For as long as we’ve been searching for potentially life-supporting exoplanets, we’ve looked for one specific characteristic: water. Water was once thought to be exceedingly rare, but Earthlings have come to understand that water is one of the most abundant molecules in the universe. It turns out to be so abundant, in fact, that the ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory recently spied a nearby star positively spewing it out into space. Just 750 million light-years away (practically next door in universal terms), a sunlike star is shooting massive quantities of water out of its poles and into the vast emptiness of the universe at 124,000 miles per hour – or about 80 times the velocity of a bullet coming out of a machine gun.

The star’s surface and immediately surrounding area contain hydrogen and oxygen which combine to form water. The water is swept up into huge gas jets shooting from the star’s poles, where it is super-heated and vaporized into gas. Once the gas gets far enough away from the star, it cools and re-forms into water – a lot of water. The amount of water pouring forth from the star in one second is equal to all the water in the Amazon. The interstellar sprinkler is relatively young at one hundred thousand years old and may give important insights into the early lives of stars. The water-spewing stage seems to be something that all protostars go through, and their energetic seeding of the universe with oxygen and hydrogen could very well be the key to forming more new stars.

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The European Space Agency just gave the Earth a look at the creation of our solar system via some startlingly beautiful pictures of a 4.5 billion year old asteroid called Lutetia. The ESA’s Rosetta mission ventured extremely close to the asteroid on July 10th, coming within 1,965 miles of Lutetia and gathering a wealth of new data in the process. The close-up photographs are hauntingly lovely, showing a space object that looks almost too amazing to be real.

This is the first close-up look we’ve gotten of this ancient rock, one that is almost like taking a look into the unthinkably long-ago past. Lutetia revealed a cratered and pockmarked surface resulting from many collisions over its very long existence. While taking pictures of Lutetia, Rosetta also collected information on the asteroid’s density, composition, magnetic field, and possible atmosphere. Rosetta even attempted to capture dust grains floating near the asteroid. (Above, Lutetia is shown with Saturn in the background.)

Even though it’s provided some compelling and fascinating data, Rosetta still has a long way to go. After its close encounter with Lutetia, Rosetta continued on toward its final destination: a 2014 rendezvous with the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mission’s primary objective is to follow the comet for months and finally send a lander down to the surface.

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This map may be one of the most amazing and unique images ever created of Earth. Using just two months of data, a gravity-measuring satellite made the first map of Earth’s gravitational field. It’s a surprising and beautiful image of a force that we would never expect to be able to see – and yes, different places on Earth experience different gravitational pulls. The map is technically known as a geoid, and it was created by the satellite known as GOCE: Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer. The satellite takes precise measurements of the Earth’s gravitational field from an orbit so low that it nearly falls out of the sky.

The geoid is basically a level which measures even the smallest changes in the Earth’s gravitational field. The resulting map is what the oceans would look like if there were no tides, no current, no wind and no temperature changes. Because of this, the geoid will be useful to oceanographers who are studying the effects of those factors on the world’s oceans. But it can also be used for a huge number of other applications, including predicting volcanoes and earthquakes, assisting engineers who are designing buildings, and simply gaining a better understanding of our planet’s gravity. The ESA expects that the satellite will be able to continue its mission until at least 2014.

The post Getting Kind of Heavy: World’s First Map of Earth’s Gravity first appeared on Gajitz.