The experts estimated about 70% of litter that ends up in the world's oceans, sinks to the bottom. The rest of the marine debris remains floating under the ocean surface and is carried around by the ocean currents. The floating debris mainly contains undegradable tiny plastic particles that can mix with larger items, such as fishing gear or shoes, and concentrates in parts of the ocean, gradually forming the so-called garbage patches, or marine trash vortices.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is the largest collection of marine debris in the world. It spans waters from the West Coast of North America to Japan. Two other areas of high trash concentration are the garbage patches in the Atlantic and Indian ocean.

Greg Shirah and Horace Mitchell have published their garbage patch visualization experiment results online on August 10, 2015, in the NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio. Their animations were also presented on the SIGGRAPH 2015 conference.

A new research, published on August 10, 2015, suggests a cluster of icy bodies located in the same areas as Pluto, might prove our early Solar System was inhabited by a fifth giant planet. During Neptune's migration, 4 billion years ago, the ice giant might have jumped into it's current orbit and scattered a cluster of it's satellites into the outer solar system, the Kuiper belt.

A cluster of about thousand icy rocks, the so-called "kernel" of the Kuiper belt, is an old mystery for astronomers. The rocks hover close to one another and never change it's moving direction from the same orbital plane as the planets, unlike other icy bodies that constitute the belt.

Previous research suggested the objects bound this way could have formed during a violent collision of bigger parent bodies. However, it turned out the collisional families would have to be stretched along the Kuiper belt, which proved the proposition invalid.

During the last 24 hours, solar wind parameters, measured by the ACE spacecraft, were indicative of background solar wind conditions until 07:45 UTC on August 15, when a sudden impulse occurred due to the arrival of a co-rotating interaction region (CIR) ahead of a recurrent positive polarity coronal hole high speed stream (CH HSS), SWPC reported at 12:30 UTC today.

Solar wind speeds jumped from near 350 km/s to near 500 km/s. IMF total field strength jumped from 11 nT to as high as 28 nT, while the maximum southward deflection of the Bz component was -20 nT.

Geomagnetic storm reached G1 (Minor) conditions at 11:25, G2 (Moderate) at 11:32 and G3 (Strong) at 11:43 UTC.

Additionally, a partial halo Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) produced by the solar filament eruption at 13:32 UTC on August 12 is expected to arrive early August 16. This is expected to further contribute to the already enhanced conditions.

A Hungarian-US team of astronomers have found what may be the largest structure in the observable universe, a circular ring of nine gamma ray bursts and hence nine galaxies that stretches five billion light years across.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most luminous events in the observable universe. These events occur when massive stars in a galaxy collapse into black holes. Astronomers have used these GRBs to locate and map the locations of their distant host galaxies. Such bursts are cataloged in the Gamma Ray Burst Online Index, a precise listing of burst distances and locations, creating a cosmic map.

Every year, sky watchers in northern hemisphere enjoy in one of the best meteor showers of the year - Perseids. This year, Perseids will peak on the night of August 12 and the morning of August 13. This meteor shower is known for its very fast and bright meteors which leave long wakes of light and color as they streak through the atmosphere. Fireballs, larger explosions of light and color that can persist longer than an average meteor streak, are also associated with this shower and you can expect an increase in fireball events around its peak.

The thin crescent moon will be no match for the bright Perseids this year so be prepared for a great show.

The best time of the month to observe faint objects such as galaxies and star clusters - New Moon - is scheduled for August 14.

Planet Venus will reach inferior solar conjunction on August 15 and will be totally unobservable for several weeks. This marks the end of its apparition in the evening sky and its transition to become a morning object over the next few weeks.