science wire

A space rock a few metres across exploded in Earth's atmosphere above the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia today at about 03:15 GMT.

A synthetic image produced from the data of the dust shell around the red giant star W Hydrae, has earned a team from the University of Sydney's Faculty of Science first prize in the annual Canon Australia's Extreme Imaging competition.

ESA's Mars Express took a high-resolution stereo image on 13 January of the southeast corner of the Amenthes Planum region on Mars, near to Palos crater and the mouth of a well-known sinuous valley, Tinto Vallis.

A laser device developed in the hopes of measuring carbon on Mars may soon be used here on Earth to root out counterfeit foods - and make sure that honey, olive oil and chocolate are what they claim. A cheap fake honey concocted from sugar would be unmasked simply by laser-scanning the carbon dioxide released from burning a few milligrams.

Black holes are deeply mysterious objects that exist throughout the universe: giant plugholes in space that drag in and consume anything that strays too close.

Tucked away in a vacuum chamber for several months, Europe's largest telecom satellite has faced the harsh conditions it will deal with once it is launched into space this summer.

NASA's Kepler mission has identified 2,740 planets orbiting other stars, but do any of them harbor intelligent life? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have now used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to look for intelligent radio signals from planets around 86 of these stars.

The first Ariane 5 heavy-lift mission of the year has delivered the Azerspace/Africasat-1a and Amazonas-3 telecom satellites into their planned transfer orbits.

A little-known asteroid will skim past Earth on 15 February, passing just 28 000 km from our planet. The 50 m-diameter chunk of space rock was discovered in last year by ESA-sponsored amateur astronomers in Spain.

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) brings together universities, observatories, and one national laboratory to hunt for supernovae and other astronomical objects.

Cambridge, MA - Using publicly available data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have found that six percent of red dwarf stars have habitable, Earth-sized planets.

ESA's XMM-Newton space observatory has completed the most detailed study ever of the fierce wind from a giant star, showing for the first time that it is not a uniform breeze but is fragmented into hundreds of thousands of pieces. Massive stars are relatively rare, but play a very important role in recycling materials in the Universe.

Robert P. Harkness, a computational astrophysicist with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, died on Sunday, January 27, after a brief bout with cancer.

Cardiff University has launched the first ever Welsh-led European Union (EU) space research programme, funded by a €2M award from the EU through its FP7 (Framework Programme 7) SPACE programme.

Cornell researchers have captured the sharpest mid-infrared images yet of a ring of gas and dust seven light-years wide orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Serious shocks need serious shock absorption, in space as well as on the ground. Now high-performance racing cars are driving more smoothly on space-ready rubber from ESA spacecraft.

Setting up a lunar base could be made much simpler by using a 3D printer to build it from local materials. Industrial partners including renowned architects Foster + Partners have joined with ESA to test the feasibility of 3D printing using lunar soil. "Terrestrial 3D printing technology has produced entire structures," said Laurent Pambaguian, heading the project for ESA.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. When Blair Porterfield outgrew her local summer-camp options at age 14, her father suggested an astronomy camp at the University of Arizona. "I'm not sure why he wanted me to go," Porterfield mused. "I hadn't been interested in science at all up until that point." In a case of "father knows best," astronomy camp couldn't have been a more perfect choice.

Cambridge, MA - The Minor Planet Center, located at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in Cambridge, Mass.

A lecturer from Durham University has been awarded a grant for his part in a project that seeks to further our understanding of how the sun works.

Posted under: Learning , News Releases , Research , Science , UW and the Community The University of Washington astronomy department is readying a traveling planetarium to take to schools for outreach - and collaboration - in Seattle and beyond.

Science Initiative will host a free lecture and discussion on why images of the universe—spacescapes— are so beautiful, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb.

A University of Alberta professor has revealed the workings of a celestial event involving binary stars that produce an explosion so powerful its luminosity ranks close to that of a supernova, an exploding star. Theoretical astrophysicist Natalia Ivanova says researchers have long debated about what happens when binary stars, two stars that orbit one another, come together in a "common envelope." "When this dramatic cannibalizing event ends there are two possible outcomes: the two stars merge into a single star or an initial binary transforms into an exotic short-period one," said Ivanova.

It's an unprecedented experiment aimed at understanding what is causing the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

NASA has officially joined ESA's Euclid mission, a space telescope designed to investigate the mysterious natures of dark matter and dark energy.

