Physics and Astronomy

Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have solved a major galactic mystery that may help astronomers in their quest to develop a detailed picture of the chemical evolution of the Milky Way galaxy.

Speaking at the 204th meeting of the American Astronomical Society held May 30 – June 3 in Denver, the researchers reported that the abundance of deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen, in the Milky Way galaxy today shows a consistent pattern that can be simply explained, lifting a vei

Seven years of waiting comes to an end on 1 July when the Cassini spacecraft swoops closer to Saturn than any spacecraft previously.

Researchers at Imperial College London will be anxiously awaiting the first signals that all has gone to plan during a 90-minute engine burning procedure known as Saturn Orbit Insertion, or SOI, and that their mission to definitively map the magnetic fields around Saturn has successfully begun.

Never has a spacecraft been put in orbit around Saturn and

The experiment, titled “Quark Propagation through Cold QCD Matter,” began its run in December 2003 and wrapped up in early March. It probed Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), a fundamental theory of particle physics that describes the interactions of quarks and gluons — the basic building blocks of matter. A property of QCD, called confinement, states that no quark can ever be found alone. Instead, quarks combine in pairs or triplets to make up larger particles. For instance, every proton and neutron cont

Hundreds of Maunder minimum stars are not, say UC Berkeley astronomers

A mysterious 17th century solar funk that some have linked to Europe’s Little Ice Age and to global climate change, becomes even more of an enigma as a result of new observations by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers.

For 70 years, from 1645 until 1714, early astronomers reported almost no sunspot activity. The number of sunspots – cooler areas on the sun that appear dark against the brig

The very first stars that formed early in the history of the universe were smaller than the massive giants implied by the results of a NASA research satellite, but still larger than the typical stars found in our galaxy today, according to a research team led by the University of Chicago’s Jason Tumlinson.

“We have managed to reconcile within a single theory the two very different leading indicators of the nature of the first stars,” said Tumlinson, the Edwin Hubble Scientist in Astron

Images from NASA’s new Spitzer Space Telescope have allowed researchers to detect the long sought population of “missing” supermassive black holes that powered the bright cores of the earliest active galaxies in the young universe. The discovery completes a full accounting of all the X-ray sources seen in one of the deepest surveys of the universe ever taken. The results were presented at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Denver, Colorado.

Mark Dickinson, of the Natio