A new method for hunting minor planets uncovered more than a hundred small, distant worlds. And the novel technique could even help resolve the mystery of Planet Nine.
Astronomers have discovered 139 new minor planets orbiting the sun beyond Neptune by searching through data from the Dark Energy Survey. The new method for spotting small worlds is expected to reveal many thousands of distant objects in coming years — meaning these first hundred or so are likely just the tip of the iceberg.

Taken together, the newfound distant objects, as well as those to come, could resolve one of the most fascinating questions of modern astronomy: Is there a massive and mysterious world called Planet Nine lurking in the outskirts of our solar system?

Something out of the Twilight Zone series, cities empty after a disaster only to be met by angry locals in remote towns and cities and told to keep moving and do not come to this place. We are seeing the same from Europe to the UK to the USA, small towns closing access to part time residents or AirBNB renters escaping. With few airlines flying skies will be clearer to look for incredibly southern Noctilucent Clouds and comet C/2019 Y4 ATLAS as it brightens between the Big and Little Dippers.

As if 2020 couldn't turn more upside-down, we now have nature playing tricks on us as well.

An image shared by amateur photographer Cessna Kutz shows the quick moment a "horizontal rainbow" appeared to almost cover the whole span of Lake Sammamish in Washington State.

"I've seen lots of rainbows over Lake Sammamish, but never a flat one," Kutz told IFLScience in an interview.

The first, wider image shows the rainbow from her window around 2 pm local time and lasted for less than five minutes. A second zoomed-in photograph was taken using her Canon Rebel t5 camera at 300mm, ISO 100 /f11 1/250sec. None of the three images had a filter applied to them, though Kutz says that she did "just a tad bit of adjusting with the contrast."

A vast ozone hole — likely the biggest on record in the north — has opened in the skies above the Arctic. It rivals the better-known Antarctic ozone hole that forms in the southern hemisphere each year.

Record-low ozone levels currently stretch across much of the central Arctic, covering an area about three times the size of Greenland (see 'Arctic opening'). The hole doesn't threaten people's health, and will probably break apart in the coming weeks. But it is an extraordinary atmospheric phenomenon that will go down in the record books.

"From my point of view, this is the first time you can speak about a real ozone hole in the Arctic," says Martin Dameris, an atmospheric scientist at the German Aerospace Center in Oberpfaffenhofen.

You don't see this everyday-or even in 30 years. "Noctilucent clouds (NLCs) have appeared over the South Pacific," reports meteorologist Ashleigh Wilson of the Australian Antarctic Division. "I photographed them from Macquarie Island on Jan. 4th."

Wilson is just wrapping up a year-long stint on the remote island where the Australian government maintains a research station to study climate change and wildlife. "According to John French of the Australian Antarctic Division Atmospheric Science Program, the only other photographic recording of NLCs from Macquarie Island was in the mid-1990s," she says.

NLCs are Earth's highest clouds. Seeded by meteoroids, they float at the edge of space more than 80 km above the planet's surface. NLCs form when summertime wisps of water vapor rise up to the edge of space and crystalize around specks of 'meteor smoke.' Prime time for sightings is June-July in the north, December-January in the south.

"It was a breathtaking moment when I first realized what I was seeing," recalls Wilson. "I spent two hours down by the ocean with a camera and tripod, adjusting ISO and lenses, trying to capture the extraordinary event. The clouds were so bright, I could see their reflection in the water."

Wilson's sighting caps a remarkable year for noctilucent clouds. Once confined to Earth's polar regions, NLCs have recently spread to lower and lower latitudes. In June 2019, the clouds appeared over Rome, Italy; Las Vegas, Nevada; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Paris, France; and outside Los Angeles, California. Many of the sightings smashed old records for low-latitude visibility.

Q: Dr. C, thank you for joining us here at the Tusk. Do you believe person-to-person viral transmission occurs with Coronavirus or other viruses? If the infection comes from space, how do you account for the "close quarters" effect where infection rates run so much higher on cruise ships and such?

