ScienceDaily: Space & Time News

Far from home: Wayward star cluster is both tiny and distant Posted: 03 Mar 2015 12:32 PM PST Like the lost little puppy that wanders too far from home, astronomers have found an unusually small and distant group of stars that seems oddly out of place. The cluster, made of only a handful of stars, is located far away, in the Milky Way's 'suburbs.' It is located where astronomers have never spotted such a small cluster of stars before.

Pressure is on to find the cause for vision changes in space Posted: 03 Mar 2015 09:21 AM PST The human body is approximately 60 percent fluids. During spaceflight, these fluids shift to the upper body and move across blood vessel and cell membranes differently than they normally do on Earth. One of the goals of the Fluid Shifts investigation, launching to the International Space Station this spring, is to test the relationship between those fluid shifts and a pattern NASA calls visual impairment and intracranial pressure syndrome, or VIIP. It involves changes in vision and the structure of the eyes and indirect signs of increased pressure in the brain, and investigators say more than half of American astronauts have experienced it during long spaceflights.

Cloudy, with a wisp of liquid rock: Clouds around exoplanets analyzed Posted: 03 Mar 2015 08:17 AM PST Meteorologists sometimes struggle to accurately predict the weather here on Earth, but now we can find out how cloudy it is on planets outside our solar system, thanks to new research.

New data on the nature of dark matter Posted: 03 Mar 2015 04:53 AM PST Recent research contributes to the effort to determine the nature of dark matter, one of the most important mysteries in physics. As indirect evidence provided by its gravitational effects, dark matter amounts to more than 80% of the universe.