More than just skyline blight, smog is an ozone-filled haze packed with the power to inflict or exacerbate ailments in even healthy adults, to say nothing of small children and the elderly. Unfortunately, although scientists know how it forms and even how to detect it, they cannot always predict where it will strike. Now, researchers at Arizona State University and University of California at Berkeley have embarked upon a project that uses NASA satellites to detect smog precursors over a much wider area than before. The research could enable scientists to spot an ozone plume in time to help communities prepare for its health effects.
Tag Archives: NASA
When searching for early galaxies, it pays to look twice
Using NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, an international team of astronomers have found nine of the smallest, faintest, most compact galaxies ever observed in the early universe–the building blocks of today’s larger, older galaxies. Composed of millions of brilliant blue stars, each infantile galaxy is one-hundredth to one-thousandth as large as our Milky Way galaxy. They formed about 12.5 billion years ago – just 1 billion years after the “Big Bang.”
Such galaxies are consistent with the conventional model of galactic formation, which holds that larger galaxies are formed when younger, smaller, less-massive galaxies merge. The sighting thus offers some much-needed support for the “hierarchical model,” which has become ever more contentious in recent years.