Physics and Astronomy

UCLA astronomers report they have detected remarkably stormy conditions in the hot plasma being pulled into the monstrous black hole residing at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, 26,000 light years away. This detection of the hot plasma is the first in an infrared wavelength, where most of the disturbed plasma’s energy is emitted, and was made using the 10-meter Keck II Telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Plasma is a hot, ionized, gas-like matter — a fourth state of ma

Researchers studying physical and chemical processes at the smallest scales, smaller even than the width of a human hair, have found that fluid circulating in a microscopic whirlpool can reach radial acceleration more than a million times greater than gravity, or 1 million Gs.

By contrast, a pilot flying a fighter jet at high speed and in relatively tight circular patterns might experience a force of 10 to 12 Gs, making the force his body feels 10 to 12 times normal.

“From a physi

A new University of Colorado at Boulder study of Jupiter’s moon Europa may help explain the origin of the giant ice domes peppering its surface and the implications for discovering evidence of past or present life forms there.

Assistant Professor Robert Pappalardo and doctoral student Amy Barr previously believed the mysterious domes may be formed by blobs of ice from the interior of the frozen shell that were being pushed upward by thermal upwelling from warmer ice underneath. Europa

The latest discovery of a large asteroid moving through our Solar System puts a spotlight on the studies of these and other wandering celestial objects by the European Space Agency.

Some astronomers have predicted that this newly discovered object could hit the Earth on 21 March, 2014, but now data indicate that the chances of it doing so are really very small – less than one in 909,000.

However, scientists continue to monitor these objects which could give clues to the orig

Scientific breakthrough in the transmutation of isotopes

Collaboration between the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) DG, the University of Jena (Germany), the University of Strathclyde (UK), Imperial College (UK), and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK) has led to the transmutation of long-lived radioactive iodine-129 into short-lived iodine-128 using very high intensity laser radiation. Until recently, transmutation could only be achieved in nuclear reactors or p

The DC303.8-14.2 globule

A small and dark interstellar cloud with the rather cryptic name of DC303.8-14.2 is located in the inner part of the Milky Way galaxy. It is seen in the southern constellation Chamaeleon and consists of dust and gas. Astronomers classify it as a typical example of a “globule”.

As many other globules, this cloud is also giving birth to a star. Some years ago, observations in the infrared spectral region with the ESA IRAS satellite observatory detecte