Physics and Astronomy

There are just under three years to go to the first launch of a new European launcher – Vega. Last week representatives of over 20 European space industries met at ESA’s European Space Research Institute, ESRIN, just outside Rome in Italy, to discuss progress on this new small-scale launcher.

“The preliminary project stage is now completed,” said Stefano Bianchi, responsible of the Launch Vehicle Development Programme. “We are now moving from the drawing board to the construction

Neutrinos released in Switzerland are due to be caught in Italy under the international project OPERA. The system of detectors for identifying these mysterious particles is developed by a joint effort of Russian and Ukrainian scientists.

Specialists from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna, Russia) and Institute of Scintillator Materials NASU (Kharkov, Ukraine) have joined the Project OPERA that is a biggest and most expensive international experiment in the field

World’s Largest Interferometer with Moving Optical Telescopes on Track

The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at Paranal Observatory has just seen another extension of its already impressive capabilities by combining interferometrically the light from two relocatable 1.8-m Auxiliary Telescopes.

Following the installation of the first Auxiliary Telescope (AT) in January 2004 (see ESO PR 01/04), the second AT arrived at the VLT platform by the end of 2004.

Black holes have a reputation for voraciously eating everything in their immediate neighborhood, but these large gravity wells also affect electromagnetic radiation and may hinder our ability to ever locate the center of the universe, according to an international research team.

“Any attempt to discover what was happening a long time ago at the beginning of our universe must take into account what gravitationally assisted negative refraction does to the radiation being viewed,” say

Saturn’s hazy largest moon, Titan – a body long held to be a frozen analog of early Earth – has a surface shaped largely by an Earth-like interplay of tectonics, erosion by fluids, winds, and perhaps volcanism. So reports the Cassini imaging team in today’s issue of Nature, in their first published presentation of findings from images of Titan gathered since last July.

Titan is about the same size and density as Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede. Unlike Ganymede, though, it proba

The dynamic atmosphere of Saturn’s haze-enshrouded moon Titan is revealed in the first Cassini Imaging Team report on Titan, to appear in the March 10 issue of Nature.

Imaging scientists, analyzing images of Titan designed to allow views of the surface and lower atmosphere, have discovered that the winds on Titan blow a lot faster than the moon rotates. In contrast, the jet stream of Earth blows a lot slower than the surface of our planet moves.

Titan is a particularly sl