Physics and Astronomy

Data from the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens mission are providing convincing evidence that Saturn’s moon Phoebe was formed elsewhere in the Solar System, and was only later caught by the planet’s gravitational pull.

One way to unlock Phoebe’s secrets is using Cassini’s Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), developed by a team of US (JPL), French and Italian (ASI) scientists and engineers. The science team is made by a large international group of US, Italian, French an

Researchers from the United Kingdom, France and the DUBBLE beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) have made a step forward in research on glass. They have monitored the change in the structure of zeolites, crystalline solids, into an almost perfect glass when heated. They have done this by recording vibrations involving groups of atoms in zeolites that subsequently characterise the glass. Their results are published in the last issue of Science. Zeolites are porous cr

What if the speed of light is a constant only most of the time? What if gravity sometimes pushed instead of pulled? Scientists are increasingly asking what would seem like far-out questions regarding the laws and rules of physics after discovering conditions and materials where the rules don’t quite apply. Take the Doppler effect.

The Doppler effect is in use everywhere, everyday. Police use it to catch speeders. Satellites use it to track space debris and air-traffic control

In 2006, with the launch of Jules Verne, the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) will become the new European powerful automatic re-supply spaceship able to bring an indispensable payload to the International Space Station and its permanent crew. This first ATV will carry a mix of supplies depending on the Station’s needs and its own payload capacity.

ESA, NASA and Russian counterparts are already defining the priorities to accommodate the most appropriate combination of different sup

The world’s most accurate “ruler” made with extreme ultraviolet light has been built and demonstrated with ultrafast laser pulses by scientists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The new device, which consistently generates pulses of light lasting just femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second, or millionths of a billionth of a second) in the ultraviolet region of the electromagnet

A new type of light was detected from a recent gamma-ray burst, as discovered by Los Alamos National Laboratory and NASA scientists using both burst-detection satellites and a Los Alamos-based robotic telescope.

In a paper published in the May 12 issue of Nature, Los Alamos scientists and NASA announced the detection of a form of light generated by the same process that drives the gamma ray burst itself, yielding new insights about these enigmatic cosmic explosions — the most pow