Strange Lights Over Germany
08 April 2002: German citizens and airline pilots reported strange lights in the night sky over the country Saturday, according to a story by the Reuters news agency. NASA officials at first thought the lights might have been the result of spacecraft debris burning up as it crashed through the atmosphere, but those reports were not confirmed. Other scientists said natural meteors might have been the cause, according to Reuters. NASA's HETI spacecraft and part of a launch vehicle are believed to have re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at approximately 10:55 p.m. Eastern Standard Time Saturday [story]. It is not uncommon for meteors or manmade debris to create flashes of light but to vaporize before hitting the ground.

Deadly Impacts Come in Twos
05 April 2002: Scientist argue over whether and how often impacts by comets and asteroids have caused mass extinctions. Evidence is clear for the extinctions, in the form of fossils. Impact evidence is harder to find. A new study suggests that multiple impacts may have sometimes caused the demise of species in the past. Michael Lucas, a geology student at Florida Gulf Coast University, cites one example of a 73-million-year-old double impact structure referred to as Kara and Ust-Kara in Russia. “Approximately ten percent of the impact structures on Earth are doublets or twin structures, suggesting a nearly simultaneous impact of binary asteroids or fragmented comets,” he said at a regional meeting of the Geological Society of America yesterday. In recent years, several asteroids have been found to have satellite companions.

Cassini Spacecraft Adjusts Course
05 April 2002: The Cassini space probe, headed for a 2004 rendezvous with Saturn, fired its main engine for the first time in just more than a year Wednesday, adjusting its course slightly. The craft, which has traveled nearly 2 billion miles on its circuitous route, must fire the engine every year or so to keep fuel lines clean, NASA said. The space agency said the craft is in good health.

When it Rains, it May Pour Nearby Later
01 April 2002: Heavy rains in one season in North America might fuel flooding months later, a NASA meteorologist says, possibly helping to explain the severity of the 1993 Mississippi River flood. Michael Bosilovich of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has worked with colleagues to develop a computer model that analyzes how moisture moves in the atmosphere. In 1993, heavy spring storms left vast regions of the Mississippi basin soaked, and much of that water may have been recycled into summer storms, Bosilovich told SPACE.com. Conversely, the global model shows that most rain in India results directly from ocean evaporation. While he expects the model's greatest use will be in predicting the climate weeks or months in advance, Bosilovich said there may be short-term implications. A farmer irrigating a very large field could contribute to nearby rainfall on a day when conditions are right, for example. Unfortunately for drought-stricken cities in the East, however, watering a lawn is too small an affair to coax relief from above.

Earth Moves, Under Your Feet, Always
01 April 2002: Using the satellite-based Global Positioning System, scientists have found what they say is an ongoing earthquake in California. The temblor, a so-called slow earthquake, has been underway since about Feb. 7, according to geologist Meghan Miller of Central Washington University. Miller and colleagues report in last week's issue of Science that these quakes, which no one feels, occur below the region where Earth's tectonic plates are stuck and release strain during earthquakes, and above the region where a fault slips continuously. "Understanding these 'silent earthquakes' that we have been missing all these years will have a profound effect on our ability to predict hazards from volcanoes and earthquakes," said Jim Whitcomb of NSF's division of earth sciences, which funded the research.

What Happens When You Fuse Two Dying Stars
25 March 2002: Rare objects called extreme helium stars give out more energy than they ought to produce by nuclear processes, and some are known to get hotter every year. A new set of computer models, capping two decades of research, suggests why. Astronomers Simon Jeffery of the Armagh Observatory and Hideyuki Saio of Tohoku University say the stars are the result of mergers between two white dwarfs, aged stars that were mostly burnt out. One simulation paired two white dwarfs heavy in helium. The merger rekindled thermonuclear fusion after a violent collision that lasted only minutes. The results are published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Zip! Stellar Pair in Fastest Orbit Ever Seen
15 March 2002: A pair of old mostly dead stars, each about the size of Earth, orbit one another every five minutes -- 100,000 times faster than Earth's yearly orbit around the Sun, astronomers said today. The stars, probably white dwarfs, are separated by just 49,700 miles (80,000 kilometers), a little more than twice the distance from Earth to a typical TV-broadcasting satellite. The system, called RX J0806.3+1527, was first detected in X-rays in 1994, and every 5 minutes it blinked. Only now, based on research led by by GianLuca Israel of the Astronomical Observatory of Rome, is it certain that the blinking is due to one star passing in front of the other. Observations were made with with the ESO's Very Large Telescope and the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo.

Computing Comes to Life
15 March 2002: Research funded by NASA has led to a crude DNA-based computer able to solve a logic problem, as reported in the journal Science this week. USC computer science professor Leonard Adleman showed in 1994 that DNA, the molecule that holds life's genetic code, could be used to find the shortest route among seven cities, a relatively simple problem. His new experiment solved a problem requiring the evaluation of more than one million possible solutions. In computer parlance, a DNA computer operates in parallel, with countless molecules shimmying around together at once. Commercial DNA computers are a long ways off, but Adleman says they "compute with extremely high energy-efficiency and store enormous quantities of information."

Supercluster of Galaxies Spotted in Development
11 March 2002: The largest structures in the universe are superclusters of galaxies, made of many smaller galactic clusters. Astronomers would like to know when these superstructures formed. European researchers announced today they've spotted what appears to be a developing supercluster nearly 12 billion light-years away, or within 3 billion years of the Big Bang. The evidence involves about twice much material as would be expected around a galaxy called MS 1512-cB58. The material, in the form of hydrogen clouds, may be galaxies in the making, according to a team led by Sandra Savaglio Johns Hopkins University. The observations were made with the ESO's Very Large Telescope.

The Pluto Recession?
11 March 2002: A Federal Reserve official says the U.S. economic recession, with unclear signs pointing every which way, is like Pluto, according to a story Friday by Reuters. "The astronomers argue about whether Pluto is or is not a planet,'' said St. Louis Fed President William Poole. Because of its odd orbit and small size, some astronomers in recent years have suggested Pluto is more like an asteroid or a comet than a planet. Poole said similarities in the two debates suggest the current economic situation might be called the Pluto Recession.

Record 6 Telescopes Combined For Picture of Stars
07 March 2002: Astronomers said today they had combined the light of six telescopes to make an image of a trio of distant stars. It's the first time so many telescopes have been used in concert to capture an optical image. The technique, called interferometry, has long been used in radio telescopes. More recently, it is becoming a force in infrared- and visible-light astronomy. Interferometry uses an array of telescopes to effectively create one large telescope that can be bigger than a football field. The new picture, of Eta Virginis, was made with the Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer at Lowell Observatory's Anderson Mesa site near Flagstaff, Arizona. The technique "will lead to the direct imaging of the surfaces of stars and of star spots, analogous to the sunspots on the Sun," said Kenneth Johnston of the Naval Observatory.