recently implemented a new CubeSat initiative for its Science Mission Directorate (SMD).

SwRI is collaborating with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., to produce the CubeSat, including the flight segment (integrated at SwRI), ground segment (provided by the NASA Wallops Flight Facility) and payload (developed at SwRI).

CuSPP was selected as part of the 2013 Heliophysics-Technology and Instrument Development for Science (H-TIDeS) 2013 competition, with funding from the new NASA SMD-wide CubeSat initiative managed by NASA's Heliophysics Division.

NASA CHESS: Sounding rocket to study birthplace of stars

The Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph (CHESS), sounding rocket gets ready for a six-minute flight to observe far beyond our solar system, to peer at a place where new stars are born. 

Credit: NASA/WSMR

NASA successfully launched the Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph (CHESS), payload aboard a Black Brant IX suborbital sounding rocket at 3:35 a.m. EDT on May 24, 2014, from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Kevin France

Principal investigator Kevin France at the University of Colorado at Boulder reports that good data was received and the mission was a success. Recovery of the payload is in progress, as planned.

In deep space, floating between the stars, lies an abundance of atoms, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, that over millions of years will grow into new stars and new planets.

Early in the morning on May 24, 2014, at 2 a.m. EDT, a NASA Black Brant IX sounding rocket will carry a payload for a 15–minute flight to observe this star nursery more comprehensively and in better detail than has been done by a single instrument ever before.

"These atoms are the raw materials, the very building blocks for the next generation of stars and planets," said Kevin France.

"We're making detailed measurements of how many atoms have transitioned into molecules, which is the very first step toward star formation."

The sounding rocket payload, Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph (CHESS), will launch from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

CHESS is equipped with what's known as a spectrograph, which can parse out just how much of any given wavelength of light is present.

CHESS will soar above Earth's atmosphere to look at the ultraviolet light from a bright star – light that is blocked by the atmosphere and can't be seen from the ground.

As this light courses toward Earth, it bumps into the interstellar atoms and molecules along the way, each of which can block certain wavelengths of light.

Scientists know which wavelength is blocked by what, so by measuring what light is missing, they can map out the atoms and molecules that are present in space.

Payload testing and integration of the Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph (CHESS) is underway at the Wallops Flight Facility. 

Graduate student Keri Hoadley (left) and Principal Investigator Dr. Kevin France (right), both from University of Colorado Boulder, prepare to align the Star Tracker 5000 with the CHESS. 

The star tracker is used for instrument/payload attitude determination, fine pointing and imaging. 

Photo credit: NASA/Berit Bland

The CHESS spectrograph provides such detailed and comprehensive observations that it can measure not only what atoms and molecules are present, but how fast they are moving and how turbulent the gas is.

Together, this information helps characterize how mature a given cloud of dust is.

"Carbon, for example, will appear differently over time," said France. "Early on the cloud will have carbon with a missing electron, called ionized carbon."

"As the gas gets denser, the carbon atoms gain back their electrons, so you have neutral carbon. As you get even denser clouds, the carbon binds to oxygen creating carbon monoxide molecules, and at that point you can probe the cloud conditions that precede the collapse into a star."

Using something like CHESS to see whether you have ionized or neutral carbon, or even carbon monoxide molecules tells you more about how old the cloud is and can help scientists learn how stars form from these clouds.

It's still not known exactly how long it takes before a cloud collapses to begin making a star, for example. It might be anywhere between 1 to 100 million years.

By flying such newly-developed instruments on a relatively inexpensive sounding rocket, scientists do more than just gather solid science data.

They also have the chance to test and improve their instruments, perhaps to someday fly long-term on a satellite in space.

NASA successfully launched the Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph (CHESS), payload aboard a Black Brant IX suborbital sounding rocket at 3:35 a.m. EDT on May 24, 2014, from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Principal investigator Kevin France at the University of Colorado at Boulder reports that good data was received and the mission was a success. Recovery of the payload is in progress, as planned.

NASA WISE study challenges black hole 'doughnut' theory

Active, supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies tend to fall into two categories: those that are hidden by dust, and those that are exposed. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A survey of more than 170,000 supermassive black holes, using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), has astronomers reexamining a decades-old theory about the varying appearances of these interstellar objects.

The unified theory of active, supermassive black holes, first developed in the late 1970s, was created to explain why black holes, though similar in nature, can look completely different.

Some appear to be shrouded in dust, while others are exposed and easy to see.

The unified model answers this question by proposing that every black hole is surrounded by a dusty, doughnut-shaped structure called a torus.

Depending on how these "doughnuts" are oriented in space, the black holes will take on various appearances.

For example, if the doughnut is positioned so that we see it edge-on, the black hole is hidden from view. If the doughnut is observed from above or below, face-on, the black hole is clearly visible.

However, the new WISE results do not corroborate this theory. The researchers found evidence that something other than a doughnut structure may, in some circumstances, determine whether a black hole is visible or hidden.

The team has not yet determined what this may be, but the results suggest the unified, or doughnut, model does not have all the answers.

"Our finding revealed a new feature about active black holes we never knew before, yet the details remain a mystery," said Lin Yan of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"We hope our work will inspire future studies to better understand these fascinating objects."

Yan is the second author of the research accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

The lead author is a post-doctoral researcher, Emilio Donoso, who worked with Yan at IPAC and has since moved to the Instituto de Ciencias Astronómicas, de la Tierra y del Espacio (ICATE) in Argentina.

The research also was co-authored by Daniel Stern at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and Roberto Assef of Universidad Diego Portales in Chile and formerly of JPL.

Every galaxy has a massive black hole at its heart. The new study focuses on the "feeding" ones, called active, supermassive black holes, or active galactic nuclei. These black holes gorge on surrounding gas material that fuels their growth.

With the aid of computers, scientists were able to pick out more than 170,000 active supermassive black holes from the WISE data.

They then measured the clustering of the galaxies containing both hidden and exposed black holes—the degree to which the objects clump together across the sky.

More information: The Angular Clustering of WISE-Selected AGN: Different Haloes for Obscured and Unobscured AGN, arxiv.org/abs/1309.2277

NASA Black Brant XII: HYPE Sounding rocket to study interplanetary medium

A Black Brant XII launches from Wallops Flight Facility. 

Credit: NASA

NASA will conduct a sounding rocket mission in May 2014, carrying a payload designed to measure the nature of the interplanetary medium (IPM), characterizing the particles that fill our solar system.

The Hydrogen Polarimetric Explorer (HYPE), measures light reflected by interplanetary hydrogen that originally flows in from outside the galaxy.

Along its travels, the hydrogen crosses the boundaries of our heliosphere, the local bubble surrounding the sun and planets that is inflated by the solar wind.

Thus it can provide not only information about the nature of near space, but also of the galactic environment and how it interacts with the sun and heliosphere.

The sounding rocket measurements will provide important information on the size and shape of the heliosphere as well as information on the interstellar magnetic field at the boundary.

These results will be combined with NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), Voyager, and Hubble Space Telescope interplanetary hydrogen measurements to improve models of the heliospheric boundary and its interactions with the local interstellar medium.

The window for the HYPE launch opens on May 2, 2014.

HYPE will fly on a Terrier-Black Brant sounding rocket, launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

It is projected to fly to an altitude of about 185 miles during a nine-minute flight.

Walt Harris with the UC Davis is the mission principal investigator.

Galaxy Segue 1 study suggests it is a fossil from the early universe

The portion of sky in which astronomers found the Segue 1 dwarf galaxy. 

Credit: Marla Geha/W.M. Keck Observatory.

A trio of space researchers studying the galaxy Segue 1 has found that its red giant stars are made mostly of hydrogen and helium, with very few heavy elements, suggesting the galaxy stopped evolving not long after its formation.

In their paper uploaded to the preprint sever arXiv (and soon to be published in Astrophysical Journal) the team describes observation data they've obtained regarding the galaxy and why what they've found might mean Segue 1 is the oldest observable galaxy in the night sky.

Scientists have known about Segue 1 for some time, it's both close to us (just 75,000 light years away) and very small, with just few hundred stars.

In this new effort, Anna Frebel with MIT, Joshua Simon with Carnegie Mellon University and Evan Kirby with the University of California studied the makeup of red giants in Segue 1 and found they are made up mostly of hydrogen and helium.

This implies that the stars came about due to the explosions of massive stars, prior research has shown that it's smaller star explosions that result in new stars forming heavy with metals (because the smaller stars create the heavier elements).

Prior research has also shown that higher mass stars tend to blow up at a much younger age than low mass stars.

Also when stars explode in general, they release material that winds up being used in new star formation. As the process repeats, more stars with heavy metals are created.

But not Segue 1, for some reason the evolution process simply stopped, leaving the galaxy in very nearly the same condition it was shortly after forming.

Why this happened is a mystery, though there is one theory, it's based on reionization.

Reionisation theory suggests that shortly after the universe was born, ionized gasses began to cool allowing the formation of atoms and eventually stars.

Those stars eventually blew up releasing radiation that served as fuel for more reionisation.

New stars cannot form from ionized gasses, of course, so if certain parts of space had stars that caused a lot of reionisation, the creation of new stars would have been impossible, the evolution of such a galaxy would simply stop.

Thus far, Segue 1 is the only such galaxy to have been found, but if the reionisation theory is correct, it's likely there are many more, researchers just can't see them because they are too far away.

More information: Segue 1: An Unevolved Fossil Galaxy from the Early Universe, arXiv:1403.6116 [astro-ph.GA] arxiv.org/abs/1403.6116

MMS Satellites to study fundamental phenomenon of magnetic reconnection

Diagram of MMS spacecraft with communication components identified. 

Credit: NASA

First thing every morning, the engineering team for NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS) gathers for a 10-minute meeting.

A white board sits at the front of the room with the day's assignments, who will wrap tape around the wires, which instruments need to be installed where, which observatory needs to undergo its next test.

This is the nerve center for the MMS engineers and technicians at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Goddard is tasked with an unprecedented feat for the center: building four identical observatories simultaneously.

The four spacecraft will launch together on a single rocket and then maneuver out into a pyramid configuration to orbit Earth.

Mechanical Engineers completed installation of the Solar Array panels for Observatory #4. 

There are eight panels per spacecraft, one enclosing each of the eight bays of the octagonal structure. 

When in orbit, the solar arrays will provide power to the Spacecraft during sunlight phases, while the battery (mounted inside the spacecraft deck) provides power during the 4 hour eclipses.

On its journey, MMS will observe a little-understood, but universal phenomenon called magnetic reconnection, responsible for dramatic re-shaping of the magnetic environment near Earth, often sending intense amounts of energy and fast-moving particles off in a new direction.

Not only is this a fundamental physical process that occurs throughout the universe, it is also one of the drivers of space weather events at Earth.

To truly understand the process, requires four identical spacecraft to track how such reconnection events move across and through any given space.

Building four spacecraft at once has many advantages. It saves on time and mission cost. However, such a massive undertaking requires meticulous logistical planning.

"This is the first time NASA has ever built four satellites simultaneously like this," said Craig Tooley, project manager for MMS at Goddard.

"It feels like we're planning a giant game of musical chairs to produce multiple copies of a spacecraft.

One instrument deck might be 2/3 finished, while another one is 1/3 finished, and the same people will have to test a nearly complete deck one day, and install large components on another one another day."

One of the earliest important feats for this group of engineers and technicians came during the design phase. Each spacecraft must carry, in addition to the navigational and power instruments, 25 scientific instruments.

These had to be carefully laid out so that each instrument had a full range of view and so that the eight booms sticking out from the spacecraft would not interfere with any other instrument's line of sight or electromagnetic systems.

