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IMAGE: (Top panel, from left to right) July 12, 2012 coronal mass ejection seen in STEREO B Cor2, SOHO C2, and STEREO A Cor2 coronagraphs, respectively. (Bottom panel) The same images. view more
Credit: Talwinder Singh, Mehmet S. Yalim, Nikolai V. Pogorelov, and Nat Gopalswamy
The surface of the sun churns with energy and frequently ejects masses of highly-magnetized plasma towards Earth. Sometimes these ejections are strong enough to crash through the magnetosphere the natural magnetic shield that protects the Earth damaging satellites or electrical grids. Such space weather events can be catastrophic.
Astronomers have studied the sun s activity for centuries with greater and greater understanding. Today, computers are central to the quest to understand the sun s behavior and its role in space weather events.
Astronomers have measured very-high-energy gamma rays coming from the aftermath of a gamma ray burst - an enormously energetic explosion of a star in another galaxy.
Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC).
An international team of astrophysicists led by the Stellar Astrophysics Group of the University of Alicante (UA), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), and the University of Valparaíso (Chile) has discovered a massive cluster of stars of intermediate age in the direction of the Scutum constellation. This object, which has been named Valparaíso 1, lies some seven thousand light years away from the Sun, and contains at least fifteen thousand stars. To detect it, observations have been combined from ESA s Gaia satellite, and various ground-based telescopes, including the Isaac Newton Telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands). The result has been published in
Sandia researcher Humberto Tito Silva III has been named Engineer of the Year by AIAA, the world s largest aerospace technical society. Silva s work improved failure-rate predictions of aerospace flight systems as they reenter Earth s atmosphere. The work helps direct engineers to attack the worst problems first for reentry rockets, spaceships and satellites.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory has selected a contractor to develop a production-ready design and build a prototype antenna for the Next Generation Very Large Array (ngVLA). The ngVLA is proposed as an array of 263 dish antennas spread across North America to form a cutting-edge scientific tool for the coming decades.