For over 60 years now, the University of Liege Astrophysics and Geophysics Institute (IAGL) has been concerned with the study of comets. Again today, four of its researchers have just made a major discovery for the understanding of these celestial objects : a lot of extra heavy nitrogen detected in two comets suggests the presence of great quantities of complex organic molecules in them. The results obtained by the Liege team will be published in the next number of the international magazine, Science
An astronomer from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in collaboration with an international team of researchers, have discovered that a neighboring galaxy — the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) — appears to have formed with an old stellar halo, similar to how our very own Milky Way formed.
The oldest and most metal-poor Milky Way stars form a spherical halo where they move about like atoms in a hot gas, which in turn prompts two major formation scenarios of our galaxy: extended hier
MIT scientists have cooled a sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded – only half-a-billionth of a degree above absolute zero. The work, to be reported in the Sept. 12 issue of Science, bests the previous record by a factor of six, and is the first time that a gas was cooled below 1 nanokelvin (one-billionth of a degree).
“To go below one nanokelvin is a little like running a mile under four minutes for the first time,” said Nobel laureate Wolfgang Ketterle, co-leader of the team.
ESA’s Herschel spacecraft will collect infrared radiation from some of the coldest and most distant objects in the Universe. But why are observations of infrared light so special?
The Universe is full of radiation of all types but most of this does not reach us here on Earth because our atmosphere blocks out many wavelengths of radiation, but lets others through.
Fortunately for life on Earth, the atmosphere blocks out harmful, high-energy radiation like X-rays, gamma rays and
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory detected sound waves, for the first time, from a super-massive black hole. The “note” is the deepest ever detected from an object in the universe. The tremendous amounts of energy carried by these sound waves may solve a longstanding problem in astrophysics.
The black hole resides in the Perseus cluster, located 250 million light years from Earth. In 2002, astronomers obtained a deep Chandra observation that shows ripples in the gas filling the cluster.
A common table commodity that people sprinkle on their food every day is the main ingredient in new measurements by scientists at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO).
In a presentation on Sunday September 7th, at TAUP2003, a major scientific conference in Seattle, Washington, new measurements were reported that strongly confirm the original SNO results announced in 2001 and 2002 that solved the “Solar Neutrino Problem” and go much further in establishing the properties of neutrin
Physicists in the UK are ready to start construction of a major part of an advanced new experiment, designed to search for elusive gravitational waves. They are already part of two experiments: the UK/German GEO 600 project and the US LIGO experiment (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), both in their commissioning phases. By bringing GEO 600 technology to LIGO, they and their German colleagues from the Albert Einstein Institute are now set to become full partners in Advanced LIGO, a
St. Petersburg researchers have designed an original thermometer for fast-moving electrons in thermonuclear reactors. The laser beam in this device is used to instantly determine the temperature of burning hot plasma, at frequencies required for precise diagnostics.
This device is a further step forward to controlled nuclear fusion. The device will help researchers to get precise information about energy distribution of hot plasma electrons inside the tokamac – the most promising current pro
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered three of the faintest and smallest objects ever detected beyond Neptune. Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia and orbits just beyond Neptune and Pluto, where they may have rested since the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. The objects reside in a ring-shaped region called the Kuiper Belt, which houses a swarm of icy rocks that are leftover building blocks, or “planetesimals,” from the sola
Carbon nanotubes, recently created cylinders of tightly bonded carbon atoms, have dazzled scientists and engineers with their seemingly endless list of special abilities – from incredible tensile strength to revolutionizing computer chips. In today’s issue of Science, two University of Rochester researchers add another feat to the nanotubes’ list: ideal photon emission.
“The emission bandwidth is as narrow as you can get at room temperature,” says Lukas Novotny, professor of
UCLA astronomers report they have detected remarkably stormy conditions in the hot plasma being pulled into the monstrous black hole residing at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, 26,000 light years away. This detection of the hot plasma is the first in an infrared wavelength, where most of the disturbed plasma’s energy is emitted, and was made using the 10-meter Keck II Telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
Plasma is a hot, ionized, gas-like matter — a fourth state of ma
Researchers studying physical and chemical processes at the smallest scales, smaller even than the width of a human hair, have found that fluid circulating in a microscopic whirlpool can reach radial acceleration more than a million times greater than gravity, or 1 million Gs.
By contrast, a pilot flying a fighter jet at high speed and in relatively tight circular patterns might experience a force of 10 to 12 Gs, making the force his body feels 10 to 12 times normal.
“From a physi
A new University of Colorado at Boulder study of Jupiter’s moon Europa may help explain the origin of the giant ice domes peppering its surface and the implications for discovering evidence of past or present life forms there.
Assistant Professor Robert Pappalardo and doctoral student Amy Barr previously believed the mysterious domes may be formed by blobs of ice from the interior of the frozen shell that were being pushed upward by thermal upwelling from warmer ice underneath. Europa
The latest discovery of a large asteroid moving through our Solar System puts a spotlight on the studies of these and other wandering celestial objects by the European Space Agency.
Some astronomers have predicted that this newly discovered object could hit the Earth on 21 March, 2014, but now data indicate that the chances of it doing so are really very small – less than one in 909,000.
However, scientists continue to monitor these objects which could give clues to the orig
Scientific breakthrough in the transmutation of isotopes
Collaboration between the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) DG, the University of Jena (Germany), the University of Strathclyde (UK), Imperial College (UK), and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK) has led to the transmutation of long-lived radioactive iodine-129 into short-lived iodine-128 using very high intensity laser radiation. Until recently, transmutation could only be achieved in nuclear reactors or p
The DC303.8-14.2 globule
A small and dark interstellar cloud with the rather cryptic name of DC303.8-14.2 is located in the inner part of the Milky Way galaxy. It is seen in the southern constellation Chamaeleon and consists of dust and gas. Astronomers classify it as a typical example of a “globule”.
As many other globules, this cloud is also giving birth to a star. Some years ago, observations in the infrared spectral region with the ESA IRAS satellite observatory detecte
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