# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This planet's lightning storms are like nothing on Earth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Radio waves from a faraway exoplanet could signal intense lightning storms there.

# data[].attributes.headline
Spinning black holes may 'sing' during a collision

# data[].attributes.subject
Spinning black holes may 'sing' during a collision

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Spinning black holes may 'sing' during a collision

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The massive black hole in the movie Interstellar would create a unique gravity-wave signal when gobbling a smaller partner.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
CLOSE

LAUREL, Md. - For the first time in its 4-billion-year life, Pluto got a visitor from Earth.

CLOSE

Prompting wild applause and hugs at the Mission Operations Center here, the spacecraft sent signals confirming that it survived its historic rendezvous with Pluto and continues to sail through the outer zone of the solar system. Engineers on the ground received the much-anticipated messages beginning at 8:52 pm Tuesday, 13 tense hours after the craft's historic flyby.

"The spacecraft was happy," mission operations manager Alice Bowman said, summarizing the technical details New Horizons sent to the ground. "In this instance, our spacecraft did exactly what it was supposed to do."

Principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., interpreted the spacecraft's transmissions another way, calling them "one small step for New Horizons and one giant leap for mankind."

The team took congratulations from luminaries ranging from President Obama, who tweeted, "Thanks @NASA -- it's a great day for discovery and American leadership," to British physicist Stephen Hawking, who recorded a message in his trademark electronic voice saying that he'll "be watching closely" as the spacecraft beams its trove of data to Earth.

Upon hearing the good news, the scientists, mission staff and guests yelled and whistled even more loudly than they did at 7:49 am ET Tuesday, the precise moment of the spacecraft's closest approach to Pluto, and many team members shed tears. No human-made object has been closer to Pluto, once considered the outermost planet in the solar system but now officially known as the biggest dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, the icy, far-removed Siberia of the solar system.

After the spacecraft phoned home, mission personnel responsible for various systems on the spacecraft reported to Bowman on the status of the spacecraft's various components. The bottom line was always the same: "nominal," or as expected. The reports made clear that during the 22 hours the spacecraft was on its own, it had executed the proper maneuvers, hadn't used up too much of its fuel, and had collected plenty of data.

"We have a healthy spacecraft. We've recorded data from the Pluto system, and we're outbound from Pluto," Bowman told her staff here at The Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which managers the mission for NASA.

Scientists were thrilled to learn that a bonanza of data, years of effort and planning in the making, is stashed safely aboard the craft.

"The most important (data) is safe on the spacecraft, and all we have to do is send it home," said New Horizons scientist Leslie Young of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "We've known the sizes of the boxes under the Christmas tree, and now we get to open them."

After surviving the 3 billion-mile, 9 1/2-year journey to Pluto, New Horizons seemed unlikely to falter just as it achieved its goal. But it would take only a speck of dust the size of a grain of rice to mortally wound the spacecraft, making it impossible for scientists to rest easy until the spacecraft checked in with its handlers.

Even so, the spacecraft was programmed to put all its strength into collecting hundreds of pieces of data in the 24 hours surrounding the flyby, the period when it would have the best view of the tiny Pluto and its retinue of five moons. Before it phoned home, New Horizon's cameras frantically snapped pictures, and sensors tried to collect bits of dust and Pluto's atmosphere.

The images and other details sent to the ground in past days have already revealed a surprising and fantastic world. Near the bright "heart" on Pluto's flank, for example, there are both lots of craters - indicating an ancient surface, perhaps several billion years old - and stretches of fresh, uncratered terrain, which is probably relatively young.

More data will be streamed to Earth in the coming days, including photos that principal investigator Alan Stern promises will be 10 times sharper than those seen so far. The sheer volume of data means that the last of it won't reach scientists' desks until the fall of 2016.

By then the $720 million mission may have set its sights even further -- on another icy little world in the Kuiper Belt. The science team has deemed several Kuiper Belt bodies worth a visit, but they'd need more money from NASA to keep their mission alive.

The New Horizons team's two goals "are to explore more Kuiper Belt objects," said Stern, "and to get funded to do exactly that."

