New research led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln chemist Xiao Cheng Zeng has led to the discovery of a new material that could have significant implications for a variety of challenges, from carbon dioxide storage to planetary science and ...
Tags: Consumer Electronics, Electronics
In October of last year, a team from NASA and MIT's Lincoln Laboratory made space communications history by beaming data, via laser, at speeds reaching 622 megabits per second, to Earth from a spacecraft orbiting the moon. Radio-frequency ...
Tags: Consumer Electronics, Electronics
ESO's New Technology Telescope has been used to find the first evidence that asteroids can have a highly varied internal structure. By making measurements astronomers have found that different parts of the asteroid Itokawa have different ...
Tags: density measurements
(Phys.org) —NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has passed its first significant mission milestone for 2014—a Spacecraft Critical Design Review (SCDR) that examined the telescope's power, communications and pointing control ...
Tags: Telescope, Webb Space Telescope
To get an idea of how the early solar system may have formed, scientists often look to asteroids. These relics of rock and dust represent what today's planets may have been before they differentiated into bodies of core, mantle, and crust. ...
Tags: solar system, Jupiter, migration, Goldilocks
Scientists using the Herschel space observatory have made the first definitive detection of water vapor on the largest and roundest object in the asteroid belt, Ceres. Plumes of water vapor are thought to shoot up periodically from Ceres ...
Tags: Consumer Electronics, Telescope
Europe's Rosetta probe is due to wake up from years of hibernation Monday, but scientists face an agonizing wait of several hours until the first signal reaches Earth and they can celebrate a new milestone in their unprecedented mission to ...
Tags: Spacecraft, Electronics
In a laboratory under a mountain 80 miles east of Rome this fall, a Princeton-led international team switched on a new experiment aimed at finding a mysterious substance that makes up a quarter of the universe but has never been seen. The ...
Tags: Dark Matter, Project Aims
The Kuiper belt—the region beyond the orbit of Neptune inhabited by a number of small bodies of rock and ice—hides many clues about the early days of the Solar System. According to the standard picture of Solar System formation, ...
Tags: Consumer Electronics
One of the most ambitious missions in the history of space goes into high-risk mode on Monday when Europe rouses a comet-chasing probe from years of hibernation. "The most important alarm clock in the Solar System" will end the scout ...
Tags: Consumer Electronics, Electronics
Astronomers have used ESO's HARPS planet hunter in Chile, along with other telescopes around the world, to discover three planets orbiting stars in the cluster Messier 67. Although more than one thousand planets outside the Solar System are ...
Tags: Consumer Electronics, Electronics
One of the benefits of being an astrophysicist is your weekly email from someone who claims to have "proven Einstein wrong". These either contain no mathematical equations and use phrases such as "it is obvious that..", or they are page ...
Tags: Einstein, astrophysicist, energy, kinetic energy
The Kepler team today reports on four years of observations from the W. M. Keck Observatory targeting Kepler's exoplanet systems, announcing results this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington. These observations, ...
Tags: Kepler team, W.M.Keck Observatory, exoplanet systems, observations
An object discovered by astrophysicists at the University of Toronto (U of T) nearly 500 light years away from the Sun may challenge traditional understandings about how planets and stars form. The object is located near and likely ...
Tags: brown dwarf, new object, star formation, young planet
Gemini Planet Imager's first light image of Beta Pictoris b, a planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris. The star, Beta Pictoris, is blocked in this image by a mask so its light doesn't interfere with the light of the planet. In addition to ...
Tags: Gemini Planet Imager, image faint planets, exoplanet camera