A team of UK astronomers have announced the discovery that some supernovae have bad habits – they belch out huge quantities of ’’smoke’’ known as cosmic dust. This solves a mystery more than 10 billion years in the making. The new observations published on 17th July in the journal ’’Nature’’, answer long-standing questions about the origin of the first solid particles ever to form in the Universe.

The team measured the cold cosmic dust in ’’C

Scientists report in Nature today that significantly fewer asteroids could hit the Earth’s surface than previously reckoned.

Researchers from Imperial College London and the Russian Academy of Sciences have built a computer simulation that predicts whether asteroids with a diameter up to one kilometre (km) will explode in the atmosphere or hit the surface.

The results indicate that asteroids with a diameter greater than 200 metres (the length of two football pitches) will hi

Peering back in time more than 7 billion years, a team of astronomers using a powerful new spectrograph at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has obtained the first maps showing the distribution of galaxies in the early universe. The maps show the clustering of galaxies into a variety of large-scale structures, including long filaments, empty voids, and dense groups and clusters.

These maps are among the first results from the DEEP2 Redshift Survey, an ongoing three-year project d

ESA PR 44-2003. A unique view of our home planet and its natural satellite – the Moon – is one of the first data sets coming from ESA’’s Mars Express.

“It is very good news for the mission,” says ESA’’s Mars Express Project Scientist, Agustin Chicarro. These and other data, such as those recording the major constituents of Earth as seen from space, are the actual proof that the instruments on board Mars Express, launched 2 June 2003, are working perfectly.
The routine check-outs

Using the powerful trick of gravitational lensing, a European and American team of astronomers have constructed an extensive ‘mass map’ of one of the most massive structures in our Universe. They believe that it will lead to a better understanding of how such systems assembled and the key role of dark matter.

Clusters of galaxies are the largest stable systems in the Universe. They are like laboratories for studying the relationship between the distributions of dark and visible matter. In 1

A novel telescope that uses the Antarctic ice sheet as its window to the cosmos has produced the first map of the high-energy neutrino sky.

The map, unveiled for astronomers here today (July 15) at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union, provides astronomers with their first tantalizing glimpse of very high-energy neutrinos, ghostly particles that are believed to emanate from some of the most violent events in the universe – crashing black holes, gamma ray bursts, and the

Discovery of quadruply lensed quasar with Einstein ring

Using the ESO 3.6-m telescope at La Silla (Chile), an international team of astronomers [1] has discovered a complex cosmic mirage in the southern constellation Crater (The Cup). This “gravitational lens” system consists of (at least) four images of the same quasar as well as a ring-shaped image of the galaxy in which the quasar reside – known as an “Einstein ring”. The more nearby lensing galaxy that causes this intriguing opt

Chemistry is big business. From medicine to food, industrial processes to environmental management, it is more important than ever before to know exactly which chemicals are present in our lives. With more sophisticated chemicals comes greater responsibility. Now a EUREKA project is helping companies the world over to comply with a new set of legally binding standards.

In the near future the International Organisation of Standardisation (ISO) will require companies to state just how reliable

Using XMM-Newton, astronomers have obtained the world’s deepest ‘wide screen’ X-ray image of the cosmos to date. Their observations show newly discovered clusters of galaxies and provide insights into the structure of the distant Universe…

Unlike grains of sand on a beach, matter is not uniformly spread throughout the Universe. Instead, it is concentrated into galaxies like our own which themselves congregate into clusters. These clusters are ‘strung’ throughout the Universe in a web-like st

Argonne physicists have precisely measured the masses of nuclear isotopes that exist for only fractions of a second or can only be produced in such tiny amounts as to be almost nonexistent in the laboratory. Some isotopes had their masses accurately measured for the first time.

The results help explain the characteristic X-ray spectrum and luminosities of strange astronomical objects called “X-ray bursters.”

X-ray bursters comprise a normal star and a neutron star. Neutron stars

Physics Lab in Japan reports evidence for the Pentaquark; Jefferson Lab data supports discovery

A Five-quark state has been discovered, first reported by a group of physicists working at the SPring-8 physics lab in Japan. All confirmed particles known previously have been either combinations of three quarks (baryons, such as protons or neutrons) or two quarks (mesons such as pions or kaons). Although not forbidden by the standard model of particle physics, other configurations of qua

An international research team co-led by Prof. Harvey Richer of the University of British Columbia today announced that it has confirmed the existence of the universe’s oldest known and farthest planet.

The findings end a decade of speculation and debate as to the true nature of this ancient world, which takes a century to complete each orbit. The un-named planet is 2.5 times the mass of our solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter. Its existence provides evidence that the universe&

A method that can be used to predict the growth of earthquake faults also aids prediction of the tiniest of phenomena–how arrays of “artificial atoms,” or quantum dots, assemble and stack themselves on semiconductor materials, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers report in the July 15 issue of Physical Review B.

The insight could aid development of more reliable methods for fabricating lasers, sensors and other devices that exploit quantum dots’ special el

Magnetic memory-based information storage systems are getting smaller and smaller, while their capacities are getting larger. However, there is a limit to how small they can get. If the tiny magnets used to store information are smaller than around five nanometres (millionths of a millimetre), vibrations caused by temperature can erase their orientation and, therefore, the information they contain. This is known as the superparamagnetic limit, which physically limits the capacity of magnetic storage

Energy emissions far greater than predicted by Planck’s Law

You can’t get something for nothing, physicists say, but sometimes a radical innovation can come close.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories — exceeding the predictions of a 100-year-old law of physics — have shown that filaments fabricated of tungsten lattices emit remarkably more energy than solid tungsten filaments in certain bands of near-infrared wavelengths when heated.

This greater use

New class of superweak particles may reveal secrets of hidden mass in universe

A UC Irvine study has revealed a new class of cosmic particles that may shed light on the composition of dark matter in the universe.

These particles, called superweakly interacting massive particles, or superWIMPs, may constitute the invisible matter that makes up as much as one-quarter of the universe’s mass.

UCI physicists Jonathan Feng, Arvind Rajaraman and Fumihiro Takayama report th