Fermi observatory: First gamma-ray study of a gravitational lens

In the heart of an active galaxy, matter falling toward a supermassive black hole creates jets of particles traveling near the speed of light. 

For active galaxies classified as blazars, one of these jets beams almost directly toward Earth. 

Credit: NASA /Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

An international team of astronomers, using NASA's Fermi observatory, has made the first-ever gamma-ray measurements of a gravitational lens, a kind of natural telescope formed when a rare cosmic alignment allows the gravity of a massive object to bend and amplify light from a more distant source.

This accomplishment opens new avenues for research, including a novel way to probe emission regions near supermassive black holes.

It may even be possible to find other gravitational lenses with data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

Teddy Cheung

"We began thinking about the possibility of making this observation a couple of years after Fermi launched, and all of the pieces finally came together in late 2012," said Teddy Cheung, lead scientist for the finding and an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.

In September 2012, Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) detected a series of bright gamma-ray flares from a source known as B0218+357, located 4.35 billion light-years from Earth in the direction of a constellation called Triangulum.

These powerful flares, in a known gravitational lens system, provided the key to making the lens measurement.

Astronomers classify B0218+357 as a blazar—a type of active galaxy noted for its intense emissions and unpredictable behavior.

At the blazar's heart is a supersized black hole with a mass millions to billions of times that of the sun.

As matter spirals toward the black hole, some of it blasts outward as jets of particles traveling near the speed of light in opposite directions.

The extreme brightness and variability of blazars result from a chance orientation that brings one jet almost directly in line with Earth.

Astronomers effectively look down the barrel of the jet, which greatly enhances its apparent emission.

Long before light from B0218+357 reaches us, it passes directly through a face-on spiral galaxy—one very much like our own—about 4 billion light-years away.

The galaxy's gravity bends the light into different paths, so astronomers see the background blazar as dual images.

With just a third of an arcsecond (less than 0.0001 degree) between them, the B0218+357 images hold the record for the smallest separation of any lensed system known.

While radio and optical telescopes can resolve and monitor the individual blazar images, Fermi's LAT cannot. Instead, the Fermi team exploited a "delayed playback" effect.

More Information: Fermi Gravitational Study

NASA leads NSF firefly mission to study lightning - Video

Somewhere across the Earth each day and night, there's a lightning flash. The globe experiences lightning some 50 times a second, yet the details of what initiates this common occurrence and what effects it has on the atmosphere – lightning may be linked to incredibly powerful and energetic bursts called terrestrial gamma ray flashes, or TGFs—remains a mystery.

Firefly, a milk-carton-sized satellite, will study gamma-ray bursts that accompany lightning.

Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

In mid-November, a football-sized mission called Firefly, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, will launch into space to study lightning and these gamma ray flashes from above.

The Firefly instrument is what's known as a cubesat, a very small satellite that offers the chance for quality space science with a relatively inexpensive price tag.

"We can do great science with these small missions," said Doug Rowland, the principal investigator for Firefly at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"Firefly will gather up to a year of observations on the mysterious workings of lightning. Lightning is so familiar we tend to take it for granted, but we really don't know the details of how it works—even though it is a critical part of the global electric circuit, and has obvious social and technological effects."

Lightning is ubiquitous and intimately connected to life on Earth, but we don't often think about what's happening higher up in the atmosphere.

The radiation generated by lightning is so intense that it can generate antimatter and gamma rays within TGFs just a few miles of the ground.

NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory first discovered TGFs in the 1990s. Designed to look outward at cosmic sources of gamma rays, the mission also caught rare but tantalizing glimpses of gamma rays coming from Earth.

This is an artist's rendition of the football-sized Firefly satellite in low-Earth orbit. 

Firefly's mission is to study the relationship between lightning and huge bursts of gamma rays called terrestrial gamma ray flashes. 

Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Massive Star Explosion Seeded the Early Solar System, Meteorite Study

A supernova could have shot matter into the early solar system, a new study shows. 

Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/CXC/SAO

The explosive death of a star seeded matter into the solar system soon after its birth, analysis of a meteorite now reveals.

Earth and the rest of the solar system coalesced from a giant cloud of gas and dust more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Many of the details about the galactic neighborhood in which the solar system arose still remain a mystery.

Meteorites contain some of the oldest material in the solar system, dating back to its formation. As such, researchers often analyze these objects in order to discover what materials were present when the sun, Earth and other planets were born.

This study sheds light on where these solar system bodies might have come from.

All elements heavier than nickel are ultimately created by supernovas, giant explosions resulting from the deaths of stars.

These explosions are bright enough to momentarily outshine their entire galaxies. Now, scientists analyzing meteorites have found that a supernova may have injected matter into the solar system within a small window of time after the solar system's first solids formed.

Gregory Brennecka

"This is evidence for supernova addition at the very start of our solar system, over 4.5 billion years ago," said the meteorite study's lead author, Gregory Brennecka, a cosmochemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Brennecka and his colleagues investigated the Allende meteorite, which fell to Earth as a fireball in Mexico in 1969.

They focused on lumps within this meteorite known as calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions.

These particles are some of the oldest objects in the solar system — they were the first solids to form in the protoplanetary disk that eventually gave rise to Earth and the other planets.

The scientists focused on a wide range of isotopes within the inclusions. In general, elements come in a variety of isotopes that differ in how many neutrons they possess in their atomic nuclei; carbon-12 has six neutrons, while carbon-13 has seven. (Both have six protons.)

NASA to Crash Test Helicopter to Study Safety

Anybody who says NASA researchers don't know how to have a smashing good time has not met a team at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

They are test engineers whose job it is to make aircraft safer by crashing them.

In late August those engineers plan to drop a 45-foot long helicopter fuselage from about 30 feet to test improved seat belts and seats and to collect crash-worthiness data.

NASA is collaborating with the Navy, Army and Federal Aviation Administration on the Transport Rotorcraft Airframe Crash Testbed full-scale crash tests at NASA Langley's Landing and Impact Research (LandIR) Facility.

LandIR, a 240-foot high, 400-foot long gantry, has an almost 50-year history.

It started out as the Lunar Landing Research Facility, where Neil Armstrong and other astronauts learned to land on the moon.

Then it became a crash test facility where engineers could simulate aircraft accidents.

And recently it added a big pool where NASA is testing Orion space capsule mock-ups in anticipation of water landings.

The August drop test is one of the most complicated and ambitious aircraft crash experiments at NASA Langley in recent memory.

"We have instrumented a former Marine helicopter airframe with cameras and accelerometers," said lead test engineer Martin Annett.

"Almost 40 cameras inside and outside of the helicopter will record how 13 crash test dummies react before, during and after impact. Onboard computers will also record more than 350 channels of data."

External cameras will capture images of an unusual looking helicopter. Instead of the usual Marine gray, technicians painted one entire side in black polka dots over a white background.

It is not a fashion statement, but a photographic technique called full field photogrammetry. Each dot represents a data point.

High speed cameras filming at 500 images per second track each dot, so after everything is over, researchers can plot and "see" exactly how the fuselage buckled, bent, cracked or collapsed under crash loads.

NASA Langley is planning to stream the crash test August 28 on the Internet live at about 1 p.m. EDT at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-lrc

NASA crashes helicopter to study safety

NASA researchers will drop a 45-foot-long helicopter fuselage from a height of about 30 feet to test improved seat belts and seats and advance experimental techniques and crashworthiness data.

NASA is collaborating with the U.S. Navy, U.S. Army and Federal Aviation Administration on the Transport Rotorcraft Airframe Crash Test Bed full-scale crash tests at Langley's Landing and Impact Research Facility.

"We have instrumented a former Marine helicopter airframe with cameras and accelerometers," said lead test engineer Martin Annett.

Martin Annett

"Almost 40 cameras inside and outside the helicopter will record how 13 crash test dummies react before, during and after impact."

During the test, onboard computers will record more than 350 channels of data as the helicopter is swung by cables, like a pendulum, into a bed of soil.

Just before impact, pyrotechnic devices release the suspension cables from the helicopter to allow free flight.

The helicopter will hit the ground at about 30 mph. The impact condition represents a severe but survivable condition under both civilian and military requirements.

For the first time ever in any test, technicians installed a video game motion sensor in the helicopter. "We want to see if it is useful as an additional way to track the movements of the dummies," said test engineer Justin Littell.

The outside of the fuselage also is new for this test. Technicians painted one entire side in black polka dots over a white background—a photographic technique called full field photogrammetry. Each dot represents a data point.

High-speed cameras filming at 500 images per second track each dot, so after over the drop researchers can plot and see exactly how the fuselage buckled, bent, cracked or collapsed under crash loads.

Another crash test of a similar helicopter equipped with additional technology, including composite airframe retrofits, is planned for next year.

Both tests are part of the Rotary Wing Project in the Fundamental Aeronautics Program of NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate.

The US Navy provided the CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter fuselages, seats, crash test dummies and other experiments for the test.

The Army contributed a litter experiment with a crash test dummy.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) provided a side-facing specialized crash test dummy and part of the data acquisition system.

Cobham Life Support-St. Petersburg, a division of CONAX Florida Corporation, also contributed an active restraint system for the cockpit.

NASA will use the results of both tests in efforts to improve rotorcraft performance and efficiency, in part by assessing the reliability of high performance, lightweight composite materials.

Researchers also want to increase industry knowledge and create more complete computer models that can be used to design better helicopters.

The ultimate goal of NASA rotary wing research is to help make helicopters and other vertical take-off and landing vehicles more serviceable—able to carry more passengers and cargo—quicker, quieter, safer and greener. Improved designs might allow helicopters to be used more extensively in the airspace system.

Depression Stems from Miscommunication Between Brain Cells; Study Challenges Role of Serotonin in Depression

A new study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine suggests that depression results from a disturbance in the ability of brain cells to communicate with each other. 

Credit: © Artur Golbert / Fotolia

A new study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine suggests that depression results from a disturbance in the ability of brain cells to communicate with each other.

The study indicates a major shift in our understanding of how depression is caused and how it should be treated. Instead of focusing on the levels of hormone-like chemicals in the brain, such as serotonin, the scientists found that the transmission of excitatory signals between cells becomes abnormal in depression.

Scott M. Thompson

The research, by senior author Scott M. Thompson, Ph.D., Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, was published online in the March 17 issue of Nature Neuroscience.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 2005 and 2008, approximately one in 10 Americans were treated for depression, with women more than twice as likely as men to become depressed.

The most common antidepressant medications, such as Prozac (Fluoxetine), Zoloft (Setraline) and Celexa (Citalopram), work by preventing brain cells from absorbing serotonin, resulting in an increase in its concentration in the brain.

Unfortunately, these medications are effective in only about half of patients. Because elevation of serotonin makes some depressed patients feel better, it has been thought for over 50 years that the cause of depression must therefore be an insufficient level of serotonin.

The new University of Maryland study challenges that long-standing explanation.

"Dr. Thompson's groundbreaking research could alter the field of psychiatric medicine, changing how we understand the crippling public health problem of depression and other mental illness," says E. Albert Reece, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., Vice President for Medical Affairs at the University of Maryland and John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

"This is the type of cutting-edge science that we strive toward at the University of Maryland, where discoveries made in the laboratory can impact the clinical practice of medicine."

Depression affects more than a quarter of all U.S. adults at some point in their lives, and the World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that by 2020 it will be the second leading cause of disability worldwide.

Depression is also the leading risk factor for suicide, which causes twice as many deaths as murder, and is the third leading cause of death for 15-24 year olds.

