ESA’s Mars Express, successfully inserted into orbit around Mars on 25 December 2003, is about to reach its final operating orbit above the poles of the Red Planet. The scientific investigation has just started and the first results already look very promising.
Although the seven scientific instruments on board Mars Express are still undergoing a thorough calibration phase, they have already started collecting amazing results. The first high-resolution images and spectra of Mars have al
Scientists using CSIRO’s Australia Telescope Compact Array, a radio synthesis telescope in New South Wales, Australia, have seen a neutron star spitting out a jet of matter at very close to the speed of light. This is the first time such a fast jet has been seen from anything other than a black hole.
The discovery, reported in this week’s issue of ’Nature’, challenges the idea that only black holes can create the conditions needed to accelerate jets of particles to extreme speeds.
Frozen helium-4 behaves like a combination of solid and superfluid
Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University are announcing the possible discovery of an entirely new phase of matter: an ultra-cold, “supersolid” form of helium-4.
Writing in the 15 January 2004 issue of the journal Nature, Penn State physicist Moses H. W. Chan and his graduate student, Eun-Seong Kim, explain that their material is a solid in the sense that all its helium-4 atoms are frozen into a rigid
Previously unseen details of a mysterious, complex structure within the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372), also called the ’Keyhole Nebula’, are revealed by this image obtained with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
The picture is a montage assembled from four different April 1999 telescope pointings with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which used six different colour filters.
The picture is dominated by a large, approximately circular feature, about 7 light-years acro
An international team of scientists working in the UK, Australia, Italy and the USA has made an astronomical discovery that has major implications for testing Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Using the 64-m CSIRO Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia, the team recently detected the first system of two pulsars orbiting each other – the only system of its kind found so far among the 1400-plus pulsars discovered in the last 35 years.
Team member Dr. Richard
The first 360-degree color view from NASA’s Spirit Mars Exploration Rover presents a range of tempting targets from nearby rocks to hills on the horizon.
“The whole panorama is there before us,” said rover science- team member Dr. Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego. “It’s a great opening to the next stage of our mission.”
Spirit’s flight team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., continues making progress toward getting the
The University team of 14 is part of a group of 300 physicists from 13 countries known as the ‘Belle collaboration’. They have discovered a sub-atomic particle that they are having difficulty explaining and difficulty fitting with any current theory that attempts to describe matter.
Their research will be published in Physical Review Letters (in press).
“It could mean some of the standard and accepted theories on matter will need to be modified to incorporate some new physics,” sa
An international team of scientists from the UK, Australia, Italy and the USA have announced in today’s issue of the journal Science Express [ 8th January 2004 ] the first discovery of a double pulsar system.
They have shown that the compact object orbiting the 23-millisecond pulsar PSR J0737-3039A with a period of just 2.4 hours is not only, as suspected, another neutron star but is also a detectable pulsar, PSR J0737-3039B, that is rotating once every 2.8 seconds.
Professor A
New findings pose a challenge for cold dark matter theory
“The universe is always more complicated than our cosmological theories would have it,” says Nigel Sharp, program officer for extra-galactic astronomy and cosmology at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Witness a collection of new and recently announced discoveries that, taken together, suggest a considerably more active and fastmoving epoch of galaxy formation in the early universe than prevailing theories had called for.
ESA’s Mars Express orbiter made its first attempt to establish contact with the Beagle 2 lander, after the two spacecraft separated on 19 December 2003.
The orbiter made its first pass over the Beagle 2 landing site today at 13:13 CET, but could not pick up any signal from the tiny lander. More attempts to contact Beagle 2 are planned in the days to come.
Beagle 2 was released on 19 December on a course towards the Red Planet by Mars Express, the mothership for the 400 million kil
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered rich deposits of neon, magnesium, and silicon in a pair of colliding galaxies known as The Antennae. When the clouds in which these elements are present cool, an exceptionally high number of stars with planets should form. These results may foreshadow the fate of the Milky Way and its future collision with the Andromeda Galaxy.
“The amount of enrichment of elements in The Antennae is phenomenal,” said Giuseppina Fabbiano of the Harvard-Smi
A joint European/University of Hawaii team of astronomers has for the first time observed a stellar ‘survivor’ to emerge from a double star system involving an exploded supernova.
Supernovae are some of the most significant sources of chemical elements in the Universe, and they are at the heart of our understanding of the evolution of galaxies.
Supernovae are some of the most violent events in the Universe. For many years astronomers have thought that they occur in either solitary
Trailing 200,000-light-year-long streamers of seething gas, a galaxy that was once like our Milky Way is being shredded as it plunges at 4.5 million miles per hour through the heart of a distant cluster of galaxies. In this unusually violent collision with ambient cluster gas, the galaxy is stripped down to its skeletal spiral arms as it is eviscerated of fresh hydrogen for making new stars.
The galaxy’s untimely demise is offering new clues to solving the mystery of what happens to sp
Ohio State University physicists and their colleagues have demonstrated for the first time a type of magnetic behavior that was predicted to exist more than 50 years ago.
The behavior involves a special kind of energy transition among atoms in a very small magnet, called chromium-8 (Cr8). And while scientists have long thought that the effect was controlled purely by quantum mechanics, the magnet’s behavior appears to reflect the laws of classical physics.
The classical laws of mov
Observations of explosions from an ultra-powerful magnetic neutron star playing hide-and-seek with astronomers suggest that these exotic objects called magnetars — capable of stripping a credit card clean 100,000 miles away — are far more common than previously thought.
Scientists from the United States and Canada present this result today at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta . The work is based on observations with the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton obser
A University of Florida-led team of astronomers may have discovered the brightest star yet observed in the universe, a fiery behemoth that could be as much as much as seven times brighter than the current record holder
But don’t expect to find the star – which is at least 5 million times brighter than the sun – in the night sky. Dust particles between Earth and the star block out all of its visible light. Whereas the sun is located only 8.3 light minutes from Earth, the bright star is
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