CLOSE

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1Mr4INY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pluto: Icy, weird, far away -- finally gets a close encounter with Earth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
CLOSE LAUREL, Md. - For the first time in its 4-billion-year life, Pluto got a visitor from Earth. CLOSE Prompting wild applause and hugs at the Mission Operations Center here, the spacecraft sent signals confirming that it survived its historic rendezvous with Pluto and continues to sail through the outer zone of the solar system.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Fans of Star Wars might remember watching a moody Luke Skywalker gaze at a double sunset on his home planet of Tatooine. It turns out that planets with two suns probably are more common than once thought. Scientists recently discovered the tenth such planet. And they say it adds to evidence that such planets may be more common than single-sun ones like Earth.

Scientists have known for a long time that most stars come as pairs or multiples. They wondered if these multi-star systems might also host planets. After the Kepler space telescope was launched in 2009, astronomers finally had the tools to search for these among exoplanets. Those are worlds outside Earth's solar system.

The newfound exoplanet, Kepler-453b, is 1,400 light-years from Earth. It orbits in a two-sun - or binary - system. Planets in such a system are called " circumbinary" for the fact that they circumnavigate both stars.

Astronomers discovered Kepler-453b while watching two stars that were orbiting each other. Sometimes light coming from the stars dimmed a bit.

"That decrease has to be because of something going in front of the stars," explains Nader Haghighipour. He's an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He was one of the authors of an August 5 paper about the planet's discovery in Astrophysical Journal.

He shared details of this planet and star system on August 14 at the International Astronomical Union General Assembly in Honolulu, Hawaii. And something was unusual about the new circumbinary planet. Of the other nine such planets known, eight orbit on the same plane as their stars. That means they pass in front of both stars every time they make a complete orbit. But the new planet's orbit is tilted a small bit compared to the orbit of its suns. As a result, Kepler-453b only passes in front of its stars about 9 percent of the time.

ONE SUN, TWO SUN In the Kepler-453 system, two stars (black dots) orbit in the center, and the planet Kepler-453b (white dot) orbits both suns. UH Magazine

"We were really lucky," says Haghighipour. If his team hadn't been watching the stars at just the right moment, the scientists would have missed the telltale dip in light that signaled the presence of this planet.

That they found this planet at all - the second circumbinary planet with such an off-plane orbit - probably means that they're incredibly common, the astronomers say. Indeed, Haghighipour adds, "We realized there must be many other systems that we're missing."

After all, if a planet's orbit never allows it to pass between Earth and its stars, no telltale dip in starlight will ever point to the planet's existence. The next step will be for astronomers to figure out how to detect these types of planets. Haghighipour thinks its possible. If the planet is big enough, its gravity will affect its stars' orbits. Astronomers could search for those tiny, telltale wobbles.

Most known exoplanets orbit a single star. But that's partly because of observational bias, notes Philippe Thebault. He's a planetary scientist at the Paris Observatory in France. He was not involved in this discovery. Early exoplanet surveys excluded systems with multiple stars. Even after scientists started looking at two-star systems, they found that most of the planets that turned up were orbiting only one of the two stars.

Some exoplanets have even more suns. A few orbit in three- and even four-star systems.

Thebault says more circumbinary systems need to be studied. That way, scientists can learn more about how they work and how common they are. "It's still difficult to do statistics" to figure that out, he says. There are simply too few examples known. He says, "It will be nice to have 50 or 100 of these guys, instead of 10."

So is it possible there's a young Jedi watching a double-sunset over Kepler-453b today? It does reside in the habitable - or " Goldilocks " - zone. That is the distance from a sun that allows water to be liquid and the planet's surface not too hot to fry life or too cold to freeze it. Life on Kepler-453b might be unlikely, though, since this exoplanet is a gas giant. That means it has no solid surface. But it could have moons, Haghighipour says. "Such a moon [would also be] in the habitable zone, and may develop conditions to start and sustain life."

Power Words

(for more about Power Words, click here)

astronomy The area of science that deals with celestial objects, space and the physical universe as a whole. People who work in this field are called astronomers.

astrophysics An area of astronomy that deals with understanding the physical nature of stars and other objects in space. People who work in this field are known as astrophysicists.

binary Something having two integral parts. (astronomy) A binary star system contains two suns in which one revolves around the other, or they both revolve around a common center.

circumbinary (in astronomy) An adjective that describes a planet that orbits two stars.

circumnavigate To travel all around something, such as to complete at least one orbit around a star or to travel all of the way around the Earth.

exoplanet A planet that orbits a star outside the solar system. Also called an extrasolar planet.

