An international team of astronomers headed by Dr. Michael Drinkwater (Queensland, Australia), Dr. Michael Gregg (Livermore, USA) and Dr. Michael Hilker from the University of Bonn has discovered a new kind of small, very compact galaxy. Their findings will be published in the next edition of the prestigious academic journal Nature on 29th May. This new type of galaxy could help to explain the discrepancy between observations and cosmological models.

The galaxies in our universe are not all

The first detailed map of space within about 1,000 light years of Earth places the solar system in the middle of a large hole that pierces the plane of the galaxy, perhaps left by an exploding star one or two million years ago.

The new map, produced by University of California, Berkeley, and French astronomers, alters the reigning view of the solar neighborhood. In that picture, the sun lies in the middle of a hot bubble – a region of million-degree hydrogen gas with 100-1,000 times fewer

University of California, Berkeley’s RHESSI satellite, launched last year by NASA, was snapping X-ray pictures of solar flares in December when it caught an extremely bright background gamma-ray burst, revealing a novel physical feature of these gamma rays – their polarization.

The result sheds new light on the driving force behind these mysterious explosions.

Gamma-ray bursts are mysterious flashes of gamma-ray photons that pop off about once a day randomly in the sky, briefl

Single-molecule switches have the potential to shrink computing circuits dramatically, but new results from the Arizona State University lab that first described how to wire a single molecule between gold contacts now show that laboratory-standard wired molecules have an unavoidable tendency to “blink” randomly.

In the May 30, 2003, Science, Stuart Lindsay and colleagues identify the cause of this blinking behavior as random, temporary breaks in the chemical bond between the wired molecule

Inflation’s got nothing to do with it. Since the beginning of time, a picture has always been worth more than a thousand words. But in this age of information proliferation, that reality is the taproot of a vexing problem that Zhongfei “Mark” Zhang, an assistant professor of computer science at Binghamton University, is determined to help solve.

From personal and commercial digital image libraries and multimedia databases to data mining programs and high-tech security and defense survei

New features may make southern sky’s ’Coalsack’ ideal for further study

Stargazers call a prominent dark black region in the Southern Hemisphere’s night sky the Coalsack. Even for naked-eye observers, the cloud of cold gas that makes up the Coalsack is hard to miss: It covers a part of the misty luminescence of the Milky Way, blocking out distant stars of our galaxy with the deep black shades that have earned the Coalsack its name.

A newly discovered aspect of the C

A new study by University of Toronto researchers offers the first-ever glimpse inside a laser while it’s operating, a breakthrough that could lead to more powerful and efficient lasers for fibre-optic communication systems.

“We’ve seen the inner workings of a laser in action,” says investigator Ted Sargent, a professor in the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “We’ve produced a topographical map of the landscape that electrons see as they flow into these

Milestone to Fulfill Metallization Requirements for Chip Manufacturing into Next Decade

Infineon Technologies (FSE/NYSE: IFX) today announced that its Munich Research Labs have demonstrated, by shrinking present film thicknesses into nanotechnology geometries, that the stringent requirements of thin encapsulation films in metallization schemes of future chip generations will be met. The results shows that thin barrier films, key components for advanced copper chip wiring, will meet t

Astronomers led by the University of Colorado and Carnegie Observatories have shown that a miniature galaxy less than one-hundredth the size of the Milky Way is ejecting large quantities of gas and energy into huge regions of intergalactic space.

“This discovery suggests tiny galaxies that appear very faint and dormant today were once much brighter and more active,” said CU-Boulder graduate student Brian Keeney. “It also indicates similar galaxy systems may have been primarily responsible fo

Astronomers Steve Howell of the University of California, Riverside and Thomas E. Harrison and Heather Osborne of New Mexico State University have found from their observations of over a dozen mass-losing stars in ’cataclysmic variables’ that most of the secondary stars do not appear to be normal main sequence stars in terms of their apparent abundances. To various degrees, each star seems to have low to no carbon and other odd mixtures of elements such as sodium and calcium, the astronomer

Niobium clusters display non-metallic properties at ultra-cold temperatures

The May 23 issue of the journal Science answers that question with an account of the surprising behavior exhibited by nanometer-scale clusters of the metal niobium. When the clusters are cooled to below 20 degrees Kelvin, electrical charges in them suddenly shift, creating structures known as dipoles.

“This is very strange, because no metal is supposed to be able to do this,” said Walter de Heer, a p

Images made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed two distant cosmic construction sites buzzing with activity. This discovery shows how super massive black holes control the growth of massive galaxies in the distant universe.

X-rays were detected from vast clouds of high-energy particles around the galaxies 3C294 and 4C41.17, which are 10 and 12 billion light years from Earth, respectively. The energetic particles were left over from past explosive events that can be traced

Ultracold experiment opens door for basic studies in quantum computing

Physicists at Rice University have completed the first real-time measurement of individual electrons, creating an experimental method that for the first time allows scientists to probe the dynamic interactions between the smallest atomic particles.

The research, which appears in the May 22 issue of the journal Nature, is important for researchers developing quantum computers, a revolutionary type of compu

There are many mysterious objects seen in the night sky which are not really well understood. For example, astronomers are puzzled by the “jets” emerging from planetary nebulae. However, the S-shaped jet from Henize 3-1475 is the most perplexing of all.

“Jets” are long outflows of fast-moving gas found near many objects in the Universe, such as around young stars, or coming from black holes, neutron stars, and planetary nebulae, for example. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has imaged th

Five spacecraft have made a remarkable set of observations, leading to a breakthrough in understanding the origin of a peculiar and puzzling type of aurora. Seen as bright spots in Earth’s atmosphere and called “dayside proton auroral spots,” they are now known to occur when fractures appear in the Earth’s magnetic field, allowing particles emitted from the Sun to pass through and collide with molecules in our atmosphere. On March 18, 2002, a jet of energetic solar protons collided

A progressive increase in the brightness of the planet Neptune suggests that, like Earth, the distant planet has seasons.

Observations of Neptune made during a six-year period with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope by a group of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) show that the planet is exhibiting a significant increase in brightness. The changes, observed mostly in the planet’s southern hemisphere, show a distinc