July 20: A large impact on Jupiter’s south polar region is captured by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
PASADENA, California — A large comet or asteroid has slammed into Jupiter, creating an impact site the size of Earth, pictures by an Australian amateur astronomer show.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed the discovery using its large infrared telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, said computer programer Anthony Wesley, 44, who discovered the impact zone while stargazing at home.
News of Wesley’s find on a backyard 14.5-inch reflecting telescope has stunned the astronomy world, with scientists saying the impact will last only days more.
Wesley said it took him 30 minutes to realize a dark spot rotating in Jupiter’s clouds on July 19 was actually the first impact seen by astronomers since a comet collided with the giant planet in July 1994.
The strange biological blob drifting in the current in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northern coast.
It’s big, it’s black, it’s gooey and it may be alive.
Giant blobs of thick, oily biological material are floating in the Arctic Ocean’s Chukchi Sea north of the Bering Strait, reports the Anchorage Daily News.
“It’s certainly biological,” Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer told the newspaper. “It’s definitely not an oil product of any kind. It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter.”
No one in the North Slope towns of Barrow and Wainwright can recall ever seeing anything like it.
Jellyfish and sea birds are getting caught up in the sticky, stinky stuff, which according to one official “has hairy strands on it.”
“It’s definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it’s some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism,” added Hasenauer.
Martin Jones is now able to see his wife for the first time - after having a tooth implanted into his eye.
The formerly blind man, from South Yorkshire, Great Britain, had one of his front teeth removed and turned into a lens holder that was then inserted in his right eye.
When Jones married his wife Gill four years ago, he had been blinded by a tub of molten aluminium which had exploded in his face 12 years ago.
“I met my wife when I was blind and when I found out there was a chance I would get my sight back the first person I wanted to see was her,” Jones told the Daily Mail.
“The doctors took the bandages off and it was like looking through water and then I saw this figure and it was her. It was unbelievable,” Jones told the paper.
The accident during which Martin was blinded happened while he was working in a scrapyard in 1997.
He suffered 37 per cent burns and had his left eye removed after it was destroyed in the accident.
An artist’s rendition of SpaceShipTwo as it journeys in suborbital space above Earth.
The company behind the dark Irish beer Guinness will give loyal drinkers a taste of space along with their stout, but only if they win a new contest.
Guinness has reserved a seat aboard a suborbital Virgin Galactic spaceliner as one of three experience prizes in an online contest honoring the 250th birthday of the beer’s brewery this year.
Founded by British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic is a commercial space tourism company that plans to launch passengers on $200,000 trips to suborbital space using a fleet of SpaceShipTwo spacecraft.
The spaceliners are designed to be launched from the air by a massive WhiteKnightTwo mothership and send two pilots and six passengers on a weightless joyride.
Virgin Galactic currently plans to launch and land space tourist flights from a terminal at Spaceport America in New Mexico — which began construction earlier this month — as well as from a spaceport in Kiruna, Sweden.