Goldilocks zone A term that astronomers use for a region out from a star where conditions there might allow a planet to support life as we know it. This distance would be not too close to its sun (otherwise the extreme heat would evaporate liquids). It also can't be too far (or the extreme cold would freeze any water). But if it's just right - in that so-called Goldilocks zone - water could pool as a liquid and support life.

gravity The force that attracts anything with mass, or bulk, toward any other thing withmass. The more mass that something has, the greater its gravity.

habitable A place suitable for humans or other living things to comfortably dwell.

light-year The distance light travels in one year, about 9.48 trillion kilometers (almost 6 trillion miles). To get some idea of this length, imagine a rope long enough to wrap around the Earth. It would be a little over 40,000 kilometers (24,900 miles) long. Lay it out straight. Now lay another 236 million more that are the same length, end-to-end, right after the first. The total distance they now span would equal one light-year.

orbit The curved path of a celestial object or spacecraft around a star, planet or moon. One complete circuit around a celestial body.

plane (in geometry) A flat surface that is two-dimensional, meaning it has no surface. It also has no edges, meaning it extends out in all directions, without ends.

planet A celestial object that orbits a star, is big enough for gravity to have squashed it into a roundish ball and it must have cleared other objects out of the way in its orbital neighborhood. To accomplish the third feat, it must be big enough to pull neighboring objects into the planet itself or to sling-shot them around the planet and off into outer space. Astronomers of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) created this three-part scientific definition of a planet in August 2006 to determine Pluto's status. Based on that definition, IAU ruled that Pluto did not qualify. The solar system now consists of eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

solar system The eight major planets and their moons in orbit around the sun, together with smaller bodies in the form of dwarf planets, asteroids, meteoroids and comets.

star Thebasic building block from which galaxies are made. Stars develop when gravity compacts clouds of gas. When they become dense enough to sustain nuclear-fusion reactions, stars will emit light and sometimes other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The sun is our closest star.

statistics The practice or science of collecting and analyzing numerical data in large quantities and interpreting their meaning. Much of this work involves reducing errors that might be attributable to random variation. A professional who works in this field is called a statistician.

sun The star at the center of Earth's solar system. It's an average size star about 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Or a sunlike star.

telescope Usually a light-collecting instrument that makes distant objects appear nearer through the use of lenses or a combination of curved mirrors and lenses. Some, however, collect radio emissions (energy from a different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum) through a network of antennas.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Like Tatooine in 'Star Wars,' this planet has two suns

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fans of Star Wars might remember watching a moody Luke Skywalker gaze at a double sunset on his home planet of Tatooine. It turns out that planets with two suns probably are more common than once thought. Scientists recently discovered the tenth such planet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A giant planet, perhaps 10 times Earth's mass, may be orbiting the sun from a great distance. Its existence, orbit and size are all surmised, based on strange effects seen in objects within the distant Kuiper Belt.

# data[].attributes.headline
Hurricane at this galaxy’s center is wicked fast (disclaimer: short article

# data[].attributes.subject
Hurricane at this galaxy’s center is wicked fast (disclaimer: short article

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/hurricane-galaxys-center-wicked-fast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
DARMSTADT, GERMANY Comets are rubble left over from the birth of the solar system. By studying these hunks of rock, dust and ice, scientists hope to better understand the early history of the solar system - including Earth's early years. And never has the chance of doing this been better than on the comet under Philae's robotic feet.

After a more than 10.5-year voyage, this robotic lander has just set down onto the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. On November 12, the day it landed, Philae and its mother ship - the Rosetta spacecraft - were roughly 500 million kilometers (310 million miles) from Earth.

Several spacecraft had spent a few hours observing comets from on high as they flew by these mega-boulders. But until Philae's landing, no mission had placed research instruments onto a comet. The robotic lander has already been sending back photos and probing the rock underfoot. Philae may even get to observe gases or other matter emerging from underground as the comet heats to scorching temperatures. And it will get beastly hot within a few months as the comet's orbit swings it in close to the sun.

For now, scientists are trying to figure out precisely where Philae set down. Problems with a thruster kept the lander from holding fast on its first try.

