Plate tectonics started 4+ billion years ago
“We’re revealing a new picture of what the early Earth might have looked like,” says UCLA graduate student Michelle Hopkins. “In high school, we are taught to see the Earth as a red, hellish, molten-lava Earth. Now we’re seeing a new picture, more like today, with continents, water, blue sky, blue ocean, much earlier than we thought.” <more>
Black hole huntersThe truth about black holes is perhaps less dramatic and menacing than movie blockbusters suggest. Rather than sucking everything into them like some cosmic vacuum cleaner, Professor Andrea Ghez says black holes “kind of mind their own business unless you get really, really close.” <more> PDF |
Worlds in collision
“It’s as if Earth and Venus collided with each other,” said UCLA’s Benjamin Zuckerman. “Astronomers have never seen anything like this before.” Learn more about what happened to two terrestrial planets orbiting a mature sun-like star some 300 light-years from Earth.
Thirty-year-old aurora borealis mystery?
Solved! UCLA space scientists and colleagues have identified the mechanism that triggers substorms in space; wreaks havoc on satellites, power grids and communication systems; and leads to the explosive release of energy that causes the northern lights. <more>
View from the Earthly edge of space
“The plane will be flying as high as you can ask a 747 to fly, but yet not go into space” said UCLA’s Mark Morris, one of three astronomers selected to participate in the first scientific observations to be conducted by SOFIA, a specially modified Boeing 747 carrying the world’s most versatile airborne astronomical observatory. SOFIA’s instruments will give Morris his clearest view ever of the clouds of dust and gas at the center of the Milky Way some 25,000 light years away – without the atmospheric interference of Earth-based telescopes. <more>
Satellite with “night-vision goggles”
When it launches in 2009, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), an unmanned satellite that will scan the entire sky in infrared light, will use detectors 500 times more sensitive than those used in previous missions. Ninety-nine percent of the sky has not yet been observed with this kind of sensitivity – and the survey should be able to find at least 100 million galaxies and hundreds of nearby cool stars that are currently unknown – says UCLA’s Edward L. “Ned” Wright, principal investigator. <more>
Wright built his own telescope when he was in high school. Now a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, he gave a UCLA Faculty Research Lecture on “Observing the Origin of the Universe: A Century of Progress in Cosmology.” <watch>
UCLA students = rocket scientists
The competition: Design, build, and launch a rocket capable of taking a 10-pound payload to 10,000 feet. The victors? UCLA Rocket Project team. Bruins won the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association’s Rocket Competition the first time they competed. <more>
UCLA leads NASA’s Dawn Mission
UCLA professor Christopher T. Russell has spent more than 15 years working on NASA’s Dawn mission to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. After launching September 2007, Dawn will travel for more than four years before reaching the “dwarf planet” Ceres and the massive asteroid Vesta – two of the first bodies formed in our solar system. Dawn’s discoveries could be huge – some think Ceres could harbor life. <more>
Mission to the moon
Diviner is one of six instruments aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission – the first mission in NASA’s program to get astronauts back on the moon by 2020 – and UCLA’s David Paige is principal investigator. Diviner will make the first global radiometric survey of the temperature of the surface of the moon, identifying cold traps and potential ice deposits as well as rough terrain and other landing hazards. The mission is scheduled for launch June 2009. <more>
