As Mars makes its closest approach in almost 60,000 years, two Australian astronomers have used the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii to look for signs that the planet once had liquid water – and so may have hosted life.
Dr. Jeremy Bailey of the Anglo-Australian Observatory and the Australian Centre for Astrobiology (ACA) at Macquarie University in Sydney, and Sarah Chamberlain, a PhD student at the ACA, have produced what is Bailey says is “perhaps the sharpest image of Ma
Understanding the physics of granular materials is important in industries that handle and process large amounts of the materials, such as pills and powders in the pharmaceutical and food industries and sand in the construction business.
But the problem of how to model granular materials has perplexed physicists. In particular, they’d like to better understand how the temperature within an assemblage of granular material affects the system’s dynamics. That understanding will help
For the first time, astronomers are able to predict when major flares–enormous explosions that shoot hot gases into space–will erupt on stars outside our solar system, according to research to be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
The research is based on data from the longest-running continuous radio survey of flares produced by two types of binary systems, each containing a pair of stars under the influence of each other’s gravity. Stars in both binary sys
On 27 August 2003, Mars is less than 56 million kilometres away – approaching closer to our planet than it has done in over 60 000 years.
About the same time as this closest approach, Mars Express passes the halfway mark of its journey, in terms of distance along its trajectory. On 1 September 2003, as it hurtles through space at 10 800 kilometres per hour, the spacecraft will have covered over 242 million kilometres, half of the total of 485 million kilometres needed to arrive at Mar
Making a landmark event in the history of the experimental investigation of plutonium, scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the first time have fully mapped the phonons in gallium-stabilized delta plutonium.
The experiment promises to reveal much about the physics and material properties of plutonium and its alloys.
The research, conducted in collaboration with researchers at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, and the Univers
Nowadays, the Universe is pervaded by energetic ultraviolet radiation, produced by quasars and hot stars. The short-wavelength photons liberate electrons from the hydrogen atoms that make up the diffuse intergalactic medium and the latter is therefore almost completely ionised. There was, however, an early epoch in the history of the Universe when this was not so.
The Universe emanated from a hot and extremely dense initial state, the so-called Big Bang. Astronomers now believe that it took
As well as keeping their fingers crossed for good weather during next week’s close approach of Mars, astronomers are hoping that the skies will be clear on Mars itself.
During National Astronomy Week – Saturday 23 to Saturday 30 August – observing events will be held across the UK where the public can view Mars through telescopes. It is expected that thousands of people will turn out to see the planet closer than it has been for almost 60,000 years. But it’’s not just our own
Until ten years ago, most astronomers did not believe stardust could enter our Solar System. Then ESA’’s Ulysses spaceprobe discovered minute stardust particles leaking through the Sun’s magnetic shield, into the realm of Earth and the other planets. Now, the same spaceprobe has shown that a flood of dusty particles is heading our way.
Since its launch in 1990, Ulysses has constantly monitored how much stardust enters the Solar System from the interstellar space around it. Usi
When NASA launches its Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) – the agency’s fourth ‘Great Observatory’ – later this week, astronomers around the world will be looking forward to using one of the most powerful time machines ever built.
Among those anticipating the opportunity to look back billions of years to an era when the universe was in its youth are Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson (Imperial College London) and Dr. Sebastian Oliver (University of Sussex), who will be participating in
Europe is going to the Moon for the first time! In just over two weeks the European Space Agency’s (ESA) lunar probe, SMART-1, begins its journey to the Moon. Due to be launched from Kourou in French Guiana on 3rd September (12.04 a.m. 4th September BST) SMART-1 will be powered only by an ion engine which Europe will be testing for the first time as the main spacecraft propulsion. Onboard will be D-CIXS, an X-ray spectrometer built by scientists in the UK, which will provide information on what the
Today, (August 14th), sees the start of data collection on the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) detector, situated in the Soudan iron mine, Minnesota, USA. UK particle physicists, working within an international collaboration, will use the MINOS detector to investigate the phenomenon of neutrino mass – a puzzle that goes to the heart of our understanding of the Universe.
Neutrinos are pointlike, abundant particles with very little mass. They exist in three types or ‘flavour
Scientists from the University of Strathclyde, collaborating with an international team from Imperial College, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory(RAL), ITU (Karlsruhe) and the University of Jena, have successfully turned the radioactive isotope Iodine-129, a major waste product in the nuclear power industry, into the more friendly isotope Iodine-128 using laboratory lasers. This is the first time an isotope has been transmuted. They announced their discovery today in The Institute of Physics journal Jour
Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Boston University have demonstrated a detector that counts single pulses of light, while simultaneously reducing false or “dark counts” to virtually zero.
Reported in the July 28, 2003, issue of Applied Physics Letters*, the advance provides a key technology needed for future development of secure quantum communications and cryptography.
Quantum communications and cryptography is a codemaker’s Holy Grai
ESA’s Mars Express is due to arrive at Mars in December 2003, and its Beagle 2 lander will be making a touchdown in the middle of the Martian winter. Will it see a ’’white Christmas’’ on the Red Planet? Also, if humans one day go to Mars, would they need to take a sunscreen?
Over its four-year lifetime, Mars Express will be returning data to refine the latest computer models of the Martian climate. It will be closely watching the clouds, fog, dust devils, and storms,
Nanotechnologists could have a firmer handle on the forces at play in their microscopic world thanks to recent physics research at Purdue University.
The latest in a series of experiments aimed at revealing fundamental knowledge of the universe has yielded precise measurement of the so-called Casimir force – a force that could make tiny machines behave erratically, causing a thorn in the side of nanotechnology manufacturers. A team, including Purdue physicist Ephraim Fischbach, has answered
The universe is gently fading into darkness according to three astronomers who have looked at 40,000 galaxies in the neighbourhood of the Milky Way. Research student Ben Panter and Professor Alan Heavens from Edinburgh University´s Institute for Astronomy, and Professor Raul Jimenez of University of Pennsylvania, USA, decoded the “fossil record” concealed in the starlight from the galaxies to build up a detailed account of how many young, recently-formed stars there were at different periods in the 1
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