Physics and Astronomy

Thanks to ESA’s Mars Express, we now know that Mars has vast fields of perennial water ice, stretching out from the south pole of the Red Planet.

Astronomers have known for years that Mars possessed polar ice caps, but early attempts at chemical analysis suggested only that the northern cap could be composed of water ice, and the southern cap was thought to be carbon dioxide ice.
Recent space missions then suggested that the southern ice cap, existing all year round, could be a mixture

Physicists in New Zealand have shown that last November’s record-breaking solar explosion was much larger than previously estimated, thanks to innovative research using the upper atmosphere as a gigantic x-ray detector. Their findings have been accepted for 17 March publication in Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union.

On 4 November 2003, the largest solar flare ever recorded exploded from the Sun’s surface, sending an intense burst of radiation

On Friday, 12 March 2004, the Sun ejected a spectacular ’eruptive prominence’ into the heliosphere. SOHO, the ESA/NASA solar watchdog observatory, faithfully recorded the event.

This ’eruptive prominence’ is a mass of relatively cool plasma, or ionised gas. We say ’relatively’ cool, because the plasma observed by the Extreme-ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) on board SOHO was only about 80 000 degrees Celsius, compared to the plasma at one or two milli

Talk about precision. New measurements of key wavelengths of ultraviolet light — down to a few millionths of a nanometer — are among the most precise ever reported and are improving calibrations of microlithography tools used in making integrated circuits such as those in computer chips.

The dimensions involved are 10,000 times smaller than hydrogen atoms, the smallest of all atoms.

To make the measurements, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technolo

ESA PR 15-2004. Today the Rosetta Science Working Team has made the final selection of the asteroids that Rosetta will observe at close quarters during its journey to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Steins and Lutetia lie in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Rosetta’s scientific goals always included the possibility of studying one or more asteroids from close range. However, only after Rosetta’s launch and its insertion into interplanetary orbit could the

Astronomers today unveiled the deepest portrait of the visible Universe ever achieved by humankind. Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), the million-second-long exposure reveals the first galaxies to emerge from the so-called ’dark ages’, the time shortly after the ’Big Bang’ when the first stars reheated the cold, dark Universe. The new image should offer unprecedented insights into what types of objects reheated the Universe long ago.

This historic new view is actually made up by t