As scientists demand more from space missions travelling to other worlds and beyond, traditional rocket technologies are beginning to show shortcomings. In response, ESA are helping to develop a new type of rocket engine, known as solar-electric propulsion, or more commonly, an ion engine, that can mark a whole new era of space exploration.
Solar-electric propulsion is ESA`s new spacecraft engine. It does not burn fuel as chemical rockets do; instead the technique converts sunlight into elec
Like ’flower power’ tattoos on aging ex-hippy baby boomers, unexpectedly large numbers of neutron stars and black holes in elliptical galaxies suggest some of these galaxies lived through a much wilder youth. The discovery by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory may require a revision of how elliptical galaxies evolved.
“For the first time, Chandra has allowed us to distinguish hundreds of star-like sources that are black holes and neutron stars in distant elliptical galaxies,” said Craig Sara
The Star Tiger team today begins a four-month pioneering research and development project at Rutherford Appleton Laboratories (RAL), which could lead to a real breakthrough for submillimetre wave imaging.
For the first time under the ESA Star Tiger initiative, eleven scientists and specialists from seven different European countries (The United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Spain) are working together in an innovative way. The idea is to get together a small
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory believe that magnetic field lines extending a few million light years from galaxies into space may be the result of incredibly efficient energy-producing dynamos within black holes that are somewhat analogous to an electric motor. Los Alamos researchers Philipp Kronberg, Quentin Dufton, Stirling Colgate and Hui Li today discussed this finding at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Albuquerque, N.M.
B
If you have ever peered down a highway on a sunny day, you have probably seen the rising, wavelike ripples of heated air that distort the appearance of objects near the horizon. Similar disturbances in the atmosphere above us make stars twinkle as their light is distorted on the way down to Earth.
Although twinkling stars inspired a well-known nursery rhyme, the effect hampers astronomers’ attempts to study the heavens. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are now build
“The presence of such a large amount of water ice under Mars`s surface is very surprising. Especially so close to the surface!” says Gerhard Schwehm, Head of the Planetary Missions Division at ESA. The team working on ESA`s Mars Express, the next mission to the Red Planet, is thrilled by NASA`s Mars Odyssey detection of hydrogen-rich layers under the Martian surface. This hydrogen indicates the presence of water ice in the top surface of the Martian soil in a large region surrounding the planet`s so
Is life a highly improbable event, or is it rather the inevitable consequence of a rich chemical soup available everywhere in the cosmos? Scientists have recently found new evidence that amino acids, the `building-blocks` of life, can form not only in comets and asteroids, but also in the interstellar space. This result is consistent with (although of course does not prove) the theory that the main ingredients for life came from outer space, and therefore that chemical processes leading to life are l
Dry valleys, channels, and networks of gullies scar the arid Martian landscape. Along with other evidence, these physical vestiges of conditions on ancient Mars suggest a planet once saturated with liquid water. Where is this water now? Scientists have posited that a portion of it evaporated into the atmosphere, but that the rest lies beneath the surface. Findings announced today offer the strongest support yet to that hypothesis: according to new data, large deposits of water ice may in fact exist u
“It is not too much to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star” (Arthur Eddington 1926)
Following a press conference this morning (Monday 27 May 2002) in Paris, the European Space Agency confirmed the establishment of the Eddington Mission as part of its new Science programme. Astronomers, led by Professor Ian Roxburgh of Queen Mary, University of London, proposed the mission in 2000, and the Eddington Satellite is to be
When you are sent to do a bit of work experience in the office of a university science department you don’t normally expect much more than a bit of boring filing and some tedious photocopying. So those that turned up to the University of Warwick’s Physics department recently were a bit shocked to be taken to a small black room and dropped into a virtual reality four dimensional hypercube.
Instead of dreary photocopying the work experience kids were used to help University of Warwick physicis
An international team of scientists from Cambridge, Manchester and Tenerife has released the first results of new high-precision observations of the relic radiation from the Big Bang, often called the cosmic microwave background or CMB.
These observations have been made with a novel radio telescope called the Very Small Array (VSA) situated on Mount Teide in Tenerife. The images show the beginnings of the formation of structure in the early Universe.
From the properties of the image
New evidence suggests that hundreds of unseen dwarf galaxies made of dark matter encircle our Milky Way and other large, visible galaxies. Scientists believe that 80 to 90 percent of the universe must be made of this as-yet-undetected matter to account for the observed structure of the universe. According to Einstein, such large concentrations of matter should warp the surrounding space and bend light in much the same way that glass lenses do. With that in mind, astrophysicists at the University of C
The SUMER instrument on the ESA-NASA SOHO spacecraft has measured amazing wind speeds during its observations of the Sun. It sets a new record in its examination of two loops of gas arching in the solar atmosphere, where NASA`s TRACE satellite spotted bright blobs of gas. Shifts in the wavelength of ultraviolet light from highly ionized neon atoms, seen by SUMER, revealed steady wind speeds of up to 320 000 kilometres per hour. That`s fast enough to cross the Atlantic Ocean in less than a minute.
Over the coming weeks an international team, led by Professor Ulrich Heber of the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany, will use over fifteen different telescopes around the world to make over one hundred nights of observations of just one star to learn about its internal structure.
The constellation of the “Serpent” contains a variable star, called V338 Ser, which vibrates with several periods of about ten minutes. It is a very old and nearly burnt out star which has lost most of its o
About 30 years ago, astronomers realised that the Sun resonates like a giant musical instrument with well-defined periods (frequencies). It forms a sort of large, spherical organ pipe. The energy that excites these sound waves comes from the turbulent region just below the Sun`s visible surface.
Observations of the solar sound waves (known as “helioseismology”) have resulted in enormous progress in the exploration of the interior of the Sun, otherwise hidden from view. As is the case on Eart
ESO telescopes have detected a strange-looking object. Using the ESO 3.6-m New Technology Telescope and the Very Large Telescope (VLT), a team of astronomers [1] have discovered a dusty and opaque disk surrounding a young solar-type star in the outskirts of a dark cloud in the Milky Way.
It was found by chance during an unrelated research programme and provides a striking portrait of what our Solar System must have looked like when it was in its early infancy. Because of its unusual appeara
Feedback
