Physics and Astronomy

This area deals with the fundamental laws and building blocks of nature and how they interact, the properties and the behavior of matter, and research into space and time and their structures.

innovations-report provides in-depth reports and articles on subjects such as astrophysics, laser technologies, nuclear, quantum, particle and solid-state physics, nanotechnologies, planetary research and findings (Mars, Venus) and developments related to the Hubble Telescope.

Saturn mission nearing crucial moment; data from closest pass will be vital say scientists

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

JLab Completes 100th Experiment

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

17th century solar oddity believed linked to global cooling is rare among nearby stars

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

New theory finds middle ground between conflicting evidence for first stars

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

GOODS uncovers hidden black holes in the distant universe

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

NCAR Instrument Gets Breakthrough View of Sun’s Magnetic Halo

A new instrument developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has captured landmark imagery of fast-evolving magnetic structures in the solar atmosphere. Steven Tomczyk (NCAR High Altitude Observatory) presented the images on Monday, May 31, at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Denver.

Animations from the coronal multichannel polarimeter, or CoMP, reveal turbulent, high-velocity magnetic features spewing outward from the Sun’s surface.

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