It appears that this new virus can be infective only on very close contact. The many cases occurring simultaneously on cruise ships or chalets in ski resorts can be explained if clouds carrying the virus come down in local regions. As for freak "superspreaders" this is a myth based on ignorance. If a group of people were exposed to a cloud of the virus and became simultaneously infected from a non-human environmental source of any kind, there would be a dispersion in the times before illness shows up. That is to say the incubation period would have statistical spread, so one case will appear first. To crown him/her a superspreader with a mysterious power is akin to a medieval myth (explained in the attached article.)

This idea was first discussed scientifically by the late Sir Fred Hoyle and me in two books - Diseases from Space (1979) and Evolution from Space (1980). Here we introduced the theory that comets carry bacteria and viruses and that impacts by comets were important for both the beginning of life on Earth and for its further evolution. The first point to make is that the standard view that life originates spontaneously on Earth in a primordial soup or in deep sea thermal vents has no evidence whatsoever to support it. Every experiment that has been done to demonstrate this possibility has been a dismal failure over more than 50 years. The molecular complexity of life - the information content of life - is of an exceedingly specific kind and is superastronomical in quantity, and so the origin of life could not have happened on Earth.

A few years ago the very oldest evidence of microbial life on Earth was discovered in rocks dated 4300 million years ago - and this was at a time when the Earth was being relentlessly pounded by comet and asteroid impacts. So there is little doubt now that life on Earth came from impacting comets, and the subsequent evolution of life happened against the backdrop of new bacteria and viruses being introduced via comets, adding new potential for evolution. It is this potential for evolution with new cosmic genes against which Darwinian evolution takes place. So there is no doubt cosmic viruses are in our genes. And this is the reason that new viruses coming from space today can relate to evolved life forms like ourselves.

It's springtime, and STEVE is back. Jocelyn Blanchette photographed the purple ribbon over Fermont, Quebec, on March 22nd. "STEVE was right beside Venus," she says.

STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement) looks like an aurora, but it is not. The phenomenon is caused by hot (~3000°C) ribbons of gas flowing through Earth's magnetosphere at speeds exceeding 13,000 mph. Glowing with a soft-purple hue, these ribbons sometimes appear when Earth's magnetic field is unsettled by the solar wind.

Studies show that STEVE tends to occur more frequently during spring and fall than summer and winter. The onset of northern spring seems to lure the arc out of winter hiding. That means *now* is the time to look for STEVE.

STEVE's usual habitat lies between latitudes +50N and +55N; Blanchette's hometown is located squarely in that range: +53N. Recently, however, sky watchers have been seeing STEVE farther north, as high as +63N. Is STEVE's range increasing?

The Earth was hit by a fragmented comet around 13,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene Era and scientists are now starting to agree.

A new research paper has been published in Scientific Reports regarding an ancient civilisation in what is modern-day Syria that was wiped out by the cataclysm, as academics finally come round to the idea that yes this event did happen.

Even the sceptic Michael Shermer, who famously debated Graham Hancock on the Joe Rogan podcast has tweeted Graham saying:

"Ok Graham, I shall adjust my priors in light of more research like this, and modify my credence about your theory."

We're back from the Arctic, and we have some new results to share. In January 2020, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus and Spaceweather.com traveled to Abisko, Sweden, to launch a pair of cosmic ray balloons. We'd been there before, launching three identical balloons in March 2017. Putting all the data together, 2017+2020, we find that radiation has increased +12% in the past 3 years:

The graph shows radiation dose rate (uGy/hr) vs. altitude (feet) all the way from ground level to the stratosphere. Radiation appears to be increasing at nearly all altitudes--even in the range 25,000 ft to 40,000 ft where airplanes fly. Polar flight crews and passengers are therefore absorbing ~12% more cosmic radiation than they did only a few years ago.

What's causing the increase? Solar Minimum. At the moment, the sun is near the bottom of the 11-year solar cycle. During Solar Minimum, the sun's magnetic field weakens, allowing extra cosmic rays from deep space to penetrate the solar system. These cosmic rays are hitting Earth's atmosphere, creating a spray of secondary cosmic rays that shower toward the ground below.

Flights taking off empty to keep the slot rotation in too 200 busiest airports globally termed "ghost flights". New Zealand summer snow and worst drought "ever". Moon halo in Canada and limits on purchases in stores across the US mean reduced donations to Salvation Army.