The first major finding of the study was the discovery that serotonin has a previously unknown ability to strengthen the communication between brain cells.

"Like speaking louder to your companion at a noisy cocktail party, serotonin amplifies excitatory interactions in brain regions important for emotional and cognitive function and apparently helps to make sure that crucial conversations between neurons get heard," says Dr. Thompson.

"Then we asked, does this action of serotonin play any role in the therapeutic action of drugs like Prozac?"

To understand what might be wrong in the brains of patients with depression and how elevating serotonin might relieve their symptoms, the study team examined the brains of rats and mice that had been repeatedly exposed to various mildly stressful conditions, comparable to the types of psychological stressors that can trigger depression in people.

The researchers could tell that their animals became depressed because they lost their preference for things that are normally pleasurable.

For example, normal animals given a choice of drinking plain water or sugar water strongly prefer the sugary solution. Study animals exposed to repeated stress, however, lost their preference for the sugar water, indicating that they no longer found it rewarding.

This depression-like behaviour strongly mimics one hallmark of human depression, called anhedonia, in which patients no longer feel rewarded by the pleasures of a nice meal or a good movie, the love of their friends and family, and countless other daily interactions.

A comparison of the activity of the animals' brain cells in normal and stressed rats revealed that stress had no effect on the levels of serotonin in the 'depressed' brains.

Instead, it was the excitatory connections that responded to serotonin in strikingly different manner. These changes could be reversed by treating the stressed animals with antidepressants until their normal behaviour was restored.

"In the depressed brain, serotonin appears to be trying hard to amplify that cocktail party conversation, but the message still doesn't get through," says Dr. Thompson.

Using specially engineered mice created by collaborators at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the study also revealed that the ability of serotonin to strengthen excitatory connections was required for drugs like antidepressants to work.

Sustained enhancement of communication between brain cells is considered one of the major processes underlying memory and learning.

The team's observations that excitatory brain cell function is altered in models of depression could explain why people with depression often have difficulty concentrating, remembering details, or making decisions.

Additionally, the findings suggest that the search for new and better antidepressant compounds should be shifted from drugs that elevate serotonin to drugs that strengthen excitatory connections.

"Although more work is needed, we believe that a malfunction of excitatory connections is fundamental to the origins of depression and that restoring normal communication in the brain, something that serotonin apparently does in successfully treated patients, is critical to relieving the symptoms of this devastating disease," Dr. Thompson explains.

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Maryland Medical Center.

Did Comet attacks end 9,000-year-old Clovis culture?

Sandia National Laboratories' Mark Boslough rebuts a speculative hypothesis about comets leading to the end of the Clovis culture in North America. Photo by Randy Montoya.

Sandia lead author Mark Boslough rebuts a speculative hypothesis that comet explosions changed Earth's climate sufficiently to end the Clovis culture in North America about 13,000 years ago.

He and other researchers from 14 academic institutions assert that some other, more plausible, explanations must be found for the apparent disappearance.

"There's no plausible mechanism to get airbursts over an entire continent," said Boslough, a physicist. "For this and other reasons, we conclude that the impact hypothesis is, unfortunately, bogus."

In a December 2012 American Geophysical Union (AGU) monograph, first available in January, the researchers point out that no appropriately sized impact craters from that time period have been discovered, nor have any unambiguously "shocked" materials been found.

In addition, proposed fragmentation and explosion mechanisms "do not conserve energy or momentum," a basic law of physics that must be satisfied for impact-caused climate change to have validity, the authors write.

Also absent are physics-based models that support the impact hypothesis. Models that do exist, write the authors, contradict the asteroid-impact hypothesis.

The authors also charge that "several independent researchers have been unable to reproduce reported results" and that samples presented in support of the asteroid impact hypothesis were later discovered by carbon dating to be contaminated with modern material.

NB: Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

UK Propose Study of Existential Risks to Humankind's Survival

British researchers say they want to create a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk to analyse the ultimate risks to the future of mankind.

