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18 August 2008
Ten Mysteries of the Solar System
We've all wondered at some point or another what mysteries our Solar System holds. After all, the eight planets (plus Pluto and all those other dwarf planets) orbit within a very small volume of the heliosphere (the volume of space dominated by the influence of the Sun), what's going on in the rest of the [...]
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07 August 2008
Could Jupiter and Saturn Contain Liquid Metal Helium?
The interiors of the two gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, are pretty extreme places. With atmospheric pressures of around 70 million Earth atmospheres, the phases of material become a bit difficult to understand. Usually when we think of a liquid metal, we have thoughts about liquid mercury at room temperature (or the reassembling liquid metal [...]
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07 August 2008
Get Ready for September 10th: CERN Announces LHC Switch-On
It's official, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will begin operations in a little over a month. On September 10th, the most sophisticated particle accelerator will go online, injecting the first circulation of accelerated particles. Actual experiments involving collisions will occur once scientists are satisfied the LHC is fully optimized and calibration is complete. The LHC [...]
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27 July 2008
IBEX Mission Will View the Final Frontier of the Solar System
Space is far from empty. The Solar System can be viewed as a "bubble" of solar matter - filled with particles emitted by the Sun as the solar wind - extending well beyond the orbit of Pluto. The solar wind velocity is supersonic for most of this distance (exceeding a million miles per hour), but [...]
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10 July 2008
Particle Physicists Discover Lowest Energy "Bottomonium" Particle
Particle physicists working with the BaBar detector at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center have discovered a new particle in the bottomonium family of "quarkonium" particles. Technically it isn't a "new particle" it is a previously unobserved state of particle, but when we are talking about subatomic particles, their energy states become a big deal (and their [...]
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09 July 2008
Large Hadron Collider Could Generate Dark Matter
One of the biggest questions that occupy particle physicists and cosmologists alike is: what is dark matter? We know that a tiny fraction of the mass of the universe is the visible stuff we can see, but 23% of the Universe is made from stuff that we cannot see. The remaining mass is held in [...]
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30 June 2008
Forget Neutron Stars, Quark Stars Might be the Densest Bodies in the Universe
So neutron stars may not be the densest exotic objects in the cosmos after all. Recent observations of ultra-luminous supernovae suggest that these explosions may create an even more exotic remnant. Neutron stars can form after a star ends its life; measuring only 16 km across, these small but massive objects (one and a half [...]
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21 June 2008
Newsflash: The LHC Won't Punch a Hole in the Earth After All…
Its official: We're not going to be blown up, smothered in stranglets, sucked into a black hole or turned into ooze by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). To put any concerns to rest, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) has concluded in another approved safety report that the LHC is harmless and will not [...]
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07 June 2008
Can a Wormhole Generate its Own Magnetic Field?
Wormholes are a strange consequence of Einstein's theory of general relativity. These "shortcuts" through the fabric of space and time may link two different locations in the universe; they may even connect two different universes together. This also leads to the possibility that wormholes can allow travel between two points in time. These strange entities [...]
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02 June 2008
How do you Model the Earth's Magnetic Field? Build your own Baby Planet…
The Earth's magnetic field is quite a mystery. How is it generated? How does it remain so stable? We have known of the Earth's magnetic field for hundreds of years and the humble compass has been telling us the direction of magnetic North Pole since the 12th Century. Animals use it for navigation and we [...]
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31 May 2008
Warm Coronal Loops May Hold the Key to Hot Solar Atmosphere
Coronal loops, the elegant and bright structures threading through the solar surface and into the solar atmosphere, are key to understanding why the corona is so hot. Yes, it's the Sun, and yes, it's hot, but its atmosphere is too hot. The puzzle as to why the solar corona is hotter than the Sun's photosphere [...]
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29 May 2008
Temperature Conditions of a Supernova Recreated in UK Laboratory
Scientists are one step closer to attaining the ultimate goal: producing temperatures high enough to sustain fusion, the reaction that powers our Sun and the possible future for global energy production. Researchers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, UK, have attained temperatures higher than the surface of the Sun, 10 million Kelvin (or Celsius), [...]
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08 May 2008
Stars Orbiting Close to Black Holes Flattened like Hot Pancakes
Playing with black holes is a risky business, especially for a star that is unlucky enough to be orbiting one. Assuming an unfortunate star hasn't already had all of its hydrogen fuel and other component elements stripped from its surface, the powerful tidal forces will have some fun with the doomed stellar body. First the [...]
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23 April 2008
Solar Sail Space Travel One Step Closer to Reality
Solar sails were once thought to belong in the realms of science fiction. Huge canopies of lightweight tin foil catching the solar photon breeze, slowly allowing spacecraft to cruise around our solar system propelled by the small but continuous radiation pressure. Recent years however have shown that solar sail spacecraft could be engineered in reality, [...]
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21 April 2008
Light Echo from X-Ray Flare Reveals Existence of a Molecular Torus Surrounding a Supermassive Black Hole
The light echo of an X-ray flare from the nucleus of a galaxy has been observed. The flare almost certainly originates from a single star being gravitationally ripped apart by a supermassive black hole in the galactic core. As the star was being pulled into the black hole, its material was injected into the black [...]
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