Astrophysics
Goddard scientists work at extreme edge of cosmic ice
March 5, 2013 9:49 am | by Elizabeth Zubritsky, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center | News | Comments
In tiny test tubes, researchers at the Cosmic Ice Lab at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center can reproduce reactions in ice from almost any time and place in the history of the solar system, including some that might help explain the origin of life. But to do so, they must use ice that produced with intense cold and low pressure, conditions that rarely occur on Earth.
NASA head views progress on asteroid lasso mission
May 23, 2013 10:59 pm | by Alicia Chang, AP Science Writer | News | Comments
Surrounded by engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, NASA chief...
Researchers explain magnetic field misbehavior in solar flares
May 23, 2013 8:39 am | News | Comments
When a solar flare filled with charged particles erupts from the sun, its magnetic...
Record-breaking high-energy particles detected by telescope buried in Antarctic
May 17, 2013 12:26 pm | News | Comments
A massive telescope buried in the Antarctic ice has detected 28 extremely high-energy...
Theorists weigh in on where to hunt dark matter
May 22, 2013 11:26 am | News | CommentsNow that it looks like the hunt for the Higgs boson is over, particles of dark matter are at the top of the physics "Most Wanted" list. Dozens of experiments have been searching for them, but often come up with contradictory results. Theorists from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology believe they've come up with an algorithm that could help narrow the search for these elusive particles.
Study: Earth's iron core is surprisingly weak
May 17, 2013 10:54 am | News | CommentsThe massive ball of iron sitting at the center of Earth is not quite as "rock-solid" as has been thought, say two Stanford University mineral physicists. By conducting experiments that simulate the immense pressures deep in the planet's interior, the researchers determined that iron in Earth's inner core is only about 40% as strong as previous studies estimated.
Weather on the outer planets only goes so deep
May 16, 2013 12:31 pm | News | CommentsThe planets Uranus and Neptune are home to extreme winds blowing at speeds of over 1,000 km/hour, hurricane-like storms as large around as Earth, immense weather systems that last for years, and fast-flowing jet streams. Researchers using a new method for analyzing the gravitational field of these planets have determined an upper limit for the thickness of the atmospheric layer, which limits the depth of stormy weather.
New method of finding planets scores first discovery
May 13, 2013 3:06 pm | News | CommentsDetecting alien worlds presents a significant challenge since they are small, faint, and close to their stars. The two most prolific techniques for finding exoplanets are radial velocity and transits. A team at Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has just discovered an exoplanet using a new method that relies on Einstein's special theory of relativity.
Moon, Earth have common water source
May 10, 2013 7:59 am | by Kevin Stacey, Brown University | News | CommentsResearchers used a multicollector ion microprobe to study hydrogen-deuterium ratios in lunar rock and on Earth. Their conclusion: The moon’s water did not come from comets but was already present on Earth 4.5 billion years ago, when a giant collision sent material from Earth to form the moon.
Telling time on Saturn
May 3, 2013 12:30 pm | News | CommentsA University of Iowa undergraduate student has discovered that a process occurring in Saturn’s magnetosphere is linked to the planet's seasons and changes with them, a finding that helps clarify the length of a Saturn day and could alter our understanding of the Earth’s magnetosphere.
Observations of massive neutron star confirm relativity theory
May 1, 2013 12:01 pm | News | CommentsAn international research team led by astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy used a collection of large radio and optical telescopes to investigate in detail a pulsar that weighs twice as much as the sun. This neutron star, the most massive known to date, has provided new insights into the emission of gravitational radiation and serves as an interstellar laboratory for general relativity in extreme conditions.
Scientists find way to monitor elusive collisions in space
April 24, 2013 9:10 am | News | CommentsMany collisions occur between asteroids and other objects in our solar system, but scientists are not always able to detect or track these impacts from Earth. Space scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles have now devised a way to monitor these types of collisions in interplanetary space by using a new method to determine the mass of magnetic clouds that result from the impacts.
Rare galaxy found furiously burning fuel for stars
April 24, 2013 9:02 am | News | CommentsAstronomers have found a galaxy turning gas into stars with almost 100% efficiency, a rare phase of galaxy evolution that is the most extreme yet observed. The findings come from the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer in the French Alps, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA sees distant planets that seem ideal for life
April 19, 2013 12:33 pm | by Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer | News | CommentsThe planet-hunting Kepler telescope has discovered two planets that seem like ideal places for some sort of life to flourish. According to scientists working with the NASA telescope, they are just the right size and in just the right place near their star. The discoveries, published online Thursday, mark a milestone in the search for planets where life could exist.
Astronomers discover massive star factory in early universe
April 18, 2013 7:53 am | by Marcus Woo, California Institute of Technology | News | CommentsSmaller begets bigger. Such is often the case for galaxies, at least: The first galaxies were small, then eventually merged together to form the behemoths we see in the present universe. Now, a team of astronomers has discovered a dust-filled, massive galaxy churning out stars when the cosmos was a mere 880 million years old—making it the earliest starburst galaxy ever observed.
Carbon’s role in atmosphere formation
April 9, 2013 4:53 am | News | CommentsA new study from a collaboration of several universities suggests that the way carbon moves from within a planet to the surface plays a big role in the evolution of a planet's atmosphere. If Mars released much of its carbon as methane, for example, it might have been warm enough to support liquid water. This finding offers important clues about the early atmospheric evolution of Mars and other terrestrial bodies.
