The tallest mountains ever seen on Titan – coated with layers of organic material and blanketed by clouds – have been imaged by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/12375/massive-mountain-range-imaged-on-saturns-moon-titan/
Solscape
Heavyweight Stars Light Up Nebula NGC 6357
The small open star cluster Pismis 24 lies in the core of the large emission nebula NGC 6357 in Sagittarius, about 8.000 light-years away from Earth. Some of the stars in this cluster are extremely massive and emit intense ultraviolet radiation. The brightest object in this cluster is designated Pismis 24-1. It was once thought to weigh as much as 200 to 300 solar masses. This would not only have made it by far the most massive known star in the galaxy, but would have put it considerably above the currently believed upper mass limit of about 150 solar masses for individual stars. Now, Hubble Space Telescope high-resolution images of the star show that it is really two stars orbiting one another. They are estimated to be 100 solar masses each.
HubbleSite: Images – Pismis 24 and NGC 6357
New Math Technique Opens Clearer Window On Universe
A fast, efficient image enhancement technique developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and originally applied to improving monochrome microscope images has proved itself equally effective at the other end of the scale – sharpening details on color images of distant galaxies produced by the Hubble Space Telescope.
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/techbeat/tb2006_1207.htm#apex
Researchers Identify Driver for Near-Earth Space Weather
New findings indicate that the aurora and other near-Earth space weather are driven by the rate at which the Earth’s and sun’s magnetic fields connect, or merge, and not by the solar wind’s electric field as was previously assumed. The merging occurs at a spot between the Earth and sun, roughly 40.000 miles above the planet’s surface, and appears fundamental to the circulation of particles and magnetic fields throughout near-Earth space.
http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pressreleases/2006/061208b.asp
Shuttle docks with space station
Space shuttle Discovery successfully docked with the international space station Monday evening. Discovery’s crew plan to spend a week at the station, rewiring its electrical system and delivering a 2-ton addition.
An inspection of the exterior of the shuttle on Sunday turned up no evidence of damage to its tiles and panels sustained during its launch Saturday night.
Source: NASA
Discovery’s Night Launch Sends STS-116 to Station
Space Shuttle Discovery and a crew of seven astronauts lifted off Saturday from Kennedy Space Center at 8:47 p.m. EST.
Shuttle @ NASA
Bridge in Tartarus Colles
A stunning new image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a natural „bridge“ over a trough in the Tartarus Colles region of Mars, where a lava tube has collapsed, except for a small portion, creating an arch over the trough. The „bridge“ is about 23 metres wide.
Narrow Trough in Tartarus Colles
Teleskop erblickt Sonnentsunami
Sonnentsunami
Der Prototyp eines neuen Sonnenüberwachungsteleskops in New Mexico machte die zur oben gezeigten Animation verarbeiteten Aufnahmen einer tsunamiartigen Schockwelle, die nach dem großen Flare vom Mittwoch, den 6. Dezember 2006 über die Sonnenoberfläche rollte.
Organic Material Found in an Ancient Meteorite
NASA researchers have discovered organic material inside a meteorite that recently fell in Canada’s Tagish Lake. The meteorite is especially valuable because scientists collected it shortly after it crashed in 2000, ensuring it wasn’t contaminated by local bacteria. The meteorite seems to contain many small hollow organic globules, which probably formed in the cold molecular cloud of gas and dust that gave birth to the Solar System. Meteorites like this have been falling to Earth for billions of years, and probably seeded the early planet with organic material.
Carbon globules in meteorite may have seeded Earth life
New Evidence for Reason Behind Rise of Life in Cambrian Period
Geologists have uncovered evidence in the oil fields of Oman that explains how Earth could suddenly have changed 540 million years ago to favour the evolution of the single-celled life forms to the multi cellular forms we know today. Reporting in the December 7 issue of the journal „Nature“, researchers from MIT, the California Institute of Technology, and Indiana University show that there was a sudden change in the oxygenation of the world’s oceans at the time just before the „Cambrian explosion“, one of the most significant adaptive radiations in the history of life. With an increased availability of oxygen, single-celled life forms that had dominated the planet for the previous three billion years were able to evolve into the diverse metazoan phyla that still characterize life on Earth. The key insight was derived when core samples and drillings taken at a depth of about three kilometers from oil wells in Oman were analysed, which are known to have the oldest commercially viable oil on the planet. The results of carbon and sulfur isotopic analyses from the material led the team to the conclusion that the oceanic conditions that laid down the deposits in Oman were quite different from conditions of today. When organic matter falls into an ocean that doesn’t stir, it becomes deprived of sufficient oxygen and cannot survive as multi cellular forms. For this reason, with a limited amount of oxygen, life continued in its single-celled form for the first three billion years. But about 550 million years ago, the deep oxygen began mixing its contents with the shallow ocean, resulting for the first time in a fully oxidized deep ocean.