The colour image (with north at the top) shows the summit caldera of Hecates Tholus, the northernmost volcano of the Elysium volcano group. The volcano reveals multiple caldera collapses. On the flanks of Hecates Tholus, several flow features related to water (lines radiating outwards) and pit chains related to lava can be observed. The volcano has an elevation of 5300 m, the caldera has a diameter of maximum 10 km and a depth of 600 m. The image centre is located at 150° East and 31.7° North.
Mysterious, powerful X-ray sources found in nearby galaxies may represent a new class of objects, according to data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. These sources, which are not as hot as typical neutron-star or black-hole X-ray sources, could be a large new population of black holes with masses several hundred times that of the sun.
“The challenge raised by the discovery of these sources is to understand how they produce so much X-ray power at temperatures of a few million degrees,”
Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne may owe John Preskill a set of encyclopedias
In 1997, the three cosmologists made a famous bet as to whether information that enters a black hole ceases to exist — that is, whether the interior of a black hole is changed at all by the characteristics of particles that enter it.
Hawking’s research suggested that the particles have no effect whatsoever. But his theory violated the laws of quantum mechanics and created a contradiction known as th
A National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) scientist has demonstrated efficient production of single photons—the smallest pulses of light—at the highest temperatures reported for the photon source used. The advance is a step toward practical, ultrasecure quantum communications, as well as useful for certain types of metrology. The results are reported in the Feb. 23 issue of Applied Physics Letters.
“Single photon turnstiles” are being hotly pursued for quantum communicatio
Redshift 10 Galaxy discovered at the edge of the Dark Ages [1]
Using the ISAAC near-infrared instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, and the magnification effect of a gravitational lens, a team of French and Swiss astronomers [2] has found several faint galaxies believed to be the most remote known.
Further spectroscopic studies of one of these candidates has provided a strong case for what is now the new record holder – and by far – of the most distant galaxy known i
Scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Washington University have seen carbon and nitrogen anomalies on a particle of interplanetary dust that provides a clue as to how interstellar organic matter was incorporated into the solar system.
Interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) gathered from the Earth’s stratosphere are complex collections of primitive solar system material and carry various isotopic anomalies. Using an ion microprobe that allows isotopic imaging at a scale o
For the first time, scientists from UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore, in conjunction with astrophysicists from the California Institute of Technology, UC Santa Cruz, the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics and UC’s Lick Observatory, have observed that distant larger stars formed in flattened accretion disks just like the sun.
Using the laser guide star adaptive optics system created by LLNL scientists, the team was able to determine that some of the relativel
Astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered the nearest and youngest star with a visible disk of dust that may be a nursery for planets.
The dim red dwarf star is a mere 33 light years away, close enough that the Hubble Space Telescope or ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics to sharpen the image should be able to see whether the dust disk contains clumps of matter that might turn into planets.
“Circumstellar disks are signposts for planet formati
Producing a material that is harder than natural diamond has been a goal of materials science for decades. Now a group headed by scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, D.C., has produced gemsized diamonds that are harder than any other crystals, available at a rate that is up to 100 times faster than other methods used to date. The process opens up an entirely new way of producing diamond crystals for electronics, cutting tools and other industrial applica
’Organic spin valves’ shown feasible for new electronic devices
University of Utah physicists have taken an important step toward a new generation of faster, cheaper computers and electronics by building the first “organic spin valves” – electrical switches that integrate two emerging fields of technology: organic semiconductor electronics and spin electronics, or spintronics.
In a study published Feb. 26 in the journal Nature, the researchers report they used a se
On 26 February, Rosetta will be setting off on its long journey through our solar system to meet up with Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It will take the European Space Agency (ESA) space probe ten years to reach its destination.
The comet, which moves in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, will at rendezvous be some 675 million kilometres from the Sun, near the point in its orbit farthest from the Sun. The meeting point was not chosen at random: at this point the comet is still barely active,
Potential applications in medicine, remote sensing, imaging and satellite communications
A world that consumes information in gigabytes may one day find terahertz-sized solutions for some of its most pressing problems.
While one gigabyte is equal to one billion (109) bytes of information, a terahertz (THz) is a unit of electromagnetic-wave frequency equivalent to one trillion (1012) hertz, with one hertz equaling one cycle per second.
Terahertz (THz) frequencies, r
Scientists at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) and NASA have captured unprecedented details of the swirling flow of gas hovering just a few miles from the surface of a neutron star, itself a sphere only about ten miles across. A massive and rare explosion on the surface of this neutron star – pouring out more energy in three hours than the Sun does in 100 years – illuminated the area and allowed the scientists to spy on details of the region never before revealed. T
Since the development of superconducting electronic devices there has been a need to develop a three terminal transistor like device sensitive enough to measure small voltage and current signals typical of those associated with single electron and photon events.
A group of researchers in the Department of Particle & Nuclear Physics at Oxford University has designed a superconducting device with properties analogous to those of a traditional semiconducting transistor. The Quatratran (Quasipar
Thirty years ago the determination of a protein structure required years of effort and typically was sufficient for a Ph.D. thesis. Today, due to advances in synchrotron X-ray sources and detectors, protein crystal structures can be calculated in just hours, “enabling many types of studies that were previously inconceivable,” according to a leading researcher at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
Sol Gruner, a Cornell physics professor and an expert in designing and building fast, large-area
You would imagine that a 500,000 kilometre long arch of super heated plasma releasing energy equal to the simultaneous explosion of 40 billion Hiroshima atomic bombs would be as easy to “hear” as it is to “see” – but it’s not. Astrophysicists have long thought about using the acoustic waves in these flares to understand more about these gigantic events, that can be dozens of times bigger than the Earth, but have been unable to use effectively up till now. Now researchers at the University of Warwick,
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