When the European Huygens probe on the Cassini space mission parachutes down through the opaque smoggy atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan early next year, it may find itself splashing into a sea of liquid hydrocarbons. In what is probably the first piece of “extraterrestrial oceanography” ever carried out, Dr Nadeem Ghafoor of Surrey Satellite Technology and Professor John Zarnecki of the Open University, with Drs Meric Srokecz and Peter Challenor of the Southampton Oceanography Centre, calculate
An international team of astronomers has used the UK’s 2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands to map the Andromeda Galaxy (otherwise known as M31) and a large area of sky all around it. Their work over the last few years has created the most detailed image of a large spiral galaxy that currently exists.
Dr Mike Irwin of the University of Cambridge, one of the team leaders, reports on some of the latest findings on Wednesday 31 March, when he will tell the RAS Nat
During recent observations from the ESA Mars Express spacecraft in orbit around Mars, methane was detected in its atmosphere.
Whilst it is too early to draw any conclusions on its origin, exciting as they may be, scientists are thinking about the next steps to take in order to understand more.
From the time of its arrival at Mars, the Mars Express spacecraft started producing stunning results. One of the aims of the mission is analysing in detail the chemical composition of the M
Very Large Telescope sets stringent limit on possible variation of the fine-structure constant over cosmological time
A fine constant
To explain the Universe and to represent it mathematically, scientists rely on so-called fundamental constants or fixed numbers. The fundamental laws of physics, as we presently understand them, depend on about 25 such constants. Well-known examples are the gravitational constant, which defines the strength of the force acting between tw
Astronomers have discovered ten previously unknown likely black holes in the Andromeda Galaxy by means of a powerful new search technique they have devised. The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest neighbouring spiral galaxy, 2.5 million light years away. Drs Robin Barnard, Ulrich Kolb and Carole Haswell of the Open University and Dr Julian Osborne of The University of Leicester used the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray observatory to find what are probably black holes lurking in dou
Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are the most powerful explosions in the Universe, yet it is only in the last few years that astronomers have started to understand them. This ongoing quest to solve the mysteries of gamma ray bursts will be boosted next September when a new US/UK/Italian space observatory, called Swift, will be launched.
Dr. Julian Osborne (University of Leicester) will describe this exciting mission and the discoveries that can be expected from Swift on Tuesday 30 March, during the
Mathematicians test simplified formula to predict winning baseball percentages
Is your local Major League Baseball team better than its record suggests? Math researchers are considering alternatives to the Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball, devised by baseball statistician Bill James. Introduced in the 1980s, the “theorem” predicts the winning percentage of a baseball team based on how many runs the team scores–and how many runs it allows.
Websites, including ESPN’s, oft
Research by Young-June Kim, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, may help determine how a class of materials already used in electronic circuits could be used in optical, or light-based, circuits, which could replace standard electrical circuits in telecommunications, computer networking, and other areas of technology.
Kim’s research is focused on “quasi one-dimensional” cuprates, materials that contain copper and oxygen where the atoms ar
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory are proposing to use a supercomputer originally developed to simulate elementary particles in high-energy physics to help determine the structures and functions of proteins, including, for example, the 30,000 or so proteins encoded by the human genome. Structural information will help scientists better understand proteins’ role in disease and health, and may lead to new diagnostic and therapeutic agents.
Findings offer clearer view of how to detect unseen matter in the universe
Astrophysicist Heidi Newberg at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her colleagues suggest that a “highway” of dark matter from another galaxy may be showering down on Earth. The findings may change the way astronomers look for mysterious cosmic particles, long suspected to outweigh known atomic matter.
The findings of Newberg and researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Utah h
An international team of physicists examining an extremely rare form of subatomic particle decay — a veritable golden needle in a micro-cosmic haystack of 7.8 trillion candidates — has discovered evidence for the highly sought process, which could be an indication of new forces beyond those incorporated in the Standard Model of particle physics. That long-standing theory of all particle physics precisely predicts the rate of such decays to be half that observed by the experimenters although it is s
This 3D image shows a portion of the southern flank of Ascraeus Mons, the northernmost volcano of the Tharsis volcano group.
The peculiar depressions which can be observed here, and on several Martian volcanoes, are so-called ’lava tubes’. The anaglyph image has been calculated from the nadir and stereo channels and it was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on Mars Express, from an altitude of 271 kilometres. North is at the right. The 3D image requires stereoscopic (red/gree
Peeking at a Puzzling Supernova with Spectropolarimetry
By measuring polarized light from an unusual exploding star, an international team of astrophysicists and astronomers has worked out the first detailed picture of a Type Ia supernova and the distinctive star system in which it exploded.
Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the researchers determined that supernova 2002ic exploded inside a flat, dense, clumpy disk of dust and gas
As Sex and the City’s Carrie finally wanders off our television screens, physicists at the Institute of Physics have devised a formula that high-heel fans can use to work out just how high they can go. Based on your shoe size, the formula tells you the maximum height of heel you can wear without toppling over or suffering agonies.
h = Q.(12+3s /8)
h is the maximum height of the heel (in cm)
Q is a sociological factor and has a value between 0 and 1 (see below to work this
Lava lakes could be Ionian versions of Earth’s mid-ocean ridges
Investigations into lava lakes on the surface of Io, the intensely volcanic moon that orbits Jupiter, may provide clues to what Earth looked like in its earliest phases, according to researchers at the University at Buffalo and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“When I look at the data, it becomes startlingly suggestive to me that this may be a window onto the primitive history of Earth,” said Tracy K. P. G
Debris from gobbled-up galaxy could be ’smoking gun’ for dark matter
WIMPs speeding at 670,000 mph on a “highway” in space may be raining onto Earth – a phenomenon that might prove the existence of “dark matter” that makes up most our galaxy and one-fourth of the universe, says a study co-authored by a University of Utah physicist.
Many researchers have long suspected that dark matter may be made of WIMPS or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which are theorized subatomic
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