Component of mothballs present in deep-space clouds

October 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - The Herschel telescope has captured images of cold gas clouds lying near the plane of the Milky Way, a region that is dotted with stellar factories, like pearls on a cosmic string. On September 3, Herschel aimed its telescope at a reservoir of cold gas in the constellation of the Southern Cross near the Galactic Plane.

September 22nd, 2009 LONDON - With the help of a rocket, scientists have created an artificial cloud at the edge of space, to learn how high-flying dust reflects radio waves. "Noctilucent", or night-shining, clouds float dozens of kilometres higher than other clouds, at an altitude of about 80 kilometres.

September 13th, 2009 WENCHANG - China Monday began construction of its new space launch centre in Wenchang city, on the northeast coast of the tropical island province of Hainan. It is scheduled to be completed by 2013.

August 29th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a new research, a team of scientists has determined that the warped shapes of the dust-filled disks where new planets may be forming around other stars, may be due to interstellar wind. The dust-filled disks where new planets may be forming around other stars occasionally take on some difficult-to-understand shapes.

August 15th, 2009 LONDON - A team of scientists in Australia and the United States has discovered a new class of object which they call "Super Planetary Nebulae." Planetary nebulae are shells of gas and dust expelled by stars near the end of their lives and are typically seen around stars comparable or smaller in size than the Sun. The international team, led by Associate Professor Miroslav Filipovic from the University of Western Sydney, surveyed the Magellanic Clouds, the two companion galaxies to the Milky Way, with radio telescopes of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Australia Telescope National Facility.

June 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new research has confirmed that the mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere. The research connects the two events by what followed each about a day later: brilliant, night-visible clouds, or noctilucent clouds, that are made up of ice particles and only form at very high altitudes and in extremely cold temperatures.

June 4th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists with NASA's Cassini mission, studying Saturn's moon Titan say its clouds are still noticeable in the southern hemisphere while fall is approaching. They monitored Titan's atmosphere for three-and-a-half years, between July 2004 and December 2007, and observed more than 200 clouds.

May 8th, 2009 Fuel for deep space exploration running on emptyWASHINGTON — NASA is running out of nuclear fuel needed for its deep space exploration. The end of the Cold War's nuclear weapons buildup means that the U.S.

May 6th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A University of Michigan astronomer has decided to use the Herschel Space Observatory to study the organic molecules that make up life on Earth in new detail in the warm clouds of gas and dust around young stars. The astronomer in question is Ted Bergin, an associate professor in the Department of Astronomy, University of Michigan.

April 29th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA has developed a flash on-line game about telescopes, featuring its next-generation spacecraft, the James Webb Space Telescope. The game, called "Scope it Out!" includes an introduction to telescopes and four matching games where you can compare simple telescopes to both Webb and the Hubble Space Telescope.

April 22nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - The Hubble Space Telescope celebrated its 19th anniversary by detecting a peculiar galactic system that contains several galaxies, along with a "cosmic fountain" of stars, gas, and dust that stretches over 100,000 light-years. Known as Arp 194, the northern (upper) component of the system of galaxies appears as a haphazard collection of dusty spiral arms, bright blue star-forming regions, and at least two galaxy nuclei that appear to be connected and in the early stages of merging.

April 21st, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists at Harvard University, US, have found that tropical cyclones readily inject ice far into the stratosphere, possibly feeding global warming. The finding provides more evidence of the intertwining of severe weather and global warming by demonstrating a mechanism by which storms could drive climate change.

April 14th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new research has suggested that scientists can get warnings of impending ionized gas bursts, which are a potential threat to satellites and power grids, through clouds of plasma in space. Till now, the arrival of burps of hot ionized gas from the Sun, has been hard to predict, but the first images of an earthbound burst captured by two satellites simultaneously have shown that plasma clouds can give warnings 24 hours in advance that trouble is heading our way.

March 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international research team has found evidence that some stars in the center of the Milky Way galaxy have both carbon and oxygen in the dust that surrounds them, which sheds new light on the origin of the elements of life. "Scientists have long expected to find carbon-rich stars in our galaxy because we know that significant quantities of carbon must be created in many such stars, but carbon had not previously shown up in the clouds of gas around these stars," said Matthew Bobrowsky, an astrophysicist in the University of Maryland's department of physics.

February 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON/MOSCOW - A US satellite was destroyed in an unprecedented collision with a spent Russian satellite, raising fears of danger to other satellites, a report said Thursday. The collision between Iridium-33, a commercial US communications satellite and Russia's Cosmos 2251 satellite, which had been turned off for years, occurred Tuesday at 04:55 GMT above Siberia at a height of 790 km, the space.com site said, quoting a statement by US space agency NASA.