Like an interplanetary spaceship carrying passengers, meteorites have long been suspected of ferrying relatively young ingredients of life to our planet. Using new techniques, scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism have discovered that meteorites can carry other, much older passengers as well–primitive, organic particles that originated billions of years ago either in interstellar space, or in the outer reaches of the solar system as it was beginning
Measuring the rotation period of a rocky planet like the Earth is easy, but similar measurements for planets made of gas, such as Saturn, pose problems. Researchers from JPL, Imperial College London and UCLA present new results in this week’s Nature (4th May 2006) that may solve the mystery. Using the magnetometer instrument on Cassini, they have found a clear period in the magnetic field of the planet that they believe indicates a day of 10 hours and 47 minutes.
This is a whole 8 minutes s
For the past four years, while ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has been slewing between different targets ready for the next observation, it has kept its cameras open and used this spare time to quietly look at the heavens. The result is a ’free-of-charge’ mission spin-off – a survey that has now covered an impressive 25 percent of the sky.
The rapid slewing of the satellite across the sky means that a star or a galaxy passes in the field of view of the telescope for ten
During April, computers in the UK have been working overtime in the fight against avian flu. As part of an international collaboration, computers at eleven UK universities and research labs have put in one hundred thousand hours of time searching for possible drug components against the avian flu virus H5N1. The analysis used a computing Grid, a new network that brings together worldwide computer resources to solve scientific problems.
The computing Grid used in the UK was originally
An international collaboration including researchers from Amsterdam, Paris, Baton Rouge (USA) and Lund University, (Sweden), has made a breakthrough which moves some of the mathematics of quantum mechanics off of the blackboard and into the laboratory – from theory to reality. Using extremely short pulses of light, new knowledge about the wave-like nature of matter can be obtained.
The Lund group presently holds the world record for producing short laser pulses. In the High-power laser faci
The University of Reading has developed a laser laboratory that is capable of showing some of the fastest physical processes known. The Ultrafast Laser Laboratory (ULL) can generate high energy laser light pulses with durations less than one tenth of a millionth of a millionth of a second long. The pulses can be tailored to have a particular shape and their properties can be measured.
The Department of Physics and the School of Systems Engineering at the University received funding from t
Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used lasers to cool and trap erbium atoms, a “rare earth” heavy metal with unusual optical, electronic and magnetic properties. The element has such a complex energy structure that it was previously considered too wild to trap. The demonstration, reported in the April 14 issue of Physical Review Letters,* might lead to the development of novel nanoscale devices for telecommunications, quantum computing or fine-tuning the
Physicists at JILA have performed the first-ever precision measurements using ultracold molecules, in work that may help solve a long-standing scientific mystery–whether so-called constants of nature have changed since the dawn of the universe.
The research, reported in the April 14 issue of Physical Review Letters,* involved measuring two phenomena simultaneously–electron motion, and rotating and vibrating nuclei–in highly reactive molecules containing one oxygen atom
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is providing astronomers with extraordinary views of comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 as it disintegrates before our eyes. Recent Hubble images have uncovered many more fragments than have been reported by ground-based observers. These observations provide an unprecedented opportunity to study the demise of a comet nucleus.
Amateur and professional astronomers around the world have been tracking the spectacular disintegration of 73P/Schwassmann-Wach
Taking advantage of the high sensitivity of ESA’s XMM-Newton and the sharp vision of NASA’s Chandra X-Ray space observatories, astronomers have studied the behaviour of massive fossil galaxy clusters, trying to find out how they find the time to form…
Many galaxies reside in galaxy groups, where they experience close encounters with their neighbours and interact gravitationally with the dark matter – mass which permeates the whole intergalactic space but is not directly
Excessive moisture can typically wreak havoc on electronic devices, but now researchers have demonstrated that a little water can help create ultra-dense storage systems for computers and electronics.
A team of experimentalists and theorists at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and Harvard University has proposed a new and surprisingly effective means of stabilizing and controlling ferroelectricity in nanostructures: terminating their surfaces with fragments
This sequence of images, taken by the advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE) on board ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft, shows on area on the near side of the Moon, on the edge of the Mare Humorum basin.
AMIE obtained these raw images on 13 January 2006 from a distance ranging between 1031 and 1107 kilometres from the surface, with a ground resolution between 93 and 100 metres per pixel.
The imaged area is located at longitude 45.7º West and latitude between 30.5º and 24.5º South. The
A Russian rocket launched Monday, April 24, is carrying the first of three small, spherical satellites developed at MIT to the International Space Station — a major step toward building space-based robotic telescopes and other systems.
The MIT SPHERES project — the acronym stands for Synchronized Position Hold Engage Re-orient Experimental Satellites — involves satellites about the size of volleyballs that are designed to float weightless in space while maintaining a precise posi
These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show the Nanedi Valles valley system, a steep-sided feature that may have been formed in part by free-flowing water.
The HRSC obtained these images on 3 October 2004 during orbit 905 at a ground resolution of approximately 18 metres per pixel. The images have been rotated 90 degrees clockwise, so that north is to the right.
They show the region of Nanedi Valles, a roughly 800-k
VLT takes images of disintegrating comet P73/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3
On the night of April 23 to 24, ESO’s Very Large Telescope observed fragment B of the comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 that had split a few days earlier. To their great surprise, the ESO astronomers discovered that the piece just ejected by fragment B was splitting again! Five other mini-comets are also visible on the image. The comet seems thus doomed to disintegrate but the question remains in how much time.
Will scientists ever find the elusive Higgs particle, the last of the fundamental particles predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics and postulated to play a major role in how fundamental particles get their masses? Are there undiscovered particles “beyond” those described by the Standard Model? Experiments expected to begin next year at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new particle accelerator at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), will take up the search and explore
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