SciByte

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

This planet, though, is all solids and much bigger than previously discovered "super-Earths," making it a "mega-Earth."

Kepler-10c, circles a sunlike star once every 45 days

It is located about 560 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco

The system also hosts a 3-Earth-mass "lava world," Kepler-10b, in a remarkably fast, 20-hour orbit

Kepler-10c was originally spotted by NASA's Kepler spacecraft.

By measuring the amount of dimming, astronomers can calculate the planet's physical size or diameter

Kepler can't tell whether a planet is rocky or gassy

Kepler-10c was known to have a diameter

, 2.3 times as large as Earth

This suggested it fell into a category of planets known as mini-Neptunes, which have thick, gaseous envelopes

The team used the HARPS-North instrument on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) in the Canary Islands to measure the mass of Kepler-10c

They found that it weighed 17 times as much as Earth - far more than expected.

This showed that Kepler-10c must have a dense composition of rocks and other solids.

Planet formation theories have a difficult time explaining how such a large, rocky world could develop

The early universe contained only hydrogen and helium

Heavier elements needed to make rocky planets, like silicon and iron, had to be created

When those stars exploded

scattered

through space, which then could

later generations of stars and planets

This process should have taken billions of years. However, Kepler-10c shows that the universe was able to form such huge rocks even during the time when heavy elements were scarce.

tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought. And if you can make rocks

This research implies that astronomers shouldn't rule out old stars when they search for Earth-like planets

if old stars can host rocky Earths too, then we have a better chance of locating potentially habitable worlds in our cosmic neighborhood

The Kepler-10 system is about 11 billion years old, which means it formed less than 3 billion years after the Big Bang

It's massive enough to have held onto

its atmosphere

if it ever had it

The next task will be looking at the propulsion system and making sure they can actually fire the engines for a trajectory correction maneuver (TCM), currently targeted for June 17.

actually two stars in one: a binary pair where a super-dense neutron star has been absorbed into its less dense supergiant

First theorized in 1975

difficult to find in real life because of their similarity to red supergiants,

It’s only through detailed spectroscopy that the particular chemical signatures

can be identified.

Only by absorbing a much hotter star — such as a neutron star left over from the explosive death of a more massive partner — is the production of such elements presumed to be possible

could be at least as strong as gravity in supermassive black holes, the singularities that lurk in the center of many galaxies

team found patterns in the sunlight reflecting off a northern lake called Punga Mare that they interpret as two-centimeter-high waves

There

may be a mudflat instead of a deep lake, and a shallow film of liquid on top may be the cause of the unique light signature

If life on Titan exists,

the best place to look

is in large bodies of liquid—the kind that form waves

Waves on Titan

would confirm that the lakes actually are deep reservoirs of methane and ethane,

True liquid bodies would also make a robotic spacecraft mission to explore Titan's habitability more feasible

By 2017 scientists should know for certain whether what they are seeing is indeed caused by waves

Cassini has been observing the moon during its northern winter, when weak winds are at work

As spring

over the next few years, bringing stronger winds to kick up seas, the probe should capture more definitive evidence of waves if they exist

They discovered that increasing the random activity, or noise, associated with HIV gene expression–without increasing the average level of gene expression–can reactivate latent HIV

When HIV infects an immune cell, it inserts its genetic material into the DNA of the infected cell

In most cases, the immune cell's

makes copies of the viral genetic material

eventually leads to the production

of all the components needed to make more viruses

In some cases, however, HIV

goes into a holding pattern and the virus enters a latent state within the infected immune cell

This means that a small percentage of HIV hides in infected cells, beyond the reach of even the most potent drugs

people with HIV infection have to take antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) for the rest of their lives

Roy Dar, PhD,

"If we can make the virus show itself, we can then use ARVs to eliminate it.

This so-called 'shock and kill' approach holds great promise, but to date it has unfortunately shown only limited success."

In this study, the team tested the counter-intuitive notion that compounds that increase noise in gene expression could work together with transcriptional activators to increase overall levels of HIV reactivation

They found that while the noise enhancers could not cause reactivation on their own, 75 percent of them could synergize with activators and increase viral reactivation relative to activator alone

some noise enhancers doubled reactivation levels when combined with activators

"The implications for using noise also extend far beyond HIV reactivation, since random cellular activity contributes to a wide range of processes, from antibiotic persistence to cancer metastasis

Dr. Weinberger

Earth fortunately survived

and the fragments from the crash gradually coalesced into the Moon that we see today

scientists believe they have found traces of Theia in lunar rocks pulled from the Apollo missions

The isotopes or types of oxygen revealed in the new research appear to be different between the Earth and the Moon

implies that a body of different composition caused the changes

Before, the “resolution” of these microscopes couldn’t find any significant differences

the new data reveals the moon rocks have 12 parts per million more oxygen-17 than the Earth rocks

“The differences are small and difficult to detect, but they are there,” stated lead researcher Daniel Herwartz

means two things

first

can now be reasonably sure that the giant collision took place

Second

it gives us an idea of the geochemistry of Theia

The work was published in Science and will also be presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in California on June 11.

Brief fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field have been detected before many earthquakes in the past 50 years

Friedemann Freund, a crystallographer at San Jose State University

in the weeks before a magnitude-5.4 quake struck about 15 kilometers northeast of San Jose in October 2007, an instrument near the epicenter sensed a number of unusual magnetic pulses

Those blips became more frequent as the day of the earthquake approached, Freund says

recently, prior to several medium- to moderate-sized quakes in Peru, two sensitive magnetometers recorded the same sort of pulses

how such pulses could be generated

suggest that these blips stem from microscopic changes in crystals in rocks under seismic stress deep within Earth

In many types of rocks, particularly volcanic rocks that have substantial amounts of water locked inside them, crystals are chock-full of oxygen-oxygen bonds called peroxy bonds

(These bonds formed long ago, after chemical changes split some of the water molecules, freeing the hydrogen atoms to bond together and then diffuse out of the rocks as gas.)

