In Brief:

Eavesdrop on 'heartbeat' of the sun

(CNN) -- Much like doctors monitoring a patient's heartbeat, solar scientists are "listening" to the sun to unravel mysteries about its temperature, composition and interior storms.

Sun researchers are using a satellite that monitors the sun to measure movement on the solar surface. Sound cannot travel through the vacuum of space, but the scientists managed to reconstruct the "sound" of our neighbor star.

They rendered the motions audible by compressing 40 days worth of solar vibrations into several seconds, producing a reverberating hum, which NASA released last week.

By using NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite to listen and look into the sun, so-called helioseismologists can better predict solar weather events like coronal mass ejections, which can disrupt communications satellites and power grids.

School kids shoot Mars with satellite camera

The student scientists snapped this picture of valleys and boulders on Mars

(CNN) -- Nine schoolchildren from around the world took some far out pictures, snapping close-up pictures of the red planet.

The junior scientists zeroed in on numerous locations on the surface of Mars using the high-resolution camera aboard the Mars Global Surveyor, which has orbited the planet since 1997.

The students, aged 10 to 16, were taking part in a program sponsored by the Planetary Society and Malin Space Science Systems, the San Diego- California-company that manages the Global Surveyor camera for NASA.

Their images, released on Friday, zoom in on equatorial valleys, the north polar icecap, and a collection of dunes, valleys and mysterious black boulders in the middle latitudes.

The students were taking part in the Planetary Society's Red Rover program. Selected from over 10,000 entrants worldwide, the four girls and five boys hail from Brazil, Hungary, India, Poland, Taiwan and the United States.

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