Heliophysics. Heliophysics We live in the extended atmosphere of an active star. While sunlight enables and sustains life, the Sun's variability produces streams of high energy particles and radiation that can harm life or alter its evolution. Under the protective shield of a magnetic field and atmosphere, the Earth is an island in the Universe where life has developed and flourished. The origins and fate of life on Earth are intimately connected to the way the Earth responds to the Sun's variations. Understanding the Sun, Heliosphere, and Planetary Environments as a single connected system is the goal of the Science Mission Directorate's Heliophysics Research Program. In addition to solar processes, our domain of study includes the interaction of solar plasma and radiation with Earth, the other planets, and the Galaxy. We have already discovered ways to peer into the internal workings of the Sun and understand how the Earth's magnetosphere responds to solar activity.
A Chemist Explains Why Gold Beat Out Lithium, Osmium, Einsteinium ... Hide captionSanat Kumar, with table. David Kestenbaum/NPR The periodic table lists 118 different chemical elements. And yet, for thousands of years, humans have really, really liked one of them in particular: gold. Gold has been used as money for millennia, and its price has been going through the roof.
Why gold? We went to an expert to find out: Sanat Kumar, a chemical engineer at Columbia University. The periodic table looks kind of like a bingo card. Sanat starts with the far-right column of the table. But there's also a big drawback: They're gases. Then he swings over to the far left-hand column, and points to one of the elements there: Lithium "If you expose lithium to air, it will cause a huge fire that can burn through concrete walls," he says. Money that spontaneously bursts into flames is clearly a bad idea. Not all of them burst into flames. So Sanat crosses out another 38 elements, because they're too reactive. Not a gas. But even here we can cross things out. For more: Making a baby in space could be dangerous for all involved. Scientists capture antimatter atoms in particle breakthrough. Antihydrogen atoms were trapped in a magnetic fieldMatter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact"It's taken us five years to get here," says Professor Jeffrey HangstCERN's next ambition is to create a beam of antimatter (CNN) -- Scientists have captured antimatter atoms for the first time, a breakthrough that could eventually help us to understand the nature and origins of the universe.
Researchers at CERN, the Geneva-based particle physics laboratory, have managed to confine single antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap. This will allow them to conduct a more detailed study of antihydrogen, which will in turn allow scientists to compare matter and antimatter. Understanding antimatter is one of the biggest challenges facing science -- most theoretical physicists and cosmologists believe that at the Big Bang, when the universe was created, matter and antimatter were produced in equal amounts. However, as our world is made up of matter, antimatter seems to have disappeared. What's the moon made of? NASA mission finds it's nothing so simple as cheese. Gazing at the moon will just never be the same.
It remains a place of mystery, for sure. But scientists say they now know that the moon has enough water ice and vapor to potentially quench the thirst of lunar astronauts and even fuel lunar rockets. Plus, it has a cache of familiar compounds - organics such as methane and ammonia, some mercury and even traces of sulfur and and silver - that were found hidden away in the moon's deep shadows. Six major papers released Thursday about the makeup of the silvery globe describe a trove of lunar chemistry kicked up by a NASA mission that sent a rocket crashing into the moon a year ago. "This place looks like it's a treasure chest of elements," said Brown University planetary geologist Peter Schultz, one of the principal investigators of the NASA mission. Although the presence of lunar ice and water vapor was reported from that mission, the amount of H2O present was not known until the newest papers were released.