Physics and Astronomy

British astronomers today (June 24th) saw the first images from an ambitious new programme of discovery, the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS). The survey will scour the sky with the world’s most powerful infrared survey camera ( WFCAM) to find some of the dimmest and most distant objects in the Universe. UKIDSS will reach at least twenty times deeper than the largest current survey conducted at this wavelength. Infrared light can be used to study objects that are not hot enough to sh

MARSIS, the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding on board ESA’s Mars Express orbiter, is now fully deployed, has undergone its first check-out and is ready to start operations around the Red Planet.

With this radar, the Mars Express orbiter at last has its full complement of instruments available to probe the planet’s atmosphere, surface and subsurface structure.

MARSIS consists of three antennas: two ‘dipole’ booms 20 metres long, and one 7-metre ‘mo

It is difficult to imagine modern life without plastics. Look around you, they are everywhere: pens, PC’s, lenses, furniture, etc. They are cheap, long-lasting and light and, moreover, they have good mechanical, thermal and dielectric properties, to such an extent that they have replaced wood, metal or glass in many applications. The polysulphone, phenoxyl or polycarbonate thermoplastics studied in this thesis are highly resistant (the last one being used for car fenders), ductile and flexible.

Dusty disk around Fomalhaut makes ideal laboratory for studying planet formation

Astronomers zooming in on a nearby star with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered unmistakable evidence of a planetary system: a perturbed dusty belt around the star that’s analogous to the vast Kuiper Belt of icy rocks encircling the sun.

While the discovery is expected to send astronomers scurrying to their telescopes to obtain direct images of a planet around the star, called F

Using color-changing plastic cylinders as a stand-in for a mass of granular material, Duke University physicists have created a computer-testable method to predict, particle-by-particle, how pushes, nudges and shoves at the edges transmit across large assemblages.

Masses of unpredictable granular particles — from the ice chunks that make up avalanche-prone snowfields to the coal in gigantic coal bins — can abruptly change behaviors with sometimes catastrophic results. Such sh

MIT scientists have brought a supercool end to a heated race among physicists: They have become the first to create a new type of matter, a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature superfluidity.

Their work, to be reported in the June 23 issue of Nature, is closely related to the superconductivity of electrons in metals. Observations of superfluids may help solve lingering questions about high-temperature superconductivity, which has widespread applications for magnets, sensors a