Now, instead of being entirely in open space, as planned, the lander is flanked by what looks like a cliff. "We are not sure how far we are from the cliff, but we are in its shadow permanently," says Jean-Pierre Bibring. A scientist at the Université Paris Sud in Orsay, France, he spoke at a media briefing on November 13.

The lander also is not sitting perfectly on all three legs, he noted. It is almost vertical, with two feet on the ground and one in open space.

Sitting in a cliff's shadow also means the lander's solar panels will get less sunlight than mission scientists had expected. The early data suggest that the lander is getting just 1.5 hours of sunlight per day. That is far less than the six to seven hours it would have gotten if it had landed exactly on target - which it did. At first.

On that first touchdown, Philae hit the bull's-eye. But the lander didn't stick its landing. Instead, it bounced twice. In between the first and second touchdown, the lander shot a kilometer up into space. In fact, it caught almost two hours of air time before it hit 67P again. The next bounce sent it 20 meters into the air for a 7 minute leap. Researchers are now trying to identify precisely where the lander now sits.

But Philae isn't the only science center studying the comet. Its mother ship, Rosetta, arrived at 67 P on August 6, 2014. Immediately, that spacecraft began orbiting the comet and snapping pictures. Rosetta plans to stay with the relatively tiny celestial rock until at least December 2015. Scientists are hoping that throughout, Rosetta will be able to send back photos.

It also will relay back to Earth the data that Philae collects. But even if Philae had stuck its landing, the robot was not expected to remain active for more than about four months. As 67P nears the sun, it will heat up dramatically. Eventually, the lander's instruments will essentially get fried.

What makes comets special?

Comets and asteroids are thought to be the oldest, most pristine relics of the early solar system. People can't go back billions of years in time to the birth of the sun. So exploring comets and asteroids may be the best option for learning how the solar system evolved, explains Matt Taylor. He's the Rosetta project scientist at the European Space Agency's Science and Technology Center in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

Studying the geology and chemistry of comets, he says, could give clues to how the planets evolved into what they are today. What's more, they might also hint at where Earth got its water and certain other ingredients for life.

In other words, Taylor says, the potential payoff of this mission has been worth the hazards, costs, nail biting and decade-long wait for answers. At last, he notes, scientists can sit back and watch the data fly in.

Did space rocks supply Earth's water?

Around 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system started to form as a giant cloud of gas and dust. Eventually, gravity forced them to collapse inward and coalesce. Most of this material got pulled into the center of the cloud to form the sun. The rest condensed into a handful of huge rocks that became planets. Smaller bodies became comets and asteroids.

In that scenario, asteroids probably formed between Mars and Jupiter. There it would have been too hot for water and ice to survive. Comets, on the other hand, probably condensed farther out in this embryonic cloud. In the frigid, dark edges of the solar system, ice would have been able to persist and start to attach to clumps of gas and dust, scientists believe.

Those outer reaches of the solar system include a region known as the Kuiper (KY-per) belt. Here, beyond the orbit of Neptune, lies a vast area or rocky debris left over from the formation of the solar system. Many of its objects are made of ice (frozen water), rock, frozen methane and ammonia. Even farther out, well beyond the orbit of Pluto, lies the Oort cloud. This zone of icy rocks has been suggested as the birthplace of many comets.

If comets formed in such distant places, they may have ferried lots more water to Earth than the asteroids did. At least, "That's the conventional wisdom," says Claudia Alexander. A leader of the U.S. arm of Rosetta, this NASA scientist is based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. (NASA contributed electronics and three instruments to the Rosetta mission. At least one of these instruments will look at 67P's water.)

Rosetta and Philae will give scientists a chance to virtually "get their hands on" the comet's ice, says Alexander. That could help them figure out pretty quickly whether comets like 67P brought water to Earth billions of years ago.

One of the first things they'll want to figure out: Is 67P's water the same type that makes up Earth's oceans? Most comets studied so far have possessed a larger amount of deuterium, an also known as "heavy hydrogen," than Earth does. If 67P does too, that would argue against comets being the source of most Earthly water.

Indeed, such a finding might instead argue that asteroids were the main source. Scientists recently found at least one asteroid with water. Called Ceres - and large enough to be considered a dwarf planet - it orbits the sun on a path between Mars and Jupiter. This asteroid also spouts off water vapor, sort of like a comet.