The first switch-on of a Galileo search and rescue package shows it to be working well. Its activation begins a major expansion of the space-based Cospas-Sarsat network, which brings help to air and sea vessels in distress. The second pair of Europe's Galileo navigation satellites - launched together on 12 October last year - are the first of the constellation to host SAR search and rescue repeaters.

Cambridge, MA - The Sun's visible surface, or photosphere, is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As you move outward from it, you pass through a tenuous layer of hot, ionized gas or plasma called the corona.

Multiple arcs are revealed around Betelgeuse, the nearest red supergiant star to Earth, in this new image from ESA's Herschel space observatory.

This is a very special gift for a very extraordinary scientist and an extraordinary man" —Professor Martin Curley At a ceremony at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology where Hawking is Director

Understanding how life evolved in our Solar system by studying the chemistry of meteorites that have smashed into the Moon's surface will be the focus of research, which begins this week. Scientists from the Imperial College London, along with academics from Birkbeck College and University College London, aim to understand in more detail the organic chemistry inside rock fragments on the Moon, which are like a "lunar library" - an unspoilt source of geological information spanning billions of years.

ESA's Mars Express imaged the striking upper part of the Reull Vallis region of Mars with its high-resolution stereo camera last year.

Benjamin Pope is preparing to start a PhD at the University of Sydney in 2013 after an amazing 2012 that saw him work with a Nobel Laureate, observe the work of world leaders in astrophysics and travel to an observatory in Hawaii.

Services Calendar 16 January 2013 ESA agreed with NASA today to contribute a driving force to the Orion spacecraft planned for launch in 2017.

A space rock several hundred metres across is heading towards our planet and the last-ditch attempt to avert a disaster - an untested mission to deflect it - fails. This fictional scene of films and novels could well be a reality one day. But what can space agencies do to ensure it works? ESA is appealing for research ideas to help guide the development of a US-European asteroid deflection mission now under study.

Researchers have tracked a trail of minerals that point to the prior presence of water at the Curiosity rover site on Mars.

ESA's Proba-V microsatellite is now assembled and midway through testing to ensure it is fully spaceworthy.

Michael Kramer, whose research uses the telescopes at Jodrell Bank Observatory, received the 2013 Herschel Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society.

Reception was surprisingly good on the phone call from space. "We just flew across Canada," said Commander Chris Hadfield, speaking from the International Space Station.

What if you had a "Wayback Television Set" and could watch an entire month of ancient prehistory unfold before your eyes in real time? David Rubin of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) presented just such a scenario to the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Long Beach, CA, when he announced the discovery of a striking astronomical object: a Type Ia supernova with a redshift of 1.71 that dates back 10 billion years in time.

ESA's Herschel space observatory made new observations of asteroid Apophis as it approached Earth this weekend. The data shows the asteroid to be bigger than first estimated, and less reflective. Catalogued as asteroid (99942) Apophis (previously 2004 MN4), it is often nicknamed 'the doomsday asteroid' in popular media, after initial observations made after its discovery in 2004 gave it a 2.7% chance of striking Earth in April 2029.

Are you watching BBC Stargazing Live - You should be, especially as it features OxSciBlog regular Chris Lintott giving you the chance to (virtually) explore Mars in the citizen science project Planet Four.

The 1969 "Woodstock" song by Joni Mitchell, it turns out, was onto something: " We are stardust / billion-year-old carbon.

It's not exactly icing on a cake, but it could be icing on a lake. A new paper, by a Cornell astronomy graduate student as lead author, finds that blocks of hydrocarbon ice could decorate the surface of liquid hydrocarbon lakes and seas on Saturn's moon Titan.

The Institute of Astronomy welcomed the aspiring astronomers to join in their winter programme of observing and talks on 28 th November and 19 th December.

An analysis of the first three years of data from NASA's Kepler mission, which already has discovered thousands of potential exoplanets, contains good news for those searching for habitable worlds outside our solar system.

Simons Foundation gives $4.3 million in funding for construction and installation of new telescopes to measure universe at its inception The first POLARBEAR telescope on Cerro Toco in Chile's Atacama Desert, began collecting data last year. The addition of two more telescopes to create the Simons Array will give us a clearer view of the beginning of the universe.