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latest data indicate that we are clearly in a new region where things are changing more quickly

data making the 16-hour-38 minute, 11.1-billion-mile (17.8-billion-kilometer), journey from Voyager 1 to antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network on Earth

These energetic particles were generated when stars in our cosmic neighborhood went supernova.

From January 2009 to January 2012, there had been a gradual increase of about 25 percent in the amount of galactic cosmic rays

Beginning on May 7, the cosmic ray hits have increased five percent in a week and nine percent in a month

The second important measure

is the intensity of energetic particles generated inside the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself

there has been a slow decline in the measurements of these energetic particles, they have not dropped off

could be expected when Voyager breaks through the solar boundary.

The final data set that Voyager scientists believe will reveal a major change is the measurement in the direction of the magnetic field lines surrounding the spacecraft

While Voyager is still within the heliosphere, these field lines run east-west. When it passes into interstellar space, the team expects Voyager will find that the magnetic field lines orient in a more north-south direction

Such analysis will take weeks

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 are in good health. Voyager 2 is more than 9.1 billion miles (14.7 billion kilometers) away from the sun

Billions of neutrinos pass through a square centimeter of Earth every second, and only a tiny fraction of them interact with matter

IceCube is located inside a cubic kilometer of ice beneath the South Pole. The observatory consists of 5,160 digital optical modules suspended from 86 strings

required three functioning wheels to maintain the precision pointing necessary to detect the signal of small Earth-sized exoplanets

With the failure of a second reaction wheel, the spacecraft can no longer precisely point at the mission's original field of view. The culprit is none other than our own sun

pushes the spacecraft around

the pressure exerted when the photons of sunlight strike the spacecraft

Without a third wheel to help counteract the solar pressure, the spacecraft's ultra-precise pointing capability cannot be controlled in all directions.

Kepler mission and Ball Aerospace engineers have developed an innovative way of recovering pointing stability by maneuvering the spacecraft so that the solar pressure is evenly distributed across the surfaces of the spacecraft

To achieve this level of stability, the orientation of the spacecraft must be nearly parallel to its orbital path around the sun

This technique of using the sun as the 'third wheel' to control pointing is currently being tested on the spacecraft and early results are already coming i

During a pointing performance test in late October, a full frame image of the space telescope's full field of view was captured showing part of the constellation Sagittarius

Photons of light from a distant star field were collected over a 30-minute period and produced an image quality within five percent of the primary mission image quality

Additional testing is underway to demonstrate the ability to maintain this level of pointing control for days and weeks.

The K2 mission concept has been presented to NASA Headquarters

A decision to proceed to the 2014 Senior Review – a biannual assessment of operating missions – and propose for budget to fly K2 is expected by the end of 2013

For four years, the space telescope simultaneously and continuously monitored the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, recording a measurement every 30 minutes.

About one in a billion stars travel at a speed roughly three times greater than our Sun

at 220 km/s with respect to the galactic center

At a speed that fast, these stars can easily escape the galaxy entirely, traveling rapidly throughout intergalactic space.

this is the first time an entire star cluster has broken free

hypervelocity stars have puzzled astronomers for years. But by observing their speed and direction, astronomers can trace these stars backward, finding that some began moving quickly in the Galactic Center

Here, an interaction with the supermassive black hole can kick a star away at an alarming speed

Another option is that a supernova explosion propelled a nearby star to a huge speed

think M87 might have two supermassive black holes at its center

The star cluster wandered too close to the pair, which picked off many of the cluster’s outer stars while the inner core remained intact

The black holes then acted like a slingshot, flinging the cluster away at a tremendous speed

TŻOs are thought to be formed by the interaction of two massive stars―a red supergiant and a neutron star formed during a supernova explosion―in a close binary system

the most commonly held theory suggests that, during the evolutionary interaction of the two stars

the much more massive red supergiant essentially swallows the neutron star, which spirals into the core of the red supergiant

Studying these objects

represents a completely new model of how stellar interiors can work

In these interiors we also have a new way of producing heavy elements in our universe

The astronomers

examined the spectrum of light emitted from apparent red supergiants, which tells them what elements are present

When the spectrum of one

star -- HV 2112

were quite surprised by some of the unusual features

took a close look at the subtle lines in the spectrum they found that it contained excess rubidium, lithium and molybdenum

Past research has shown that normal stellar processes can create each of these elements

high abundances of all three of these at the temperatures typical of red supergiants is a unique signature of TŻOs

careful to point out that HV 2112 displays some chemical characteristics that don't quite match theoretical models

There are some minor inconsistencies between some of the details of what we found and what theory predicts

But the theoretical predictions are quite old, and there have been a lot of improvements in the theory since then