To confuse matters further, Rosetta's observations already indicate that 67P has many traits of an asteroid. This comet, for example, isn't covered in surface ice. Instead, its water appears to be stored deeper within its core.

Such findings hint that comets and asteroids aren't as radically different as scientists had once thought. Instead, Alexander says, they may fall on a continuum with rocky, dry asteroids on one end, really icy comets on the other and everything else in between.

As 67P approaches the sun, its ice will transform directly into water vapor and other gases. Along with dust, these gases will shoot outward. As these jets collide with other particles from the sun, the comet will develop two tails.

Unlike the showy tails of Halley's comet in 1986, however, 67P's tails will not be visible to the naked eye. But no problem. Rosetta will witness them from a front-row seat. As the comet's tails grow, Rosetta will record the show - along with other details of how the comet morphs during its intense solar heating.

Power Words

asteroid A rocky object in orbit around the sun. Most orbit in a region that falls between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers refer to this region as the asteroid belt.

chemistry The field of science that deals with the composition, structure and properties of substances and how they interact with one another. Chemists use this knowledge to study unfamiliar substances, to reproduce large quantities of useful substances or to design and create new and useful substances. (about compounds) The term is used to refer to the recipe of a compound, the way it's produced or some of its properties.

coalesce The bringing together of many small elements into a combined mass.

comet A celestial object consisting of a nucleus of ice and dust. When a comet passes near the sun, gas and dust vaporize off the comet's surface, creating its trailing "tail."

condense To become thicker and more dense. This could occur, for instance, when moisture evaporates out of a liquid.

deuterium An isotope of hydrogen which consists of a proton, neutron and electron. The proton-neutron nucleus is also referred to as deuteron.

embryo The early stages of a developing vertebrate, or animal with a backbone, consisting only one or a or a few cells. As an adjective, the term would be embryonic - and could be used to refer to the early stages or life of a system or technology.

evolve To change gradually over generations, or a long period of time. Nonliving things may be described as evolving if they change over time. For instance, the miniaturization of computers is sometimes described as these devices having evolved to smaller, more complex devices.

geology The study of Earth's physical structure and substance, its history and the processes that act on it. People who work in this field are known as geologists. Planetary geologists study the same things about other planets and celestial bodies, such as asteroids.

gravity The force that attracts anything with mass, or bulk, toward any other thing with mass. The more mass that something has, the greater its gravity.

Kuiper belt An area of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is a vast area containing leftovers from the formation of the solar system that continue to orbit the sun. Many objects in the Kuiper belt are made of ice, rock, frozen methane and ammonia.

lander A special, small vehicle designed to ferry humans or scientific equipment between a spacecraft and the celestial body they will explore.

Oort cloud A swarm of small rocky and icy bodies far beyond the orbit of Pluto, up to 1.5 light-years from the sun. The cloud is a source of some comets.

orbit The curved path of a celestial object or spacecraft around a star, planet or moon. One complete circuit around a celestial body.

orbiter A spacecraft designed to go into orbit, especially one not intended to land.

planet A celestial object that orbits a star, is big enough for gravity to have squashed it into a roundish ball and it must have cleared other objects out of the way in its orbital neighborhood. To accomplish the third feat, it must be big enough to pull neighboring objects into the planet itself or to sling-shot them around the planet and off into outer space. Astronomers of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) created this three-part scientific definition of a planet in August 2006 to determine Pluto's status. Based on that definition, IAU ruled that Pluto did not qualify. The solar system now consists of eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

pristine An adjective referring to something that is in original or near-original condition. It means something is somewhat old but in a seemingly "untouched" or unaltered condition.

relic Something that is a leftover from an earlier time. The term is usually applied to things that had been fashioned by people.

solar Having to do with the sun, including the light and energy it gives off.

solar system The eight major planets and their moons in orbit around the sun, together with smaller bodies in the form of dwarf planets, asteroids, meteoroids and comets.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Comet probe may shed light on Earth's past

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Scientists spent more than two decades setting up Philae's months-long investigation of a comet. What they hope to learn could shed light on Earth's childhood - and the source of its water. But that's if problems with Philae's landing don't cut the robot's life span.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Smash hit? Comet mission comes to an end

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Rosetta's 12-year mission to a comet has come to a bittersweet end. The orbiter turned off its cameras, settled down on its rocky home and entered a deep and lasting sleep.