ESA is now planning a mission that can detect moons around planets outside our Solar System, those orbiting other stars!
Everyone knows our Moon: lovers stare at it, wolves howl at it, and ESA recently sent SMART-1 to study it. But there are over a hundred other moons in our Solar System, each a world in its own right.
A moon is a natural body that travels around a planet. Moons are a by-product of planetary formation and can range in size from small asteroid-sized bodies of a f
A team of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder has taken another step in the quest to build a compact, tabletop x-ray microscope that could be used for biological imaging at super-high resolution.
By firing a femtosecond laser – a laser that generates light pulses with durations as short as 100 trillionth of a second – through a gas-filled tube called a waveguide, they were able to create more efficient “laser-like” beams in regions of the spectrum that were previously inacc
A PhD student from Loughborough University has discovered why biscuits sometimes break-up after being baked. Published today in the Institute of Physics journal Measurement Science and Technology this discovery will help manufacturers work out how to make the perfect biscuit.
Biscuits such as the “Rich Tea” type sometimes develop cracks spontaneously up to a few hours after baking, making the biscuit liable to break under the application of small loads such as being packaged or transported t
New research on the sun’s contribution to global warming is reported in this month’s Astronomy & Geophysics. By looking at solar activity over the last 11,000 years, British Antarctic Survey (BAS) astrophysicist, Mark Clilverd, predicts that the sun’s contribution to warming the Earth will reduce slightly over the next 100 years.
This is a different picture to the last century when solar flares, sunspots and geomagnetic storms, increased in number. This rise is simultaneous with emissions of
SMART-1’’s revolutionary propulsion system was successfully fired at 12:25 UT on 30 September, 2003, in orbit around the Earth.
Engineers at ESOC, the European Space Agency’’s control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, sent a command to begin the firing test, which lasted for one hour. This was similar to a trial performed on Earth before SMART-1 was launched.
Several months ago, the ion engine, or Solar Electric Primary Propulsion (SEPP) system, had been placed in a vacuu
Astronomers have discovered two of the smallest moons yet found around Uranus. The new moons, uncovered by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, are about 8 to 10 miles across (12 to 16 km) — about the size of San Francisco.
The two moons are so faint they eluded detection by the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which discovered 10 small satellites when it flew by the gas giant planet in 1986. The newly detected moons are orbiting even closer to the planet than the five major Uranian satellites, which
The world’s particle physics community today announced the launch of the first phase of the LHC computing Grid (LCG). The LCG is designed to handle the unprecedented quantities of data that will be produced by experiments at CERN ’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) from 2007 onwards. “The LCG will provide a vital test-bed for the new Grid computing technologies that are set to revolutionise the way scientists use the world’’s computing resources in areas ranging from fundamental research to
Elusive brown dwarfs, the missing link between gas giant planets like Jupiter and small, low-mass stars, have now been “fingerprinted” by UCLA astronomy professor Ian S. McLean and colleagues, using the Keck II Telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
McLean and his research team will publish the most systematic and comprehensive near-infrared spectral analysis of more than 50 brown dwarfs in the Oct. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal, the premier journal in astronomy, publi
Revealing images produced by one of the world’s most sophisticated telescopes are enabling a team of Edinburgh astronomers to see clearly for the first time how distant galaxies were formed 12 billion years ago. Scientists from the UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC) and the University of Edinburgh have been targeting the biggest and most distant galaxies in the Universe with the world’s most sensitive submillimetre camera, SCUBA. The camera, built in Edinburgh, is operated on the James Clerk Ma
A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astrophysicist, in collaboration with international researchers, has found evidence for the synchronous formation of massive, luminous elliptical galaxies in young galaxy clusters.
The forming galaxies were detected at sub-millimeter wavelengths. Emission at these wavelengths is due to dust from young stars that is heated by the stars or by active black holes. The galaxies were grouped around high-red shift radio galaxies, the most massive systems kn
Telltale X-rays from iron may reveal if black holes are spinning or not, according to astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton Observatory. The gas flows and bizarre gravitational effects observed near stellar black holes are similar to those seen around supermassive black holes. Stellar black holes, in effect, are convenient `scale models’ of their much larger cousins.
Black holes come in at least two different sizes. Stellar black holes
Philosophical transactions a November issue
Organised and edited by Carlos Frenk, George Kalmus, Nigel Smith and Simon White
What is the universe made of? How is it expanding? What is the origin of galaxies and other cosmic large-scale structures? These questions and some tentative answers were the focus of the discussion meeting on The search for dark matter and dark energy in the Universe, held at The Royal Society on 22-23 January 2003.
Astronomers have known fo
The universe may have been created by an explosion within a black hole, according to a new theory by two mathematicians recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A..
“It’s a mathematically plausible model which refines the standard model of the Big Bang,” said Blake Temple, professor of mathematics at UC Davis and co-author of the paper with Joel Smoller, professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan.
In the standard model o
Measurements of 11 exploding stars spread throughout the visible universe made by the Hubble Space Telescope confirm an earlier, ground-based study which produced the first evidence that the universe is not only expanding, but expanding at an increasing rate.
The new study, which has been posted online [http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0309368] and will soon appear in the Astrophysical Journal, also provides some tantalizing new insights into the nature of the mysterious repulsive force, d
Observations of the bright side of the Moon with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have detected oxygen, magnesium, aluminum and silicon over a large area of the lunar surface. The abundance and distribution of those elements will help to determine how the Moon was formed.
“We see X-rays from these elements directly, independent of assumptions about the mineralogy and other complications,” said Jeremy Drake of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass, at a
Galileo, the NASA space probe in which UK scientists have played a key role, will dramatically end its 14-year mission when it plunges into Jupiter’s dense atmosphere on the 21st September. The spacecraft, which has revealed a wealth of scientific data on Jupiter and its moons, with fuel and power exhausted, will vaporize like a meteor as its descends through the giant planet’s turbulent atmosphere (an artist’s impression of what this might look like is available – please see notes to
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