Physics and Astronomy

VLT Images Progenitors of Today’s Large Galaxies [1]

An international team of astronomers [2] has made the deepest-evernear-infrared Ks-band image of the sky, using the ISAAC multi-modeinstrument on the 8.2-m VLT ANTU telescope.

For this, the VLT was pointed for more than 100 hours under optimalobserving conditions at the Hubble Deep Field South (HDF-S) andobtained images in three near-infrared filters. The resulting imagesreveal extremely distant galaxies, which appear at

Reconnection, the merging of magnetic field lines of opposite polarity near the surface of the sun, Earth and some black holes, is believed to be the root cause of many spectacular astronomical events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, but the reason for this is not well understood. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory now have a new theory that may explain the instability and advance the understanding of these phenomena.

Theorists Giovanni Lapenta of Los Alamos Nati

Study of planetary disks around T Tauri stars

If David Weintraub and Jeff Bary are right, there may be a lot more planets circling stars like the Sun than current models of star and planet formation predict.
The associate professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt and his graduate student are taking a critical look at T Tauri stars. These are stellar adolescents, less than 10 million years old, which are destined to become stars similar to the Sun as they age.

Classical T Taur

The sun is healthy and strong, but physicists will have to change some of the basic assumptions they have made about how the universe works.

These are the results released today from the latest study of neutrinos made with a detector buried a half mile under a Japanese mountain. LSU physicist Bob Svoboda, who worked on an earlier ground-breaking experiment in the same mountain, was construction supervisor on this one.

Basically, scientists were trying to understand why the s

A new study led by University of Colorado at Boulder researchers indicates Mars has been primarily a cold, dry planet following its formation some 4 billion years ago, making the possibility of the evolution of life there challenging at best.

Led by CU-Boulder doctoral candidate Teresa Segura and her adviser, Professor Owen B. Toon, the team used Mars photos and computer models to show that large asteroids or comets hit the planet some 3.5 billion years ago. These impacts apparently occurre

Astronomers think big all the time: it’s their job. And on 13th December, at a meeting hosted by the Royal Astronomical Society in London, a group of them will juggle with some truly astounding large numbers. On this occasion, though, they won’t be discussing the distances to remote galaxies, but the phenomenal sizes of the telescopes they want to build so they can explore the universe to a level of detail previous generations of astronomers would never have dreamt possible. Announcing a si