Supercomputer assists in crunching LHC data
April 5, 2013 9:42 am | News | CommentsGordon, the unique supercomputer launched last year by the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, recently completed its most data-intensive task so far: rapidly processing raw data from almost one billion particle collisions as part of a project to help define the future research agenda for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
What is behind Einstein’s turbulence?
April 4, 2013 7:48 am | News | CommentsThe American Nobel Prize Laureate for Physics Richard Feynman once described turbulence as “the most important unsolved problem of classical physics”, because a description of the phenomenon from first principles does not exist. This is still regarded as one of the six most important problems in mathematics today, but recent numerical calculations by experts in gravitational physics give an initial insight into the relativistic properties of this mysterious process
Shape from sound: New methods to probe the universe
April 3, 2013 6:11 pm | by Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications, Princeton University | News | CommentsAs the universe expands, it is continually subjected to energy shifts, or “quantum fluctuations,” that send out little pulses of “sound” into the fabric of spacetime. In fact, the universe is thought to have sprung from just such an energy shift. A recent physics paper reports a new mathematical tool that should allow one to use these sounds to help reveal the shape of the universe.
NASA team investigates complex chemistry at Titan
April 3, 2013 6:06 pm | News | CommentsA laboratory experiment at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., simulating the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan suggests complex organic chemistry that could eventually lead to the building blocks of life extends lower in the atmosphere than previously thought. The results now point out another region on the moon that could brew up prebiotic materials.
First data released from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer
April 3, 2013 5:51 pm | News | CommentsFollowing up on Wednesday’s surprise announcement that a cosmic ray detector on board the International Space Station had possibly made the first instrumented detection of dark matter, an article from the U.S. Department of Energy describes the methodology behind the discovery and what lies ahead for researchers.
Puzzle of how spiral galaxies get their arms comes into focus
April 3, 2013 7:59 am | News | CommentsAs the shapes of galaxies go, the spiral disk—with its characteristic pinwheel profile—is by far the most pedestrian. But despite their common morphology, how galaxies like ours get and maintain their characteristic arms has proved to be an enduring puzzle in astrophysics. How do the arms of spiral galaxies arise? Do they change or come and go over time? The answers to these and other questions are now coming into focus as researchers capitalize on powerful new computer simulations to follow the motions of as many as 100 million “stellar particles” as gravity and other astrophysical forces sculpt them into familiar galactic shapes.
Study provides evidence ancient asteroid caused global firestorm on Earth
March 28, 2013 7:48 am | News | CommentsA new look at conditions after a Manhattan-sized asteroid slammed into a region of Mexico in the dinosaur days indicates the event could have triggered a global firestorm that would have burned every twig, bush, and tree on Earth and led to the extinction of 80% of all Earth’s species, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.
Measuring the magnetism of antimatter
March 25, 2013 3:28 pm | News | CommentsIn a breakthrough that could one day yield important clues about the nature of matter itself, a team of Harvard University scientists have made a major leap in measuring the magnetic charge of single particles of matter and antimatter. By precisely measuring the oscillations of each particle, the team was able to measure the magnetism of a proton more than 1,000 times more accurately than an antiproton had been measured before.
Universe ages 80M years; Big Bang gets clearer
March 21, 2013 9:09 am | by Lori Hinnant and Seth Borenstein, Associated Press | News | CommentsThe Big Bang theory says the visible portion of the universe was smaller than an atom when, in a split second, it exploded, cooled and expanded rapidly, much faster than the speed of light. The European Space Agency's Planck space probe has looked back at the afterglow of the Big Bang, and results released today have now added about 80 million years to the universe's age, putting it 13.81 billion years old.
Voyager 1 has left the solar system
March 20, 2013 2:56 pm | News | CommentsAfter taking measurements of sudden, drastic changes in radiation levels, researchers have reported that NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, now more than 11 billion miles from the Sun, left the heliosphere dominated by the Sun and has passed outside our solar system. Anomalous cosmic rays, which are cosmic rays trapped in the outer heliosphere, all but vanished, dropping to less than 1% of previous amounts.
Water signature in distant planet shows clues to its formation
March 14, 2013 12:10 pm | News | CommentsA team of international scientists, including a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astrophysicist, has made the most detailed examination yet of the atmosphere of a Jupiter-size like planet beyond our solar system. The finding provides astrophysicists with additional insight into how planets are formed.
Massive new observatory makes “game-changing” galaxy discovery
March 14, 2013 9:21 am | News | CommentsShining in the infrared with the energy of a trillion suns and producing a thousand new suns per year, newly discovered “starburst galaxies” represent what the most massive galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood looked like in their star-making youth. The discovery of these “abnormal” galaxies was recently made by the new Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, which was formally dedicated this week.
Foundations of carbon-based life leave little room for error
March 13, 2013 4:49 pm | News | CommentsLife as we know it is based upon the elements of carbon and oxygen. Now a team of physicists, including one from North Carolina State University, is looking at the conditions necessary to the formation of those two elements in the universe. They’ve found that when it comes to supporting life, the universe leaves very little margin for error.
