A mysterious arc of light found behind a distant cluster of galaxies has turned out to be the biggest, brightest and hottest star-forming region ever seen in space.
The so-called Lynx Arc is one million times brighter than the well-known Orion Nebula, a nearby prototypical ’starbirth’ region visible with small telescopes. The newly identified super-cluster contains a million blue-white stars that are twice as hot as similar stars in our Milky Way galaxy. It is a rarely glimpsed exa
45th Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics
The emerging field of high energy density physics has been described by a recent National Academy of Science report as the “X-games” of contemporary science. The term high energy density is used to describe matter with pressures more than 1 million times the pressure on the surface of the earth. While high energy density matter is extreme by terrestrial standards, it can be found throughout the universe in a number of astrophysica
45th Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics
In work that makes practical, large-scale fusion energy production increasingly feasible, plasma physicists working at DOE’s DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego are using a little chaos to prevent precious energy from escaping fusion energy devices.
In a magnetic fusion device, or tokamak, one of the most crucial regions for reducing the loss of heat and particles is at the plasma region’s edge. Partic
An asteroid that has eluded astronomers for decades turns out to be an unusual pair of objects traveling together in space, a UCLA planetary scientist and colleagues report.
The asteroid Hermes was rediscovered last week after being lost for 66 years. Now Jean-Luc Margot, a researcher in UCLA’s department of Earth and space sciences, has determined that the asteroid is, in fact, two objects orbiting each other. The two objects together would cover an area approximately the size
’Fly-bys’, or ’gravity assist’ manoeuvres, are now a standard part of spaceflight and are used by almost all ESA interplanetary missions.
Imagine if every time you drove by a city, your car mysteriously picked up speed or slowed down. Substitute a spacecraft and a planet for the car and the city, and this is called a ’gravity assist’. These manoeuvres take advantage of the fact that the gravitational attraction of the planets can be used to change the tra
Pierre Auger Observatory seeks source of highest-energy extra-terrestrial particles
With the completion of its hundredth surface detector, the Pierre Auger Observatory, under construction in Argentina, this week became the largest cosmic-ray air shower array in the world. Managed by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Pierre Auger project so far encompasses a 70-square-mile array of detectors that are tracking the most violent-and perha
Integral, ESA’s powerful gamma-ray space telescope, has discovered what seems to be a new class of astronomical objects.
These are binary systems, probably including a black hole or a neutron star, embedded in a thick cocoon of cold gas. They have remained invisible so far to all other telescopes. Integral was launched one year ago to study the most energetic phenomena in the universe.
Integral detected the first of these objects, called IGRJ16318-4848, on 29 January 2003. Al
Rice physicists show that quantum methods can predict nanophotonic behavior
According to new research from Rice University, scientists studying the way light interacts with metallic nanostructures should throw out their old optics textbooks and bone up on their quantum mechanics instead.
The new findings, which are described in the Oct. 17 issue of the journal Science, offer a new understanding of plasmonics, an emerging field of optics aimed at the study of light at the nan
Addressing a controversy first raised around 1910, two physicists have performed experiments with the aid of an engineer that validate anew the special theory of relativity’s limitations on the speed of light.
In a paper published in the Oct. 16 issue of the research journal “Nature,” the three researchers — Daniel Gauthier and Michael Stenner of Duke University and Mark Neifeld of the University of Arizona -– reached their findings by applying information theory to experiments with la
“Intelligent Agent” computer programs are roaming the Internet and watching the skies. It may sound like science fiction, but these programs, using Grid computing technology, will help astronomers detect some of the most dramatic events in the universe, such as massive supernova explosions. The Agents, created by the “eScience Telescopes for Astronomical Research” (eSTAR) project, have been deployed on the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii. The work is being announced at a conferenc
Once freed from its home inside the nucleus of an atom, a neutron lives on average 886.8 seconds (about 14.8 minutes), plus or minus 3.4 seconds, according to recent measurements performed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
This result, published in the Oct. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters, is the most precise ever achieved using beams of neutrons and is the culmination of almost 10 years of work. The new neutron lifetime value is consistent with physicists’ cur
Researchers at the University of Warwick have found that phosphorus, an element commonly found in teeth, can act as a “superconductor” – but you would have to have the strength of Superman to clench your teeth hard enough for it to work – as it happens at a pressure of around 2.5 megabars – some 30,000 times harder than an ordinary human can clench their teeth.
Physicists were aware that lower pressures of around 0.1 megabars could convert the electrically insulating phosphorus to a form whi
Revised periodic table slanted toward astronomers
The periodic table isn’t what it used to be, thanks to innovations by a planetary chemist at Washington University in St. Louis.
Katharina Lodders, Ph.D., Washington University research associate professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences, has evalutated data from numerous studies including her own and arranged the data into a periodic table slanted toward astronomers and cosmochemists. It’s the Cosmochemic
A franco-american quintet of cosmologists conducted by Jean-Pierre Luminet, from Paris Observatory (LUTH), has proposed an original explanation to account for a surprising detail observed in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) recently mapped by the NASA satellite WMAP. According to the team, who published their study in the 9 october 2003 issue of “Nature”, an intriguing discrepancy in the background luminous texture of the Universe can indeed be explained by a very specific global shape of space
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle places severe constraints on the subatomic world. To illustrate, for particles called bosons, the principle dictates that bosons either condense to form a superconductor or they must remain localized in an insulator. However, experiments conducted during the last 15 years on thin films have revealed a third possibility: Bosons can exist as a metal. Scientists have been struggling to interpret this surprising result.
“The conventional theory of metals is
Physicists are getting more involved in the fight against diseases by studying the folding of proteins, which they hope will eventually lead to the development of new drugs. Illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease and even some cancers are the result of protein folding that has gone awry. Since proteins in the body perform different functions according to their shape, the folding process is considered a very important area of study.
Everett Lipman, a new assistant professor of physics at
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