ESA’s Rosetta will be the first mission to orbit and land on a comet, one of the icy bodies that travel throughout the Solar System and develop a characteristic tail when they approach the Sun. Rosetta is scheduled to be launched on-board an Ariane-5 rocket in January 2003 from Kourou, French Guiana. A decision on the launch date will be taken by Tuesday 14 January (see Arianespace press release N° 03/02 of 7 January 2003 or at http:www.arianespace.com).

The mission’s target is Comet Wi

A vast, but previously unknown structure has been discovered around our own Milky Way galaxy by an international team of astronomers. The announcement is being made at the American Astronomical Society’s meeting in Seattle, Washington, on behalf of Drs Annette Ferguson, Rodrigo Ibata, Mike Irwin, Geraint Lewis and Nial Tanvir. Their observations suggest that there is a giant ring of several hundred million stars surrounding the main disk of the Milky Way. Despite its size, the ring has not been

This Chandra X-ray Observatory image of the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center, a.k.a. Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*, was made from the longest X-ray exposure of that region to date. In addition to Sgr A* more than two thousand other X-ray sources were detected in the region, making this one of the richest fields ever observed.

During the two-week observation period, Sgr A* flared up in X-ray intensity half a dozen or more times. The cause of these outbursts is not understood

Cosmologists hope to “hear the shape of space”, namely its topology, by analyzing in detail the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). An international team of cosmologists, including researchers from l’Observatoire de Paris, has recently developped a model for the vibrations of the universe. For the first time [1], they have simulated high resolution CMB maps containing the signatures of a wide class of topologies, for comparison with the forthcoming MAP satell

A Dartmouth researcher is building a case for a “dark energy” – dominated universe. Dark energy, the mysterious energy with unusual anti-gravitational properties, has been the subject of great debate among cosmologists.

Brian Chaboyer, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth, with his collaborator Lawrence Krauss, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, have reported their finding in the January 3, 2003, issue of Science. Combining their calc

Combining concepts from electromagnetic radiation research and fiber optics, researchers have created an extreme-ultraviolet, laser-like beam capable of producing tightly-focused light in a region of the electromagnetic spectrum not previously accessible to scientists. Between 10-100 times shorter than visible light waves, the extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) wavelengths will allow researchers to “see” tiny features and carve miniature patterns, with applications in such fields as microscopy, lithography an

Quasars and active galactic nuclei (AGN) are likely powered by matter accretion onto a super-massive black hole located at their center. Before being swallowed by the black hole, matter spirals towards the center, while forming an accretion disc. Unfortunately, such a disc is too small so that one can in general solve it with present day telescopes. But the technique of radio interferometry with very long base (VLBI, with base length of the size of the earth’s radius) make it possible somehow. I

Don’t worry – you are not the only one who thought this was a nice amateur photo of planet Saturn, Lord of the Rings in our Solar System!

But then the relative brightness and positions of the moons may appear somewhat unfamiliar… and the ring system does look unusually bright when compared to the planetary disk…??

Well, it is not Saturn, but Uranus, the next giant planet further out, located at a distance of about 3,000 million km, or 20 times the distance between the Sun and t

The science minister, Lord Sainsbury, will today open the highest resolution analytical microscope in the world at the CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire. The SuperSTEM (Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope) project is directed by Professor Peter Goodhew at Liverpool University and involves other scientists from the Universities of Liverpool, Cambridge, Glasgow and Leeds.

The microscope is housed in a new purpose-built low-vibration laboratory at the Daresbury Laboratory and will

ESA’s gamma-ray satellite, Integral, is fully operational. Today Integral’s first ground-breaking images of the high-energy Universe were presented in Paris, France. Astronomers call such initial observations ’first-light’ images.

The high-energy Universe is a violent place of exploding stars and their collapsed remnants such as the ultra-compressed neutron stars and, at the most extreme, all-consuming black holes. These celestial objects create X-rays and gamma rays tha

The European Investment Bank (EIB) is lending EUR 300 million to finance the final phase of construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The loan will also help to finance the instrumentation to record and analyse the high-energy particle collisions at the LHC. A loan to enable construction of this major project was foreseen by CERN’s governing Council when it approved the LHC in 1996.

The EIB, the European Union’s long term

Ohio University astronomers have discovered the largest disk of hot, X-ray emitting gas ever observed in the universe: At 90,000 light years in diameter, it’s about 100,000 times the size of any comparable object. The disk, spinning through a distant galaxy, is more than just an interstellar oddity, the researchers say. The object could offer new information about the way certain galaxies form and evolve.

About 20 percent of all galaxies are elliptical, the largest of the three types of ga

Forget the robot child in the movie “AI.” Vanderbilt researchers Nilanjan Sarkar and Craig Smith have a less romantic but more practical idea in mind.

“We are not trying to give a robot emotions. We are trying to make robots that are sensitive to our emotions,” says Smith, associate professor of psychology and human development.

Their vision, which is to create a kind of robot Friday, a personal assistant who can accurately sense the moods of its human bosses and respond appropriate

Using a powerful new instrument at the South Pole, a team of cosmologists has produced the most detailed images of the early Universe ever recorded. The research team, which was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), has made public their measurements of subtle temperature differences in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. The CMB is the remnant radiation that escaped from the rapidly cooling Universe about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. Images of the CMB provide researchers

For every warm-blooded human who has ever taken an online poll or signed up for free web-based email, there are legions of computer-automated Internet robots, or “bots,” trying to do the same thing.

A clever security system designed to stop these bot programs – which contribute to the Internet equivalent of computer-generated telemarketing calls – has now been cracked by a pair of computer scientists from the University of California, Berkeley.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon Unive

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