Recently, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has been turning up a new crowd of stars close to home: the coldest of the brown dwarf family of "failed" stars. Now, just as scientists are "meeting and greeting" the new…
China completed its first manned space docking on Monday, June 18, 2012 as a spacecraft carrying three astronauts successfully coupled with an orbiting module, in a major milestone for its ambitious space programme.The docking to Tiangong-1 space lab was done by
On June 16, 2012 People’s Republic of China (PRC) successfully launched their first manned crew to Tiangong-1 space lab. Not only will this soon become their own space station but this is the mission when first Chinese woman was sent to space.Chang Wanquan, Chief
Data from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft indicate that the venerable deep-space explorer has encountered a region in space where the intensity of charged particles from beyond our solar system has markedly increased. Voyager scientists looking at this rapid rise draw
Newly-discovered asteroid 2012 LZ1 is flying past the Earth-Moon system today. At closest approach on June 14th (23:10 UT), this 300 – 700 meter-wide space rock will be 14 lunar distances (5 310 835.2 km, 3.3 million miles) away. A team of astronomers led by Ernesto
Sunspot 1504 poses a growing threat for Earth-directed M-class solar flares and continues to expand into a large-sized sunspot cluster. Now spans the size of at least 4 planet Earths.It erupted in southern hemisphere on June 13th at 13:19 UTC, producing a
NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array – NuSTAR was launched into the morning skies over the central Pacific Ocean at 9 a.m. PDT (16:00 UTC) Wednesday, June 13, 2012 beginning its mission to unveil secrets of hidden black holes, exploded stars and other exotic
Solar physicist Dibyendu Nandi and PhD student Bidya Binay Karak have shown that the Sun’s memory of its sunspot cycles, long believed to be imprinted in its churning plasma, lasts no longer than five-and-a-half years.Sunspots are regions of strong magnetic fields
Solar eruptions are on the rise as the Sun progresses toward the peak of its roughly 11-year-long activity cycle, now expected in mid-2013. Sun produced powerful solar flare rated as X5.4 (based on the peak intensity of its X-rays) on March 7, 2012. During a
New evidence from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory challenges prevailing ideas about how black holes grow in the centers of galaxies. Astronomers long have thought that a supermassive black hole and the bulge of stars at the center of its host galaxy grow at the same
