Luna Meteoroid Impact Seen From Earth

A 45-kilogram/100Lb  chunk of random space rock has slammed into the Moon at almost 100,000 kilometres per hour/62,000 miles per hour, creating a bright flash of light as it exploded with a force of 5 tonnes of dynamite, according to NASA.

An automated telescope run by NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office – MEO – captured the images of the March 17 explosion, the biggest seen since NASA began monitoring the Moon for meteoroid impacts 8 years ago.

MEO is the space agencies arm responsible for monitoring meteoroids, helping spacecraft avoid them and engineering craft that can withstand their impact. By measuring the impacts on the moon NASA gains a better understanding not only of the rate of impact, but of the affect impacts have, how to avoid them and how to engineer systems and craft to cope with a space filled with heavy, fast  moving objects.

NASA says this latest flash was so bright that anyone looking at the Moon at the moment of impact would have seen it without a telescope :: Read the full article »»»»

Australian Researchers Brew Recipe For Long Life Beer

Australian beer drinkers will soon have the option of buying a beer with a much longer shelf life, a new type of malt barley, developed by Adelaide researchers and a Japanese brewer, can curb beers propensity of tasting stale when left on the shelf.

The new barley variety ‘SouthernStar’ is the results of collaboration between the University of Adelaide and Sapporo Breweries. Importantly this new barley is not genetically modified, it’s been produced using conventional – albeit high tech – breeding techniques, utilising data from the recently completed Barley Genome Project .

South Australian farmers are to begin commercial production of the barley this year. Commercial crops grown in 2013 will be harvested in November/December, processed into malt in the first half of 2014 and used for commercial beer production in the later part of 2014 :: Read the full article »»»»

Kepler-62 Most Earth Like Planets

Astronomers using a potent NASA space telescope to search for life say they have found planets which are the most Earth-like candidates yet. Two of the five planets orbiting a Sun-like star called Kepler-62 are squarely in the habitable zone – not too hot, not too cold, possibly bearing water – NASA scientists report in the journal Science :: Read the full article »»»»

Swiss Witness Black Hole Devouring a Planet

Swiss astrophysicists have witnessed the most rare of event, a black hole awakening from its slumber to devour a planet-sized object in a galaxy 47 million light years away. Observers from the University of Geneva using the European Space Agency’s INTEGRAL satellite project, revealed a black hole that had been slumbering for years chomping on a giant, low-mass object that had ventured too close.

Scientists at the Swiss university analyse the data collected by INTEGRAL, launched in 2002 to study gamma rays and shed light on events far from Earth’s galaxy. They spotted a light flare coming from a black hole in the centre of the NGC 4845 galaxy, which has a mass more than 300,000 times greater than the Sun and had been dormant for more than 30 years, the university said in a statement.

Matter-sucking black holes normally lurk dormant and undetected at the centre of galaxies, but can occasionally be tracked by the scraps left over from their stellar feasts. This black hole had woken up and absorbed an object with a mass 15 times that of Jupiter after taking three months to drag the snack from its trajectory. It managed to swallow 10 per cent of the object’s total mass, while the remainder stayed in orbit :: Read the full article »»»»

Our Planet Hottest Since Human Civilisation

Earth is on track to becoming the hottest it has been at any time in the past 11.3 millennia, a period spanning the history of human civilisation, a new study says.

Based on fossil samples and other data collected from 73 sites around the world, scientists have been able to reconstruct the history of the planet’s temperature from the end of the last Ice Age around 11,000 years ago to the present.

They have determined the past 10 years have been hotter than 80 per cent of the past 11,300 years.

However virtually all the climate models evaluated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict Earth’s atmosphere will be hotter in the coming decades than at any time since the end of the Ice Age.

This finding is resolute no matter what greenhouse gas emission scenario is used, the study found :: Read the full article »»»»

Two NASA Probes Crash Land on Lunar Surface

Two tiny NASA probes have crashed into the Moon after spending months gathering data by orbiting kilometres above the lunar surface, the US space agency said. The site where the probes crashed will be named after astronaut Sally Ride, the first US female in space. The two tiny probes have been dubbed Ebb and Flow :: Read the full article »»»»

Australia’s First Chief Scientist, Ralph Slatyer Died Age 83

Australia’s first chief scientist, Ralph Slatyer, has died at the age of 83. Professor Slatyer was appointed to the role in 1989 by then prime minister Bob Hawke. He remained chief scientist until 1992 and set up the Cooperative Research Centres in Australia.

The centres’ chief executive, Tony Peacock, says the pair went to primary school together in Perth. “He was of course a very eminent scientist by then (when he was appointed chief scientist),” he said. “He had been very senior in CSIRO and very senior at the ANU and he’d been Australia’s ambassador to UNESCO before that, so he’d had a very successful career.”

Mr Peacock says Professor Slatyer was concerned about the impact of the CSIRO moving off university campuses. “He was concerned that basic research being done at universities, that a generation of knowledge, wasn’t being used as much because there was less interaction with the CSIRO colleagues who’s job it was to deliver that science,” he said.