Black holes really are holes – objects without a surface – say Drs Christine Done and Marek Gierlinski in a paper accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Having an “event horizon” rather than a surface is the property that makes something a black hole but, by definition, it’s impossible ever to see one directly. However, these new results give direct evidence of the existence of such holes in spacetime.
Drs Done and Gierlinski set out to track
Though Einstein put his foot down and demanded that nothing can move faster than light, a new device developed at the University of Rochester may let you outpace a beam by putting your foot down on the gas pedal. At 127 miles per hour, the light in the new device travels more than 5 million times slower than normal as it passes through a ruby just a few centimeters long.
Instead of the complex, room-filling mechanisms previously used to slow light, the new apparatus is small and, in the wor
Most people are familiar with the fact that sensitive instruments known as seismographs can detect earthquakes taking place many hundreds or thousands of miles away. By studying the waves from these tremors, scientists can find out about the conditions deep inside our rocky planet.
In the same way, astronomers are now able to measure millions of sound waves that propagate throughout the Sun, causing it to vibrate or ring like a bell. This technique, known as helioseismology, is the solar eq
In January 2002, a moderately dim star in the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn, suddenly became 600 000 times more luminous than our Sun. This made it temporarily the brightest star in our Milky Way. The light from this eruption created a unique phenomenon known as a ’light echo’ when it reflected off dust shells around the star.
The brightness of V838 Monocerotis, as astronomers call the star, has long since returned to normal levels. Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space
Early on the morning of 30 June 1908, the vast forest of western Siberia was illuminated by a strange apparition: an alien object streaking across the cloudless sky. White hot from its headlong plunge into the Earth’s atmosphere, the intruder exploded about 8 km above the ground, flattening trees over an area of 2000 square kilometres.
Despite the huge detonation, equivalent to a 10 megaton nuclear warhead (about 500 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb), there were few if any casu
Dramatic images reveal unique star explosion
In the early months of 2002, astronomers scanning the sky saw something highly unusual – and they still don’t know exactly what it is. A star suddenly flashed to 600,000 times its previous brightness. For a brief time, it was the brightest star in the galaxy.
As the light from the outburst spread into space, it reflected from surrounding rings of dust to reveal a spectacular, multicolored bull’s eye that is now 3 light
Intricate patterns formed by granular materials under the influence of electrostatic fields have scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory dreaming of new ways to create smaller structures for nanotechnologies. With a combination of electric fields and fluid mixtures, researchers Igor Aronson, Maksim Sapozhnikov, Yuri Tolmachev and Wai Kwok can cause tiny spheres of bronze and other metals to self-assemble into crystalline patterns, honeycombs, pulsating rings and
Supermassive black holes, notorious for ripping apart and swallowing stars, might also help seed interstellar space with the elements necessary for life, such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and iron, scientists say.
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite, scientists at Penn State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found evidence of high-speed winds blowing away copious amounts of gas from the cores of two quasar galaxies, which are
ESA’s Integral satellite is detecting gamma-ray bursts at a rate of nearly one per day, establishing itself as a key player in the hunt for these enigmatic explosions.
Launched in October 2002, Integral has just captured four bursts in the last four months right in the middle of its field of view. Such precision observations are providing scientists with a remarkable view of gamma-ray bursts, which occur randomly, fade within seconds, and yet shine with the intensity of millions
By constructing artificial materials that break long-standing rules of nature, a University of Toronto researcher has developed a flat lens that could significantly enhance the resolution of imaged objects. This, in turn, could lead to smaller and more effective antennas and devices for cell phones, increased space for data storage on CD-ROMs and more complex electronic circuits.
“This is new physics,” says George Eleftheriades, a U of T professor specializing in electromagnetic technology
Observations with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the ESO Paranal Observatory (Chile) have provided the first-ever direct determination of the angular sizes of the disks of the solar-type stars Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. As the two largest members of this triple stellar system that also includes the much smaller Proxima Centauri, they are the Sun’s nearest neighbours in space at a distance of just over 4 light-years. Together with photometric and asteroseismic observati
Our planet is bombarded every second with a large number of chargeless, seemingly massless, particles that originate in nuclear fusion reactions that power the sun. They’re called neutrinos.
According to The Standard Solar Model – the most substantiated model of the sun – the sun should emit around three times more neutrinos than are actually measured on Earth. They are a source of great interest for scientists who seek to better understand elementary particles and the physics of the s
Researchers attack 100-year-old puzzle, learn how a single layer of particles can pack on the surface of a sphere ARLINGTON, Va. – In a discovery that is likely to impact fields as diverse as medicine and nanomanufacture, researchers have determined how nature arranges charged particles in a thin layer around a sphere. The leap forward in understanding this theoretical problem may help reveal structural chinks in the outer armor of viruses and bacteria (revealing potential drug targets
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, for the first time, astronomers have observed the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet evaporating off into space. Much of this planet may eventually disappear, leaving only a dense core. The planet is a type of extrasolar planet known as a ’hot Jupiter’. These giant, gaseous planets orbit their stars very closely, drawn to them like moths to a flame.
The scorched planet called HD 209458b orbits ‘only’ 7 million kilometres from its yellow Sun-like st
In a major breakthrough for understanding what one of them calls “the most exotic environment in the Universe,” a team of astronomers has discovered that powerful radio bursts in pulsars are generated by structures as small as a beach ball.
“These are by far the smallest objects ever detected outside our solar system,” said Tim Hankins, leader of the research team, which studied the pulsar at the center of the Crab Nebula, more than 6,000 light-years from Earth. “The small size of these regi
Early demo project identifies new brown dwarf
A new approach to finding undiscovered objects buried in immense astronomical databases has produced an early and unexpected payoff: a new instance of a hard-to-find type of star known as a brown dwarf.
Scientists working to create the National Virtual Observatory (NVO), an online portal for astronomical research unifying dozens of large astronomical databases, confirmed discovery of the new brown dwarf recently. The star emerge
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