Thursday 23 June 2016

Hubble confirms new dark spot on Neptune

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New images confirm the presence of a dark vortex on Neptune. Though similar features were seen during the Voyager 2 flyby of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 1989 and by Hubble in 1994, this vortex is the first one observed on Neptune in the 21st century.
via Science Daily
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Hubble Confirms New Dark Spot on Neptune


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Pancake-shaped clouds not only appear in the children's book "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs," but also 3 billion miles away on the gaseous planet Neptune. When they appeared in July 2015, witnessed by amateur astronomers and the largest telescopes, scientists suspected that these clouds were bright companions to an unseen, dark vortex. The dark vortex is a high-pressure system where the flow of ambient air is perturbed and diverted upward over the vortex. This forms huge, lens-shaped clouds, that resemble clouds that sometimes form over mountains on Earth.


via HubbleSite NewsCenter -- Latest News Releases
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2016/22/

GraphExeter illuminates bright new future for flexible lighting devices

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Researchers have pioneered an innovative new technique to make flexible screens more effective and efficient. GraphExeter -- a material adapted from the 'wonder material' graphene -- can substantially improve the effectiveness of large, flat, flexible lighting, say investigators.
via Science Daily

Successful first observations of galactic center with GRAVITY

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A European team of astronomers have used the new GRAVITY instrument at ESO's Very Large Telescope to obtain exciting observations of the center of the Milky Way by combining light from all four of the 8.2-meter Unit Telescopes for the first time. These results provide a taste of the groundbreaking science that GRAVITY will produce as it probes the extremely strong gravitational fields close to the central supermassive black hole and tests Einstein's general relativity.
via Science Daily
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Solstice Dawn and Full Moonset

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A Full Moon sets as the Solstice Sun rises in this June 20 dawn skyscape. Captured from a nearby peak in central California, planet Earth, the scene looks across the summit of Mount Hamilton and Lick Observatory domes on a calendar date that marks an astronomical change of seasons and hemispherical extremes of daylight hours. Earth's shadow stretches toward the Santa Cruz Mountains on the western horizon. Just above the atmospheric grey shadowband is a more colorful anti-twilight arch, a band of reddened, backscattered sunlight also known as the Belt of Venus. The interplay of solstice dates and lunar months does make this solstice and Full Moon a rare match-up. The next June solstice and Full Moon will fall on the same calendar date on June 21, 2062.
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