Science

Tags:

NASA's AIRS Images Tropical Storm Barry Before Landfall

PIA23355-16_0.jpg
NASA's AIRS instrument imaged Tropical Storm Barry on the afternoon of July 12, 2019, a day before the storm is expected to make landfall on the Louisiana Coast.

Tags:

NASA's ARIA Team Maps California Quake Damage

PIA23354-16_0.jpg
NASA's ARIA team produced this map of earthquake damage in Southern California from the recent temblors in July2019. The color variation from yellow to red indicates increasingly more significant surface change, or damage.

Tags:

Experimental mini-accelerator achieves record energy

Coupled terahertz device significantly improves electron beam quality

Pressemittelung_STEAM_Juni2019_web_0.jpg
Experimental mini-accelerator achieves record energy

Tags:

Science Release: Hubble Discovers Mysterious Black Hole Disc

heic1913a_0.jpg
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have observed an unexpected thin disc of material encircling a supermassive black hole at the heart of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147, located 130 million light-years away.

Tags:

Through Smoke and Fire, NASA Searches for Answers

Follow the space agency this summer to learn how NASA investigates fires to improve lives and safeguard the future.

ventura_0.jpg
On Dec. 5, 2017, the Multi Spectral Imager on the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite captured the data for a false-color image of the Thomas Fire in Ventura County, California. Active fires appear orange and the burn scars are brown. Unburned vegetation is green; developed areas are gray.

Tags:

Hubble Uncovers Black Hole that Shouldn't Exist

stsci-h-p1935a-f-3319x1391_0_0_0.png
A Hubble Space Telescope image of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147 appears next to an artist's illustration of the supermassive black hole residing at the galaxy’s core. The Hubble image shows off the galaxy's sweeping spiral arms, full of young blue stars, pinkish nebulas, and dust in silhouette. However, at the brilliant core of NGC 3147 lurks a monster black hole, weighing about 250 million times the mass of our Sun. Hubble observations of the black hole demonstrate two of Einstein’s theories of relativity. The reddish-yellow features swirling around the center are the glow of light from gas trapped by the hefty black hole’s powerful gravity. The black hole is embedded deep within its gravitational field, shown by the green grid that illustrates warped space. The gravitational field is so strong that light is struggling to climb out, a principal described in Einstein's theory of general relativity. Material also is whipping so fast around the black hole that it brightens as it approaches Earth on one side of the disk and gets fainter as it moves away. This effect, called relativistic beaming, was predicted by Einstein's theory of special relativity. NGC 3147 is located 130 million light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Draco the Dragon.

[Image]

Tags:

Light dark matter is a thousand times less likely to bump into regular matter than previous astrophysical analyses allowed

A SLAC/Stanford study of the population of satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way provides new clues about the particle nature of dark matter.

dmsim_0.jpg
Simulation of the dark matter structure surrounding the Milky Way. Driven by gravity, dark matter forms dense structures, referred to as halos (bright areas), in which galaxies are born. The number and distribution of halos, and therefore also of galaxies, depends on the properties of dark matter, such as its mass and its likelihood to interact with normal matter.

Tags:

New Sensor Could Shake Up Earthquake Response Efforts

Berkeley Lab technology could reduce time needed to declare buildings affected by earthquakes safe and sound

iStock-quake-1000px_0.jpg
A new sensor developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory combines laser beams with a position sensitive detector to directly measure drift between building stories, an essential part of assessing earthquake damages in a building and deeming them safe to reoccupy.

Tags:

Wildfires Across Alaska Top One Million Acres Burned

alaska2019_0.jpg

Tags:

For Climbing Robots, the Sky's the Limit

lemur-timelapse-1280_0_0.gif
The climbing robot LEMUR rests after scaling a cliff in Death Valley, California. The robot uses special gripping technology that has helped lead to a series of new, off-roading robots that can explore other worlds.