False alarm of cosmic blast sends astronomers racing to telescopes

False alarm of cosmic blast sends astronomers racing to telescopes

NASA’s Swift satellite has detected a burst of high-energy gamma rays coming from the Andromeda galaxy, the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way. The rare cosmic explosion is likely to deliver a flood of data to astronomers, who are swiveling their telescopes to capture its aftermath.  Read more

Moon dust probe crashes

Moon dust probe crashes

A NASA spacecraft that studied lunar dust vapourized into its own cloud of dust when it hit the far side of the Moon, as planned, in a mission-ending impact on 17 April. Launched last September, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) finished its primary mission in March. In early April, on an extended mission, it made close passes as low as 2 kilometres above the surface, gathering science data on more than 100 low-elevation orbits. Mission controllers deliberately crashed it to avoid the chance that, left alone, it might crash and contaminate historic locations such as the Apollo landing sites.  Read more

NASA lays out long-term vision for astrophysics

NASA lays out long-term vision for astrophysics

A new year is a good time to make long-term plans, and NASA has jumped into the deep end of planning. On 20 December the US space agency’s astrophysics division released a wish list of future space missions — looking three decades into the future, and even beyond.  Read more

Research fleet stays partly afloat

Research fleet stays partly afloat

The coastal town of Newport, Oregon, is normally bustling down at the docks. Fishermen take their boats out to harvest the bountiful Pacific Ocean and research vessels zip back and forth beneath the arched Yaquina Bay Bridge. But these days, Newport’s harbor is pretty quiet, says Clare Reimers, an oceanographer at Oregon State University in Corvallis.  Read more

US astronomy organization plans closure of Arizona scopes

Telescopes atop Kitt Peak, in Arizona, include the NOAO's 4-metre Mayall telescope (foreground).

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), the Tucson, Arizona-based organization that runs a number of major ground-based telescopes, is preparing to furlough its employees in Arizona if the US government shutdown continues past 18 October — but it will keep workers on in Chile.  Read more

Student projects interrupted by US shutdown

It was to have been an exciting three-month research visit. Siddharth Hegde, a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, had lined up a trip to NASA’s Ames Research Center near San Francisco. Hegde is an astronomer who models atmospheres on extrasolar planets, and he was planning to study the optical properties of extremophiles — organisms that thrive in extreme environments — during his California sojourn.  Read more

Deadly Pakistan quake may have unleashed a mud volcano

Orange marks the highest intensity shaking, and the star the epicentre, of the 2013 Pakistan earthquake.

A magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck Pakistan today has likely killed hundreds of people, and perhaps many more. It also may have triggered the eruption of a mud volcano hundreds of kilometres away off Pakistan’s coast, generating media reports of a new island that had not existed before.  Read more