Physics and Astronomy

Five spacecraft have made a remarkable set of observations, leading to a breakthrough in understanding the origin of a peculiar and puzzling type of aurora. Seen as bright spots in Earth’s atmosphere and called “dayside proton auroral spots,” they are now known to occur when fractures appear in the Earth’s magnetic field, allowing particles emitted from the Sun to pass through and collide with molecules in our atmosphere. On March 18, 2002, a jet of energetic solar protons collided

A progressive increase in the brightness of the planet Neptune suggests that, like Earth, the distant planet has seasons.

Observations of Neptune made during a six-year period with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope by a group of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) show that the planet is exhibiting a significant increase in brightness. The changes, observed mostly in the planet’s southern hemisphere, show a distinc

The ability to understand how small bodies such as moons switch from orbiting the Sun to orbiting a planet has long remained one of the outstanding problems of planetary science. A paper published in Nature on 15 May shows how this problem has been resolved using chaos theory, enabling scientists to predict where astronomers might search for new moons orbiting the giant planets.

In the last couple of years many small moons have been found orbiting the giant planets in our Solar System. For e

Astronomers from Cardiff University are completing the first survey ever for cosmic hydrogen, the primeval gas which emerged from the Big Bang to form all the stars and galaxies we can see today.

Since 1997 the astronomers, with their Australian colleagues, have been using two giant radio telescopes, the 64-metre diameter dish at Parkes in New South Wales, Australia, and the 76-metre dish at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, England to build up an atlas of the heavens as mapped by cosmic hydrogen.

The storage of plutonium has long plagued scientists. “It is a dangerous metal and its long term storage must be done with special care so as not to harm the environment, ”said physicist Serguei Savrasov, Ph.D.

Finding a solution to this problem led Savrasov, an associate professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), and a team of researchers at Rutgers University and Los Alamos National Laboratories, to study how this metal reacts to heat, a natural condition of storage over time

Self-organization is a growing interdisciplinary field of research about a phenomenon that can be observed in the Universe, in nature and in social contexts. Researchers seek explanations by using both experimental, often computer-based approaches and empirical, observational approaches. Mechanisms of self-organization are beginning to be identified and the theoretical foundation is under development. Research on self-organization tries to describe and explain forms, complex patterns and behaviours t