Science (Mostly Astronomy) News

Here are a bunch of stories, I encourage you to click through to the articles for some very pretty pictures.

General relativity passes a large scale test "General relativity, our current best understanding of gravity, has passed yet another test—this time on a much larger length scale. Ever since relativity's first confirmation in 1919, when Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington observed that the light from distant stars was shifted by the mass of the sun, direct tests have been confined to length scales smaller than our solar system. No test to date has stringently probed general relativity's applicability to the length scales of the universe itself."

Scientists supersize quantum mechanics "A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving."

New Images Unlock Secrets of Jupiter's Red Spot "It's difficult enough to track the weather on Earth, but with new thermal images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, scientists now have the first detailed interior weather map of a giant storm system on another planet. 'This is our first detailed look inside the biggest storm of the solar system,' said Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 'We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated.'"

Finally, a "Normal" Exoplanet "Chalk up another exoplanet discovery for the CoRoT satellite. But this planet, while a gas giant, could have temperatures cool enough to host liquid water. Corot-9b orbits a sun-like star at a distance similar to Mercury – one of the largest orbits of any extrasolar planet yet found, and may have an interior that closely resembles Jupiter and Saturn. ‘This is a normal, temperate exoplanet just like dozens we already know, but this is the first whose properties we can study in depth,’ said Claire Moutou, who is part of the international team of 60 astronomers that made the discovery. ‘It is bound to become a Rosetta stone in exoplanet research.’"

The Air Force is building it's own secret space shuttle? Secret Mini Space Shuttle Could Launch April 19 "It's cute. It's little. It's also top secret. The X-37B orbital test vehicle is at Cape Canaveral in Florida, and the word is that it will be launched on board an Atlas V rocket on Monday April 19, 2010 at around 10 pm EDT. Other than that, the Air Force isn't saying much about this mini-space shuttle look-alike. The reusable unmanned vehicle is capable of staying in orbit for 270 days, but the mission duration hasn't been announced. Additionally, the ship has a payload bay for experiments and deployable satellites, but no word if any payloads will be included on the inaugural flight of this mini space plane."

Jupiter may have a new ring that was created by a smash between moons. "The possible ring appears as a faint streak near Jupiter's moon Himalia in an image taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. The telescopic camera aboard the Pluto-bound probe snapped the ring in September 2006 as the craft was closing in on Jupiter in the lead-up to a close encounter with the planet the following February.'We were taking an image of Himalia to test the instrument. It was completely unexpected that something else was there.'"