Physics and Astronomy

Fifteen days after the launch of Mars Express, Europe has reaffirmed its trust in Soyuz: next stop Venus in 2005!

Just two weeks after the flawless launch of Mars Express on its way towards the Red Planet, ESA and the European-Russian company Starsem reinforced their relationship with the signature of the Venus Express launch services agreement.

The contract was signed at Le Bourget (Paris) Air Show, Tuesday, 17 June 2003, by David Southwood, Director of Science for the European Sp

Multi-National team of physicists include Weizmann Institute Scientists

Recent results of a joint experiment conducted by 460 physicists from 57 research institutions in 12 countries strongly indicate that the scientists have succeeded in reproducing matter as it first appeared in the universe; this matter is called the quark-gluon plasma. The experiment, called PHENIX and conducted at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, has brought together physicists from Br

Using the superior sensitivity of ESA’s X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, a team of European astronomers has made the first direct measurement of a neutron star’s magnetic field.

The results provide deep insights into the extreme physics of neutron stars and reveal a new mystery yet to be solved about the end of this star’s life.

A neutron star is very dense celestial object that usually has something like the mass of our Sun packed into a tiny sphere only 20–30 km across. It is the p

Physicists at Ohio State University may have explained some strange behavior of the ultra-cold material known as Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).

The new analysis shows that scientists are closer than ever to harnessing BEC to perform useful functions such as quantum computing, said Tin-Lun Ho, professor of physics at Ohio State and the project’s principal investigator.

Ho has pioneered theoretical studies of BEC, an entirely new form of matter that defies description as

VLT Interferometer Measurements of Achernar Challenge Stellar Theory

To a first approximation, planets and stars are round. Think of the Earth we live on. Think of the Sun, the nearest star, and how it looks in the sky.

But if you think more about it, you realize that this is not completely true. Due to its daily rotation, the solid Earth is slightly flattened (“oblate”) – its equatorial radius is some 21 km (0.3%) larger than the polar one. Stars are enormous gaseous spheres

A team of astrophysicists at the University of the Basque Country has detected, for the first time ever, changes in Saturn’s winds. The research has merited front page coverage in the scientific magazine, Nature.

The winds blowing around Saturn and Jupiter are special. Unlike those of the rest of the planets, these move in an eastwards direction and are ten times stronger than the earth’s winds. On our planet it is solar radiation which governs the winds, but on the distant planets it is bel