Physics and Astronomy

On 26 February, Rosetta will be setting off on its long journey through our solar system to meet up with Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It will take the European Space Agency (ESA) space probe ten years to reach its destination.

The comet, which moves in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, will at rendezvous be some 675 million kilometres from the Sun, near the point in its orbit farthest from the Sun. The meeting point was not chosen at random: at this point the comet is still barely active,

Potential applications in medicine, remote sensing, imaging and satellite communications

A world that consumes information in gigabytes may one day find terahertz-sized solutions for some of its most pressing problems.

While one gigabyte is equal to one billion (109) bytes of information, a terahertz (THz) is a unit of electromagnetic-wave frequency equivalent to one trillion (1012) hertz, with one hertz equaling one cycle per second.

Terahertz (THz) frequencies, r

Scientists at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) and NASA have captured unprecedented details of the swirling flow of gas hovering just a few miles from the surface of a neutron star, itself a sphere only about ten miles across. A massive and rare explosion on the surface of this neutron star – pouring out more energy in three hours than the Sun does in 100 years – illuminated the area and allowed the scientists to spy on details of the region never before revealed. T

Since the development of superconducting electronic devices there has been a need to develop a three terminal transistor like device sensitive enough to measure small voltage and current signals typical of those associated with single electron and photon events.

A group of researchers in the Department of Particle & Nuclear Physics at Oxford University has designed a superconducting device with properties analogous to those of a traditional semiconducting transistor. The Quatratran (Quasipar

Thirty years ago the determination of a protein structure required years of effort and typically was sufficient for a Ph.D. thesis. Today, due to advances in synchrotron X-ray sources and detectors, protein crystal structures can be calculated in just hours, “enabling many types of studies that were previously inconceivable,” according to a leading researcher at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

Sol Gruner, a Cornell physics professor and an expert in designing and building fast, large-area

You would imagine that a 500,000 kilometre long arch of super heated plasma releasing energy equal to the simultaneous explosion of 40 billion Hiroshima atomic bombs would be as easy to “hear” as it is to “see” – but it’s not. Astrophysicists have long thought about using the acoustic waves in these flares to understand more about these gigantic events, that can be dozens of times bigger than the Earth, but have been unable to use effectively up till now. Now researchers at the University of Warwick,