Space

Hydrocarbons Found On Saturn's Moon

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has revealed for the first time surface details of Saturn's moon Hyperion, including cup-like craters filled with hydrocarbons that may indicate more widespread presence in our solar system of basic chemicals necessary f ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 6 2007 - 10:49am

Is It The End Of U.S. Physics If We Don't Fund The Next Particle Accelerator?

Mention "outsourcing" and people tend to think of fields like manufacturing or telemarketing; theoretical physics isn't even on the list. Yet the scientists who develop theoretical predictions for high-energy particle physics experiments say ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 7 2007 - 6:01am

Stellar Tiramisu

Looking at the chemical composition of stars that host planets, astronomers have found that while dwarf stars often show iron enrichment on their surface, giant stars do not. The astronomers think that the planetary debris falling onto the outer layer of t ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 9 2007 - 11:46am

Astronomers Find The Most Distant Known Galaxies

Using natural ‘gravitational lenses’, an international team of astronomers claim to have found a hint of a population of the most distant galaxies yet seen- the light we see from them today left more than 13 thousand million years ago, when the Universe wa ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 10 2007 - 10:21pm

Astronomers Develop New Method To Describe Galaxy Features

A University of Alabama astronomer has co-developed a new way to characterize galaxy features that is giving scientists additional insight into how galaxies formed and changed over time, according to a paper published in the June 2007 issue of The Astronom ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 10 2007 - 2:22pm

AKARI Presents Detailed All-sky Map In Infrared Light

One year after the beginning of its scientific operations, the high-capability infrared satellite AKARI continues to produce stunning views of the infrared Universe. Launched in February 2006, AKARI is making a comprehensive, multi-wavelength study of the ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 11 2007 - 4:08pm

UCL Astronomers Find Water On Extra-Solar Planet

Dr. Giovanna Tinetti (read her interview with Scientific Blogging's Douglas Blane here) of the European Space Agency and UCL’s Department of Physics & Astronomy has discovered that a planet passing in front of its ‘sun’ absorbs starlight in a way ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 19 2008 - 3:07pm

The Gobbling Dwarf That Exploded

A unique set of observations, obtained with ESO's VLT, has allowed astronomers to find direct evidence for the material that surrounded a star before it exploded as a Type Ia supernova. This strongly supports the scenario in which the explosion occurr ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 13 2007 - 10:53am

Visions Of Venus

ESA’s Venus Express and NASA’s MESSENGER looked at Venus in tandem for a few hours in June. Here is the first set of images. The orbital geometry of Venus Express when MESSENGER skimmed past Venus on 5 June meant that the two spacecraft were not at the sam ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 14 2007 - 4:13am

Seeing Normal And Dark Matter Clearly- Collision In The Bullet Cluster

The orbiting X-ray telescopes XXM-Newton and Chandra have caught a pair of galaxy clusters merging into a giant cluster. The discovery adds to existing evidence that galaxy clusters can collide faster than previously thought. When individual galaxies colli ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 19 2007 - 2:57am