Day: June 30, 2011

Cassini imaging scientists used views like this one to help them identify the source locations for individual jets spurting ice particles, water vapour and trace organic compounds from the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Image credit: Nasa/JPL/Space Science Institute For the first time, scientists working on Nasa’s Cassini mission have detected sodium salts in ice …

Salt finding from Nasa’s Cassini hints at ocean within Saturn moon Read More »

Figure 1. Extending over many thousands of kilometers and with a mass of more than 100 billion tonnes, a twisting solar prominence protrudes out of the Sun’s corona in the bottom left of this image. Magnetic fields are heavily involved in the formation of these and other solar features, such as flares and coronal mass …

Reconnecting Magnetic Fields Read More »

September 2009 Iranian photographer Babak Tafreshi has won the 2009 Lennart Nilsson scientific photography prize. According to the award panel, his images “reclaim a night sky that most modern people have lost” – see some of them here We highly recommend New Scientist  magazine . Click on the link for the complete article.

This all-sky image was taken by the Desert Fireball Network in Western Australia with a fish-eye lens. The film is exposed for most of the night, so stars trace long curves; the white streak diagonally across them is a fireball (Image: Desert Fireball Network, funding from STFC and the EU) A rare meteorite that may …

Rare meteorite found by ‘fireball’ observatory Read More »

The microwave strip observed by Planck (multi-coloured curve) is superimposed on a visible-light image of the sky, which is dominated by the disc of our Milky Way galaxy (Image: ESA/LFI/HFI Consortia/Axel Mellinger)   The Planck spacecraft has obtained its first peek at the afterglow of the big bang, revealing it in unprecedented detail. Its first …

Probe gets clearest glimpse yet of cosmic dawn Read More »