Scientists and engineers who work with the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer have pulled off a second daring and unprecedented rescue of the satellite observatory from serious guidance problems. This time, though, they didn´t actually wait for the guidance problems to happen.
In response to hints of the potential for future new difficulties with FUSE´s gyroscopes, which are used to check the satellite´s pointing accuracy, researchers redesigned software for three computers aboard FUSE a
A comparison of 754 nearby stars like our sun – some with planets and some without – shows definitively that the more iron and other metals there are in a star, the greater the chance it has a companion planet.
“Astronomers have been saying that only 5 percent of stars have planets, but that’s not a very precise assessment,” said Debra Fischer, a research astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. “We now know that stars which are abundant in heavy metals are five times
The sun´s big, bright, explosive flares are the attention grabbers, but tiny, more numerous microflares may have nearly as much influence on the solar atmosphere, according to new data from the University of California, Berkeley´s RHESSI satellite.
Solar flares, the largest explosions in the solar system, propel energetic particles into space and are thought to be the main source of heat pumping the sun´s outer atmosphere to a few million degrees Celsius — hotter than the surface i
On 27th August, Mars will be at its closest to Earth for almost 60,000 years. On that date, the Red Planet will approach to within 34,646,418 miles (55,758,006 km) – 145 times the distance of the Moon.
The last time the two planets were so close our ancestors were living in caves and struggling to survive the extreme conditions of the Ice Age. Who knows what will have happened by the time they are as near again – 284 years into the future?
When and were to see Mars
Communicating with ESA’s spacecraft such as Mars Express, or SMART-1, Rosetta and Venus Express – yet to be launched – will be even easier and more effective when the new Cebreros ground station, near Avila (Spain), becomes operational in September 2005.
On 22 July, in Madrid, the Director General of ESA, Jean-Jacques Dordain, the Spanish Secretary of State for Defence, Mr Fernando Díez Moreno, and the Spanish Secretary of State for Science and Technology, Mr Pedro Morenés Eulate, wil
A team of UK astronomers have announced the discovery that some supernovae have bad habits – they belch out huge quantities of ’’smoke’’ known as cosmic dust. This solves a mystery more than 10 billion years in the making. The new observations published on 17th July in the journal ’’Nature’’, answer long-standing questions about the origin of the first solid particles ever to form in the Universe.
The team measured the cold cosmic dust in ’’C
Scientists report in Nature today that significantly fewer asteroids could hit the Earth’s surface than previously reckoned.
Researchers from Imperial College London and the Russian Academy of Sciences have built a computer simulation that predicts whether asteroids with a diameter up to one kilometre (km) will explode in the atmosphere or hit the surface.
The results indicate that asteroids with a diameter greater than 200 metres (the length of two football pitches) will hi
Peering back in time more than 7 billion years, a team of astronomers using a powerful new spectrograph at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has obtained the first maps showing the distribution of galaxies in the early universe. The maps show the clustering of galaxies into a variety of large-scale structures, including long filaments, empty voids, and dense groups and clusters.
These maps are among the first results from the DEEP2 Redshift Survey, an ongoing three-year project d
ESA PR 44-2003. A unique view of our home planet and its natural satellite – the Moon – is one of the first data sets coming from ESA’’s Mars Express.
“It is very good news for the mission,” says ESA’’s Mars Express Project Scientist, Agustin Chicarro. These and other data, such as those recording the major constituents of Earth as seen from space, are the actual proof that the instruments on board Mars Express, launched 2 June 2003, are working perfectly.
The routine check-outs
Using the powerful trick of gravitational lensing, a European and American team of astronomers have constructed an extensive ‘mass map’ of one of the most massive structures in our Universe. They believe that it will lead to a better understanding of how such systems assembled and the key role of dark matter.
Clusters of galaxies are the largest stable systems in the Universe. They are like laboratories for studying the relationship between the distributions of dark and visible matter. In 1
A novel telescope that uses the Antarctic ice sheet as its window to the cosmos has produced the first map of the high-energy neutrino sky.
The map, unveiled for astronomers here today (July 15) at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union, provides astronomers with their first tantalizing glimpse of very high-energy neutrinos, ghostly particles that are believed to emanate from some of the most violent events in the universe – crashing black holes, gamma ray bursts, and the
Discovery of quadruply lensed quasar with Einstein ring
Using the ESO 3.6-m telescope at La Silla (Chile), an international team of astronomers [1] has discovered a complex cosmic mirage in the southern constellation Crater (The Cup). This “gravitational lens” system consists of (at least) four images of the same quasar as well as a ring-shaped image of the galaxy in which the quasar reside – known as an “Einstein ring”. The more nearby lensing galaxy that causes this intriguing opt
Using XMM-Newton, astronomers have obtained the world’s deepest ‘wide screen’ X-ray image of the cosmos to date. Their observations show newly discovered clusters of galaxies and provide insights into the structure of the distant Universe…
Unlike grains of sand on a beach, matter is not uniformly spread throughout the Universe. Instead, it is concentrated into galaxies like our own which themselves congregate into clusters. These clusters are ‘strung’ throughout the Universe in a web-like st
Argonne physicists have precisely measured the masses of nuclear isotopes that exist for only fractions of a second or can only be produced in such tiny amounts as to be almost nonexistent in the laboratory. Some isotopes had their masses accurately measured for the first time.
The results help explain the characteristic X-ray spectrum and luminosities of strange astronomical objects called “X-ray bursters.”
X-ray bursters comprise a normal star and a neutron star. Neutron stars
Physics Lab in Japan reports evidence for the Pentaquark; Jefferson Lab data supports discovery
A Five-quark state has been discovered, first reported by a group of physicists working at the SPring-8 physics lab in Japan. All confirmed particles known previously have been either combinations of three quarks (baryons, such as protons or neutrons) or two quarks (mesons such as pions or kaons). Although not forbidden by the standard model of particle physics, other configurations of qua
An international research team co-led by Prof. Harvey Richer of the University of British Columbia today announced that it has confirmed the existence of the universe’s oldest known and farthest planet.
The findings end a decade of speculation and debate as to the true nature of this ancient world, which takes a century to complete each orbit. The un-named planet is 2.5 times the mass of our solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter. Its existence provides evidence that the universe&
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