Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, a team of Italian astronomers reveal the troubled past of the stellar cluster Messier 12 – our Milky Way galaxy ‘stole’ close to one million low-mass stars from it.

Globular clusters move in extended elliptical orbits that periodically take them through the densely populated regions of our galaxy, and then high above and below the plane (the ’halo’). When venturing too close to the innermost dense regions of our galaxy, (the &#14

Academics at Aston University in Birmingham, UK have invented what is thought to be the world’s longest laser. They have transformed an optical fibre 75 kilometres long into the laser, which the team hopes will improve long distance transmissions across the World.

The new laser is special because it can transmit light signals over such a long distance without any loss of power, so the signal that is being sent barely deteriorates. When normal telephone conversations or data sent

Following the recent detection of Saturnian radio bursts by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft that indicated a rare and powerful atmospheric storm, Cassini imaging scientists have spotted the storm in an unlikely fashion: they looked for it in the dark.

When lightning-generated radio noise from the storm was detected by Cassini on January 23, the spacecraft was at a place in its orbit where it was unable to image the sunlit side of Saturn. Instead, imaging scientists searched for

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design.

The device, which uses two opposing crystals to generate a powerful electric field, could potentially lead to a portable, battery-operated neutron generator for a variet

A University of Illinois scientist studying how membranes wrinkle has discovered a novel system for on-demand drug delivery.

Sahraoui Chaieb, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, has created temperature-sensitive capsules that can release drugs on demand. The capsules, which can range in size from 10 to 100 microns, can be tuned to deliver drugs at different rates. Chaieb reports his findings in the Feb. 17 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Some people are born, live and die in the one village. Others cross the world to new homes. Stars do the same. Our Galaxy is a melting-pot of stars from different places.

A team of 55 astronomers from 10 countries is today [Friday 10 February] releasing data on 25 000 stars to the rest of the astronomical community — data that will help sort the travellers from the stay-at-homes, and unravel the history of the Galaxy.

“Some stars were formed in our Galaxy. Others were

A Cambridge PhD student is following in his great-great-grandfather’s footsteps by helping to measure the speeds of up to one million stars passing near the Sun – a huge advance on the efforts of his ancestor who was able to measure the speeds of only 100 stars over a century ago. The first data release is being announced today.

“The speeds of stars reveal where they were born,” said George Seabroke, a graduate student at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. “We’re tr

An important part of the decades-old assumption thought to be essential for quantum statistical physics is being challenged by researchers at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and colleagues in Germany and Italy.

In a journal article to be published in Physical Review Letters and now available online, the researchers show that it is not necessary to assume that large collections of atomic particles are in a random state in order to derive a mathematical formula tha

The Department of Energy’s Spallation Neutron Source, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has passed another milestone on the way to completion this year–the commissioning of the proton accumulator ring. The accumulator ring is the final step in a proton’s journey through the accelerator before it strikes the SNS’s mercury target, “spalling” away neutrons to be used for research.

The DOE Office of Science facility will produce the world’s most inten

Evanescent wave lithography enables optical imaging to smallest-ever level

A new computer chip lithography method under development at Rochester Institute of Technology has led to imaging capabilities beyond that previously thought possible.

Leading a team of engineering students, Bruce Smith, RIT professor of microelectronic engineering and director of the Center for Nanolithography Research in the Kate Gleason College of Engineering, developed a method—known as evane

An international team of astronomers released to the public the first data collected as part of the Radial Velocity Experiment, an ambitious spectroscopic survey aimed at measuring the speed, temperature, surface gravity and composition of up to a million stars passing near the sun.

The measurements, released at an astrophysics workshop at the Aspen Center for Physics in Colorado and available today online to other astronomers, includes examination of old “fossil” stars that were

Cosmic space is filled with continuous, diffuse high-energy radiation. To find out how this energy is produced, the scientists behind ESA’s Integral gamma-ray observatory have tried an unusual method: observing Earth from space.

During a four-phase observation campaign started on 24 January this year, continued until 9 February, Integral has been looking at Earth. Needing complex control operations from the ground, the satellite has been kept in a fixed orientation in space, w

Teaching a machine to sense its environment is one of the most intractable problems of computer science, but one European project is looking to nature for help in cracking the conundrum. It combined streams of sensory data to produce an adaptive, composite impression of surroundings in near real-time.

The team brought together electronic engineers, computer scientists, neuroscientists, physicists, and biologists. It looked at basic neural models for perception and then sought t

The images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show pits and tectonic ‘grabens’ in the Phlegethon Catena region of Mars.

The HRSC obtained these images during orbit 1217 with a ground resolution of approximately 11.9 metres per pixel. The scenes show the region of Phlegethon Catena, centred at approximately 33.9° South and 253.1° East.

Located south-east of the Alba Patera volcano, Phlegethon Catena is a region exhibit

RIT astronomer uses NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to study massive stars

The discovery of dusty disks–the building blocks of planets–around two of the most massive stars known suggests that planets might form and survive in surprisingly hostile environments.

The discovery was made through NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope observations of two hypergiant stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud–the Milky Way’s nearest neighboring galaxy–by a team led by Joel

Ohio State University planetary scientists have found the remains of ancient lunar impacts that may have helped create the surface feature commonly called the “man in the moon.”

Their study suggests that a large object hit the far side of the moon and sent a shock wave through the moon’s core and all the way to the Earth-facing side. The crust recoiled — and the moon bears the scars from that encounter even today.

The finding holds implications for lunar prospectin