Monthly Archives: March 2010

Gamma Ray Mystery Remains Mysterious

The ever-present fog of energetic gamma rays permeating the universe isn’t created by what astronomers expected, new observations from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveal, leaving scientists with a new cosmic mystery to solve.

The sky glows in gamma rays even far away from well-known bright sources, such as pulsars and gas clouds within our own Milky Way galaxy or the most luminous active galaxies. Conventionally, astronomers thought that the accumulated glow of active galactic nuclei — black hole-powered jets emanating from active galaxies — accounted for most of this gamma-ray background.

“Thanks to Fermi, we now know for certain that this is not the case,

The rest of the story…

More Moon Water

scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon’s north pole. NASA’s Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it’s estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.

The Mini-SAR has imaged many of the permanently shadowed regions that exist at both poles of the Moons. These dark areas are extremely cold and it has been hypothesized that volatile material, including water ice, could be present in quantity here. The main science object of the Mini-SAR experiment is to map and characterize any deposits that exist.

more from NASA