When those rocks are squeezed, say, by the sides of a fault zone scraping past one another, some of the peroxy bonds break

Those broken bonds release negatively charged electrons, which remain trapped in place, and create positively charged “holes” in the crystal

his team propose that the same process might be happening within Earth’s crust

As stress on large volumes of rock builds in advance of an impending quake, many, many of these electrical holes are created inside them

the mass migration of such holes that creates the large electrical currents responsible for generating the low-frequency magnetic pulses that make their way to detectors on Earth’s surface

they say

some critics of his model have proposed

lightning

as an alternative explanation

he notes, with data from the two sensors in Peru he and his colleagues were able to pinpoint the strongest of those pulses as originating within a few kilometers of the epicenters of subsequent quakes

For now, Freund admits, the team’s model is preliminary: The paper has been submitted to a journal and is now being reviewed by other scientists.

two instruments aren’t sufficient to pinpoint the location of an event; to truly “triangulate” an event you need at least three sensors

“I’m concerned that the pulses are not originating deep within the Earth.”

“This paper only makes sense if the observations [of magnetic pulses] are good,”

John Ebel, a seismologist at Boston College, who wasn’t involved in the research

the blips may have some inexplicable humanmade origin

Decades ago

his Boston-based magnetometers started picking up a series of odd pulses every morning.

Eventually

identified

It was the engineers cranking up Boston’s trolley cars at a rail yard a few kilometers away from the instruments

Even if the magnetic pulses originate within Earth along seismic zones under stress, Freund says, the blips don’t always foretell a quake

It’s more likely to be the pattern of pulses—and, in particular, changes in their size and frequency—that Freund and his colleagues say might offer scientists a crystal ball for impending temblors

Vega is the brightest star shining in the east after dusk. It's currently the top star of the big Summer Triangle. The brightest star to Vega's lower left is Deneb. Look farther to Vega's lower right for Altair. The Summer Triangle will climb higher in early evening all through the summer, to pose highest overhead at dusk when fall begins

Venus

low in the east during dawn.

Mars (

high in the south-southwest in late twilight

Mars sets in the west around 2 a.m. daylight saving time

Jupiter

low in the west-northwest in twilight and sets around nightfall

southeast to south during evening

Saturn (

As NASA plans increasingly ambitious robotic missions to Mars, laying the groundwork for even more complex human science expeditions to come, accommodating extended stays for explorers on the Martian surface will require larger and heavier spacecraft

use a helium balloon -- that, when fully inflated, would fit snugly into Pasadena's Rose Bowl

to lift our vehicle to 120,000 feet

A fraction of a second after dropping from the balloon, and a few feet below it, four small rocket

stabilize the saucer.

A half second later, a

solid-fueled rocket engine will

sending the test vehicle to the edge of the stratosphere

"Our goal is to get to an altitude and velocity which simulates the kind of environment one of our vehicles would encounter when it would fly in the Martian atmosphere," said Ian Clark, principal investigator of the LDSD project at JPL

to fly the two supersonic decelerator technologies that will be thoroughly tested during two LDSD flight tests next year.

The SIAD-R, essentially an inflatable doughnut that increases the vehicle's size and, as a result, its drag

. It will quickly slow the vehicle

where the

the largest supersonic parachute ever flown, first hits the supersonic flow

Mercury

across the Sun’s face

Silhouetted against the bright disk of the Sun, Mercury barely appears as a hazy blur in the filtered Mastcam images

it was moving relatively quickly during the transit, passing the darker smudges of two Earth-sized sunspots over the course of several hours.

It’s the first time Mercury has ever been imaged from Mars

the first time we’ve observed a planet transiting our Sun from another world besides our own

this was

a carefully calculated observation using the Mastcam’s right 100mm telephoto lens and neutral density filter, which is used to routinely image the Sun in order to measure the dustiness of the Martian atmosphere

There is no cure for Type 1 diabetes though it can be controlled with insulin therapy

by using an antibody to stimulate a specific molecule in the innate immune system we can reverse—with a high rate of success—new onset diabetes in mice that have already developed the symptoms of diabetes

The cause of this reversal is a preservation of the endocrine pancreatic beta cells that produce insulin

These cells are preserved from the autoimmune attack which is the hallmark of Type 1 diabetes

The key to reversing Type 1 diabetes in mice,

is catching the disease at its onset, which is typically within a very short time window

The time frame would be longer in humans, but it is still a relatively short time from new onset to end-stage Type 1 diabetes

Ridgway says this approach differs from most in combating Type 1 diabetes because his team's therapies in mice do not directly interact with T-cells

treatment of autoimmunity has often been directed at suppressing an over-zealous adaptive immune response by eliminating auto-reactive T-cells

In Type 1 diabetes, autoimmunity causes the body's T-cells to attack its insulin-producing beta cells.

targeting a different part of the immune system

There are two arms of the immune system.

respond to many different antigens

The innate system tends to have a stereotypical response. We are targeting a receptor that is found mostly on the innate immune cells, such as dendritic cells.

Additional study will be required, but the therapy may hold promise because one agonistic anti-TLR4 agent is already FDA approved and others are under development