A method of storing harmful greenhouse gases by injecting them below ground has likely triggered a series of earthquakes in Texas

Below-ground gas injection linked to Texas quakes

by Staff Writers Washington (AFP) Nov 04, 2013 A method of storing harmful greenhouse gases by injecting them below ground has likely triggered a series of earthquakes in Texas, some larger than magnitude 3, a US study said Monday.
The findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences mark the first time that carbon storage has been linked to temblors ranging from 3.0 to 4.4 in severity.
Researchers warned last year in the same journal that carbon capture and storage risked causing earthquakes, but there had been no direct evidence of such quakes until now.
The study focused on seismic activity in petroleum fields in Scurry and Kent Counties in northwest Texas, known as the Cogdell and Kelly-Snyder oil fields.
A process called water flooding was used in the Cogdell field to boost oil production from 1957 to 1982, and previous research has found that the practice caused small quakes in the area from 1975 to 1982.
More recently, methane and CO2 have been injected into the oil field at high volumes, said the research by Wei Gan and Cliff Frohlich at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics.

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Dwarf Galaxies Found to Harbor 1,000 Times More Dark Matter

Astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin believe they have discovered the answer to a 20-year debate over how the mysterious cosmic “dark matter” is distributed in small galaxies. They found that the distribution, on average, follows a simple law of decreasing density from the galaxy’s center, although the exact distribution often varies from galaxy to galaxy. The findings are published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Dark matter is matter that gives off no light, but that astronomers detect by seeing its gravitational tug on other objects (like stars). Theories abound on what dark matter might be made of — unseen particles, dead stars, and more — but nobody knows for sure. Though mysterious, understanding the nature of dark matter is important, because it makes up most of the matter in the universe. The only way to understand how the cosmos evolved to its present state is to decode dark matter’s role.
For that reason, astronomers study the distribution of dark matter within galaxies and on even larger scales. Dwarf galaxies, in particular, make great laboratories to study dark matter, say astronomers John Jardel and Karl Gebhardt, because they contain up to 1,000 times more dark matter than normal matter. Normal galaxies like the Milky Way, on the other hand, contain only 10 times more dark matter than normal matter.


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Multiple streams of Sagittarius dwarf galaxy

segasai

Uploaded on Nov 26, 2011

The illustration of multiple streams produced by the disruption of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy in the Milky Way halo. The orange sphere shows the location of the Sun in the Galaxy. The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy itself is located in the middle of the stream.The size of the area shown in the movie is approximately 600 thousands light years (200 kiloparsecs)

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