Nachash

Hunting has been banned in parts of Austria after freak storms with tennis ball-sized hailstones killed up to 90 per cent of the wild game population.

Hundreds of deer were discovered either dead or so badly injured they had to be put down by wildlife experts.

In the country’s rural Salzburg province, 90 per cent of pheasants and 80 per cent of hares were killed in the hail storms.

Sepp Eder, the hunting chief, said : “Animals sought shelter in farms, in fields of grain but the hail was so heavy it smashed right into them. It may take five years for animal numbers to recover, if they ever do so.”

Farmers are believed to have suffered more than £60 million in damages to crops and buildings.

Source/Full Story: Telegraph

Thirty-two planets have been discovered outside Earth’s solar system through the use of a high-precision instrument installed at a Chilean telescope, an international team announced Monday.

The existence of the so-called exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — was announced at the European Southern Observatory/Center for Astrophysics, University of Porto conference in Porto, Portugal, according to a statement issued by the observatory.

The announcement was made by a consortium of international researchers, headed by the Geneva Observatory, who built the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS. The device can detect slight wobbles of stars as they respond to tugs from exoplanets’ gravity. That tactic, known as the radial velocity method, “has been the most prolific method in the search for exoplanets,” according to the European Southern Observatory statement.

The instrument detects movements as small as 3.5 km/hr (2.1 mph), a slow walking pace, the observatory said.

With the discovery, the tally of new exoplanets found by HARPS is now at 75, out of about 400 known exoplanets, the organization said, “cementing HARPS’s position as the world’s foremost exoplanet hunter.” The 75 planets are in 30 planetary systems, the European Southern Observatory said.

Source/Full Story: CNN.com

Scientists at NASA have discovered a nearly invisible ring around Saturn — one so large that it would take 1 billion Earths to fill it.

The ring’s orbit is tilted 27 degrees from the planet’s main ring plane. The bulk of it starts about 3.7 million miles (6 million km) away from the planet and extends outward another 7.4 million miles (12 million km).

Its diameter is equivalent to 300 Saturns lined up side to side. And its entire volume can hold one billion Earths, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said late Tuesday.

“This is one supersized ring,” said Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Verbiscer and two others are authors of a paper about the discovery published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Source/Full Story: CNN.com

The U.S. government says there’s no relation between the fireballs that streaked the Texas skies Sunday and the collision of two satellites over Siberia last week.

“There is no correlation between the debris from that collision and those reports of re-entry,“ said Maj. Regina Winchester, official spokesman for the U.S. Strategic Command, which includes the Air Force Space Command that monitors satellites.

Jim Orberg, space program expert and NBC contributor, explains officials at Strategic Command came to that conclusion by noting the orientation in space of the belt of debris formed from the remains of both satellites, and that Texas was not passing through the belts of debris at the time of the sightings.

Numerous people across Texas reported seeing fireballs in the air Sunday morning.

People in Richardson, Plano, Burleson and near Corsicana reported seeing the streaks in the skies.

Kenneth and Jacqueline Terry said they saw fireballs in the sky as they were leaving church services at the Potter’s House in Dallas.

“It was definitely five streaks of burning debris that lasted for about five seconds, and then it disappeared and then the white smoke stayed and it just started to go with the wind,“ Kenneth Terry said.

“It was really amazing,“ Jacqueline Terry said.

Air traffic controllers at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport also received several reports from pilots of a streak of light in the sky.

Some pilots said it looked like something re-entering the atmosphere, an air traffic source said.

The FAA notified pilots on Saturday to be aware of possible space debris from the collision.

Controllers also saw what looked like a vapor trail in the sky far to the south of the airport.

The FAA said it suspected the lights are pieces of two big communications satellites that collided in space on Tuesday, but the FAA could not confirm it.

The FAA said some Texas law enforcement agencies have found debris, but it was not immediately clear which agencies reported finding pieces.

The FAA said people who find pieces of debris should not touch them and should contact law enforcement.

Local military officials will collect and analyze the debris to confirm what it is, the FAA said. The debris field could stretch from New Mexico to Houston.

Full Story

Technorati Tags: Fireballs, UFO

Source: Yahoo! News
NASA’s 2008 solar eclipse web site:
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEmono/TSE2008/TSE2008.html

A total solar eclipse will darken some of Earth’s skies on Friday, but geography, weather, the economy and even the Olympics are combining to make it a hard and expensive for people to see it.

The total blotting out of the sun, which occurs when the moon’s dark inner shadow falls on parts of the Earth, can only be seen in mostly remote places: the northeastern edge of Canada, the tip of Greenland, parts of Russia, China and Mongolia, including the famed Gobi desert. For those who can’t be there, it will be shown live on the Internet.

Some of the areas where the eclipse will last the longest — including parts of the Arctic — have a 75 percent chance of bad weather that will make it tough to see. This eclipse at its peak will last for 2 minutes and 27 seconds.

Yet eclipse chasers can’t wait for the sky to darken, animals to howl and people to stare in awe.

“It’s so rare and unusual, it’s unfortunate to pass up any chance,” said NASA astrophysicist Fred Espenak, who has been chasing eclipses since 1970 and has his own Mr. Eclipse Web site and a NASA solar eclipse Web site. Espenak will be in northern China to watch the eclipse with a tour group.