Physics and Astronomy

One week after the successful completion of Huygens’ mission to the atmosphere and surface of Titan, the largest and most mysterious moon of Saturn, the European Space Agency is bringing together some of the probe’s scientists to present and discuss the first results obtained from the data collected by the instruments.

After a 4000 million kilometre journey through the Solar System that lasted almost seven years, the Huygens probe plunged into the hazy atmosphere of Titan at 11

For decades, scientists have observed that Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo, spins much faster than the sun. But thanks to a powerful new telescopic array, astronomers now know with unprecedented clarity what that means to this massive celestial body.

A group of astronomers, led by Hal McAlister, director of Georgia State University’s Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy, have used the center’s array of telescopes to detect for the first ti

Researchers from the CEA’s Nuclear Energy Division have, for the first time, been able to make a quantitative prediction of the evolution of radiation-induced defects in a structural material. The results obtained for iron, using multi-scale simulation techniques based on the atomic scale, will help provide greater insight into material aging phenomena in existing nuclear power plants and may be applied to nuclear systems of the future. They are to be published in the “Nature Materials” jour

This picture is a composite of 30 images from ESA’s Huygens probe. They were taken from an altitude varying from 13 kilometres down to 8 kilometres when the probe was descending towards its landing site. View all raw images here: http://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/titanraw/index.htm

Astronomers announced Jan. 10 that they have a lead in the case of the missing disks. The report was presented by UCLA graduate student and Ph.D. candidate Peter Plavchan; his adviser, Michael Jura; and Sarah Lipscy, now at Ball Aerospace, to the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Diego. This lead may account for the missing evidence of red dwarfs forming planetary systems.

The evidence

Red dwarfs (or M Dwarfs) are stars like our Sun in many respects but smaller,

New results may lead to advances in nanotechnology, molecular electronics

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Bar-Ilan University, and Harvard University have grown ultrathin films of organic chain molecules on the surface of liquid mercury and discovered that the molecules form ordered structures. Similar to sixty years ago when fundamental studies of silicon paved the way to the semiconductor-electronics age, these results help to build