The purpose of the center, they said, would be to consider risks to mankind's survival from biotech, nanotech, extreme climate change, nuclear war and runaway artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is a particular focus, researchers said, with concerns super-intelligent machines could someday be a danger to the human race.

The exponential increases in computing complexity will eventually reach a critical turning point when artificial intelligence allows computers to write programs and create technology to develop their own offspring, they said.

"Think how it might be to compete for resources with the dominant species," said Cambridge University philosopher Huw Price. "Take gorillas for example -- the reason they are going extinct is not because humans are actively hostile towards them, but because we control the environments in ways that suit us, but are detrimental to their survival."

Experts from a number of fields, including law, computing and science, would advise the center and help with investigating the risks, Price said.

"At some point, this century or next, we may well be facing one of the major shifts in human history -- perhaps even cosmic history -- when intelligence escapes the constraints of biology," he said.

"Nature didn't anticipate us, and we in our turn shouldn't take artificial general intelligence for granted."

.

NASA Funds Study of Sideways Flying Supersonic Plane - Video

NASA has approved a $100,000 grant for development of a supersonic plane concept pioneered by Gecheng Zha, a professor at the University of Miami.

Called the Supersonic Bidirectional Flying Wing, the concept addresses the main conflict in supersonic design: a supersonic vessel needs large wings to get off the ground, but small wings to achieve supersonic speeds.

Zha has dealt with this problem by the simple expedient of creating two sets of wings.

The wings are positioned at 90° to each other.

Once the plane has taken off using the longer wings, it rotates and uses the lower drag wings to go supersonic.

It is expected to take decades to develop the technology to the point of implementation. The project is one in a new wave of technology development in the realm of supersonic and hypersonic flight.

In August, Boeing’s X-51A Waverider, developed for the US AirForce, failed to go hypersonic in a flight test. Russia is developing Hammer, a hypersonic booster intended to launch satellites of up to 800 kg into low Earth orbit.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, CEO and founder of SpaceX, has spoken of developing a hovering supersonic electric jet.

The only commercial supersonic passenger jet ever developed, the Concorde, was retired in 2003 when it was unable to achieve commercial success following a combination of a 2000 fatal crash and the reduced air traffic that resulted from the 2001 New York terrorist attacks.

The fastest passenger plane in use today is the Mach 0.9 Cessna Citation X which carries 7 passengers.

Study Claims Every Star has Exoplanets around

Every star twinkling in the night sky plays host to at least one planet, a new study suggests.

That implies there are some 10 billion Earth-sized planets in our galaxy.

Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, an international team found a handful of exoplanets that imply the existence of billions more.

The findings were released at the 219th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting, alongside reports of the smallest "exoplanets" ever discovered.

Gravitational microlensing is a method that uses the gravity of a far-flung star to amplify the light from even more distant stars that have planets.

Astronomers used a number of relatively small telescopes that make up the Microlensing Network for the Detection of Small Terrestrial Exoplanets, or Mindstep, to look for the rare event of one star passing directly in front of another as seen from Earth.

The team witnessed 40 of these microlensing events, and in three instances spotted the effects of planets circling the more distant stars.

While the number of actual events and detected planets was low, the team was able to estimate how many such exoplanets must exist.

Most news of exoplanets in recent years has come from the Kepler telescope, which spots planets by looking for the slight dimming of their host stars' light as planets pass in front of them.

That method is better at finding large planets close to their host stars.

While a more difficult effect to catch, gravitational microlensing is better at finding planets of all sizes and distances.

It can currently spot a planet as small as Mercury, orbiting at a similar distance to its host star, or as far away as Saturn.

The study, also published in the journal Nature, was a collaboration between researchers from more than 20 international institutes and universities.

"Just the recent 15 years have seen the count of known planets beyond the Solar System rising from none to about 700, but we can expect hundreds of billions to exist in the Milky Way alone," said co-author Dr Martin Dominik, from the University of St Andrews, UK.

Read more of this article here: Exoplanets are around every star, study suggests