Razor-sharp optics on ground-based telescopes now allows astronomers to peer at events occurring near the very edge of our galaxy’s central black hole, providing new clues about the massive but invisible object at the core of the Milky Way.

In a paper in this week’s issue of Nature, a team led by University of California, Berkeley, physicist Reinhard Genzel, who also directs the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany, reports the detection of p

VLT Observes Infrared Flares from Black Hole at Galactic Centre

An international team of astronomers led by researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching (Germany) has discovered powerful infrared flares from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way.

The signals, rapidly flickering on a scale of minutes, must come from hot gas falling into the black hole, just before it disappears below the “event horizon” of the monst

A mysterious arc of light found behind a distant cluster of galaxies has turned out to be the biggest, brightest and hottest star-forming region ever seen in space.

The so-called Lynx Arc is one million times brighter than the well-known Orion Nebula, a nearby prototypical ’starbirth’ region visible with small telescopes. The newly identified super-cluster contains a million blue-white stars that are twice as hot as similar stars in our Milky Way galaxy. It is a rarely glimpsed exa

STEELBIZ is an on-line information system designed to improve the performance of the European steel construction industry. It provides engineers with technical information, design guides, building regulations, case studies and, for broadband users, voiceover Continuing Professional Development (CPD) lectures.

The STEELBIZ project is led by the UK-based Steel Construction Institute (SCI) which represents some 600 SME members in 30 countries. In the last 15 years it has produced nearly 200 pub

Columbia researchers develop “fingerprinting” techniques for SAR mapping

Research by scientists at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University shows that Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) polarimetry is a more superior technology for rapidly identifying disaster zones than the currently used optical remote sensing technologies, such as Landsat and SPOT. Their findings are published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, and coincide with an opportunity to outfit satelli

45th Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics

The emerging field of high energy density physics has been described by a recent National Academy of Science report as the “X-games” of contemporary science. The term high energy density is used to describe matter with pressures more than 1 million times the pressure on the surface of the earth. While high energy density matter is extreme by terrestrial standards, it can be found throughout the universe in a number of astrophysica

45th Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics

In work that makes practical, large-scale fusion energy production increasingly feasible, plasma physicists working at DOE’s DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego are using a little chaos to prevent precious energy from escaping fusion energy devices.

In a magnetic fusion device, or tokamak, one of the most crucial regions for reducing the loss of heat and particles is at the plasma region’s edge. Partic

An asteroid that has eluded astronomers for decades turns out to be an unusual pair of objects traveling together in space, a UCLA planetary scientist and colleagues report.

The asteroid Hermes was rediscovered last week after being lost for 66 years. Now Jean-Luc Margot, a researcher in UCLA’s department of Earth and space sciences, has determined that the asteroid is, in fact, two objects orbiting each other. The two objects together would cover an area approximately the size

’Fly-bys’, or ’gravity assist’ manoeuvres, are now a standard part of spaceflight and are used by almost all ESA interplanetary missions.

Imagine if every time you drove by a city, your car mysteriously picked up speed or slowed down. Substitute a spacecraft and a planet for the car and the city, and this is called a ’gravity assist’. These manoeuvres take advantage of the fact that the gravitational attraction of the planets can be used to change the tra

Pierre Auger Observatory seeks source of highest-energy extra-terrestrial particles

With the completion of its hundredth surface detector, the Pierre Auger Observatory, under construction in Argentina, this week became the largest cosmic-ray air shower array in the world. Managed by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Pierre Auger project so far encompasses a 70-square-mile array of detectors that are tracking the most violent-and perha

Integral, ESA’s powerful gamma-ray space telescope, has discovered what seems to be a new class of astronomical objects.

These are binary systems, probably including a black hole or a neutron star, embedded in a thick cocoon of cold gas. They have remained invisible so far to all other telescopes. Integral was launched one year ago to study the most energetic phenomena in the universe.
Integral detected the first of these objects, called IGRJ16318-4848, on 29 January 2003. Al

Findings could have implications for speech recognition, machine learning, information retrieval

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have developed new insight into a formula that helped British cryptanalysts crack the German Enigma code in World War II. Writing in the Oct. 17 edition of the journal Science, UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering professor Alon Orlitsky and graduate students Narayana P. Santhanam and Junan Zhang shed light on a lingering mathematic

The digital world surrounding us is full of images. Many of them are very large and do not easily fit into small devices, such as smart mobile phones. Alexander Kolesnikov’s thesis brings a revolutionary change to this. He has invented the most efficient vector graphics compression technique in the world that will make all maps, drawings and cartoons fit into small but smart mobile phones.

Digital images on digital TV’s, DVDs and computer and mobile device displays come in two variants: ras

Rice physicists show that quantum methods can predict nanophotonic behavior

According to new research from Rice University, scientists studying the way light interacts with metallic nanostructures should throw out their old optics textbooks and bone up on their quantum mechanics instead.

The new findings, which are described in the Oct. 17 issue of the journal Science, offer a new understanding of plasmonics, an emerging field of optics aimed at the study of light at the nan

CERN and California Institute of Technology (Caltech) will today receive an award for transferring over a Terabyte of data across 7,000 km of network at 5.44 gigabits per second (Gbps), smashing the old record of 2.38 Gbps achieved in February between CERN in Geneva and Sunnyvale in California by a Caltech, CERN, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center team.

The international CERN-Caltech team set this new Internet2® Land Speed Record on 1 October 2003 by trans

Vision RT Limited’s new system for radiotherapy patient alignment should allow rapid positioning with error margins reduced from centimetres to within millimetres, according to data to be presented at the October ASTRO meeting. Dr. Norman Smith, CEO of Vision RT, will give a paper on Vision RT’s 3D body imaging technology and describe how it can impact positively on the speed and accuracy of radiotherapy treatment, at the 45th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncol