News by Subject Space & Planetary

Cold cloud top temperatures can tell forecasters if a tropical cyclone has the potential to generate heavy rainfall, and that is exactly what NASA's Aqua satellite found when it observed the temperatures in Tropical Cyclone Belna over northwestern Madagascar.

Environmental scientists are always in search of new tools that can better characterize the Earth's surface. In a new study published in Scientific Reports, a group of researchers in the US and Japan reported that Himawari-8, a new-generation geostationary satellite, was able to acquire cloud-free observations every 4 days and capture the seasonal changes of vegetation more accurately than before.

A new hydrous phase, ?-AlOOH, was observed to be stable at pressures above ?200 GPa. The stability of ?-AlOOH at extremely high pressures may affect the modelling results of the internal structure and deep water circulation of some extra-solar planets, such as terrestrial super-Earths, because the hydroxide may store water in these regions.

Greenland is losing ice seven times faster than in the 1990s and is tracking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's high-end climate warming scenario, which would see 40 million more people exposed to coastal flooding by 2100.

When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the Southern Indian Ocean, water vapor data provided information about the intensity of Tropical Cyclone Belna.

Satellite data from the European Space Agency (ESA) has now been used as the basis for new insights on the deep structure of the continent Antarctica. Scientists from Kiel University (CAU) recently published their discoveries in the 'Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth' in cooperation with scientists from the British Antarctic Survey, Great Britain, and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Scientists may have figured out how dust particles can stick together to form planets, according to a Rutgers co-authored study that may also help to improve industrial processes.

Russian scientists discovered a unique neutron star, the magnetic field of which is apparent only when the star is seen under a certain angle relative to the observer. The neutron star GRO J2058+42 studied by the researchers offers an insight into the internal structure of neutron star's magnetic field only at a certain phase of its rotational period.

Researchers from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Science (NAOC), Peking University and Tsinghua University have found a special population of dwarf galaxies that could mainly consist baryons within radii of up to tens of thousands of light-years. This contrasts with the normal expectation that such regions should instead be dominated by dark matter.