Astronomers have glimpsed dusty debris around an essentially dead star where gravity and radiation should have long ago removed any sign of dust — a discovery that may provide insights into our own solar system’s eventual demise several billion years from now.
The results are based on mid-infrared observations made with the Gemini 8-meter Frederick C. Gillett Telescope (Gemini North) on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. The Gemini observations reveal a surprisingly high abundance
Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, a team of astronomers led by the University of Rochester has detected gaps ringing the dusty disks around two very young stars, which suggests that gas-giant planets have formed there. A year ago, these same researchers found evidence of the first “baby planet” around a young star, challenging most astrophysicists’s models of giant-planet formation.
The new findings in the Sept. 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters not only r
New processes have applications in bioimaging and solar conversion
Efficient and highly scalable new chemical synthesis methods developed at the University at Buffalo’s Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics have the potential to revolutionize the production of quantum dots for bioimaging and photovoltaic applications.
A patent has been filed on the methods, which were described last month in papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and Applied Phy
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have uncovered important evidence that explains how water, usually an inhibitor of catalytic reactions, can sometimes promote them. The findings could lead to fewer constraints on reaction conditions potentially leading to the development of lower cost techniques for certain industrially important catalytic reactions. The results appear in the September 6, 2005 issue of Physical Review Letters.
“Normally, in most catalytic reactio
A breakthrough by a team of British, US and French scientists will help protect astronauts, spacecraft and satellites from radiation hazards experienced in space.
Reporting in the journal Nature this week, the team describe how their study of rare and unusual space storms provided a unique opportunity to test conflicting theories about the behaviour of high energy particles in the Van Allen radiation belts* – a volatile region 12000 miles (19,000 km) above the Earth.
SSETI Express, a low Earth orbit spacecraft designed and built by European university students under the supervision of ESA’s Education Department, is to be launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on a Russian Cosmos 3M launcher on 27 September in the morning.
On that occasion, ESA will be organising a launch event at Space Expo, the public visitors’ centre close to ESA/ESTEC at Noordwijk in the Netherlands. A live televised transmission of the launch will bring images from Plesetsk a
Rice scientists replace pricey solvents with cheap processing fluids
In an important advance toward the large-scale manufacture of fluorescent quantum dots, scientists at Rice University have developed a new method of replacing the pricey solvents used in quantum dot synthesis with cheaper oils that are commonplace at industrial chemical plants.
Rice’s study, which was conducted under the auspices of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN)
’Light breaks where no sun shines’
Astronomers looking for earth-like planets in other solar systems — exoplanets — now have a new field guide thanks to earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis.
Bruce Fegley, Ph.D., Washington University professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and Laura Schaefer, laboratory assistant, have used thermochemical equilibrium calculations to model the chemistry of silicate vapor a
Scientists have developed a new ultra-light limb that can mimic the movement in a real hand better than any currently available. This research was presented today at the Institute of Physics conference Sensors and their Applications XIII which took place at the University of Greenwich, Kent, UK.
Every year 200 people in the UK lose their hands. Common causes include motorbike accidents and industrial incidents. Currently available prosthetic hands are either simple mimics that l
Chemical proof for two wet scenarios
A large team of NASA scientists, led by earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis details the first solid set of evidence for water having existed on Mars at the Gusev crater, exploration site of the rover Spirit.
Using an array of sophisticated equipment on Spirit, Alian Wang, Ph.D., Washington University senior research scientist in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and the late Larry A. Hask
Missions of interest include Saturn’s Titan
For the last two years, tests have been conducted at Sandia National Laboratories’ National Solar Thermal Test Facility to see how materials used for NASA’s future planetary exploration missions can withstand severe radiant heating.
The tests apply heat equivalent to 1,500 suns to spacecraft shields called Advanced Charring Ablators. The ablators protect spacecraft entering atmospheres at hypersonic speeds.
Ohio State University researchers have just completed the first comprehensive study of human hair on the nanometer level.
Special equipment enabled Bharat Bhushan and his colleagues to get an unprecedented close-up look at a rogue’s gallery of bad hair days – from chemically overprocessed locks to curls kinked up by humidity.
They used the techniques they developed to test a new high-tech hair conditioner.
Ultimately, the same techniques could be used to
Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have the universe’s coldest substance running in circles.
The UC Berkeley team has created a Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium atoms and nudged it into a circular racetrack 2 millimeters across, creating a particle storage ring analogous to the accelerator storage rings of high energy physics. This ring, the first to contain a Bose-Einstein gas, is full of cold particles at a temperature of only one-millionth of a deg
A major breakthrough in the use of molecules as information processors is to be announced at this year’s BA Festival of Science in Dublin.
Nanotechnology experts are exploring the capabilities of molecules that act like conventional computers but can operate in tiny places where no silicon-based chip or semiconductor can go. Now, for the first time, they have used these molecules to perform logic operations and process information in spaces a few nanometres across.
New observations from the Cassini spacecraft now at Saturn indicate the particles comprising one of its most prominent rings are trapped in ever-changing clusters of debris that are regularly torn apart and reassembled by gravitational forces from the planet.
According to University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Larry Esposito of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, particle clusters in the outermost main ring, the A ring, range from the size of sedans to movin
ESA’s Integral space observatory, together with NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer spacecraft, has found a fast-spinning pulsar in the process of devouring its companion.
This finding supports the theory that the fastest-spinning isolated pulsars get that fast by cannibalising a nearby star. Gas ripped from the companion fuels the pulsar’s acceleration. This is the sixth pulsar known in such an arrangement, and it represents a ’stepping stone’ in the evol
Feedback
