Astronomers from The University of Western Ontario have released footage of a meteor that was approximately 100 times brighter than a full moon. The meteor lit up the skies of southern Ontario two weeks ago and Western astronomers are now hoping to enlist the help of local residents in recovering one or more possible meteorites that may have crashed in the area of Grimsby, Ontario. The Physics and...

Britney E. Schmidt, a UCLA doctoral student in the department of Earth and space sciences, wasn`t sure what she`d glean from images of the asteroid Pallas taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But she hoped to settle at least one burning question: Was Pallas, the second-largest asteroid, actually in that gray area between an asteroid and a small planet? The answer, she found, was yes. Pallas, like ...

Thousands of newly released images from more than 1,500 telescopic observations by NASA`s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show a wide range of gullies, dunes, craters, geological layering and other features on the Red Planet. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the orbiter recorded these images from the month of April through early August of this year. The camera team at ...

Herschel has carried out the first test observations with all its instruments, with spectacular results. Galaxies, star-forming regions and dying stars comprised the telescope’s first targets. The instruments provided spectacular data at their first attempt, finding water, carbon and revealing dozens of distant galaxies. These observations show that Herschel’s instruments are working b...

NASA`s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) has taken and received its first images of the Moon, kicking off the year-long mapping mission of Earth`s nearest celestial neighbor. The LROC imaging system, under the watchful eyes of Arizona State University professor Mark Robison, the principal investigator, consists of two Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs) to provide high-resolution black-and-white ...

Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers are reporting the first detailed molecular snapshots of a deadly gastrointestinal virus as it is caught in the grasp of an immune system molecule with the capacity to destroy it. The images could help scientists design a more effective vaccine against rotavirus, a lethal infection that kills more than 500,000 children worldwide each year. The discovery i...

People have always wondered where we, our Earth, our galaxy, come from. A group of scientist has now driven that quest one step further and taken a peak at how the stars that gave rise to most of the material found on our universe formed over cosmic history. University of Miami professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, Joshua Gundersen is part of an international research team tha...

Analyzing MRI studies of the brain with software developed at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) may allow diagnosis of Alzheimer`s disease and of mild cognitive impairment, a lesser form of dementia that precedes the development of Alzheimer`s by several years. In their report that will appear in the journal Brain and has been released online, the M...

Motorway-sized troughs and channels carved into Antarctica`s continental shelves by glaciers thousands of years ago could help scientists to predict future sea-level rise, according to a report in the May issue of the journal Geology. Using sonar technology from onboard ships, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the German Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) captured the most extensive, ...

When photographers zoom in on an object to see it better, they lose the wide-angle perspective — they are forced to trade off "big picture" context for detail. But now an imaging method developed by Princeton researchers could lead to lenses that show all parts of the scene at once in the same high detail. The new method could help build more powerful microscopes and other optical ...