Physics and Astronomy

The first pictures from the new Swedish solar telescope on La Palma, Canary Islands, are presented in an article in the prestigious science journal Nature from November 14. The images of the sun are the most detailed ever seen. One of the most sensational discoveries is a previously unknown detailed sunspot structure.

The impact of this discovery is now capturing the attention of solar researchers, and it won`t be long before new and revised theories are formulated.

The solar tele

Scientists have recreated a temperature not seen since the first microsecond of the birth of the universe and found that the event did not unfold quite the way they expected, according to a recent paper in Physical Review Letters. The interaction of energy, matter, and the strong nuclear force in the ultra-hot experiments conducted at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was thought to be well understood, but a lengthy investigation has revealed that physicists are missing something in their mo

An international team of astronomers, led by scientists at the University of Manchester have produced new evidence that most of the energy in the Universe is in the form of the mysterious “Dark Energy”. The new evidence comes from a 10-year census of the sky for examples of gravitational lenses, which are seen when a galaxy bends the light from a distant quasar to form several images of the same quasar. Linking the number of lenses they found with the latest information on the numbers of galaxies, th

When it comes to sleuthing in science, few are better than the intrepid investigators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For example, take the “Case of the Stray Electrons.”

NIST researchers have created nanoscale devices that manipulate electrons in order to count them one at a time. Such counting is critical to the development of new fundamental electrical standards. When two electrons are bound in pairs (called Cooper pairs) in a superconductor, they can be man

Like rapidly flowing gases and liquids, magnetically confined plasmas in tokamaks and related fusion devices exhibit a high degree of turbulence, which can generally destroy the optimal conditions for producing fusion energy. In a deeply encouraging new result, scientists have experimentally confirmed that turbulence can actually limit its own ability to wreak havoc.

Researchers at the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics have discovered that turbulence generates its own flows that act as a sel

Doughnuts of plasma can be coaxed into configurations with hollow current rings, providing practical advantages over conventional “filled doughnut” shapes. Simulations suggest they will allow faster turn-on and greater efficiency of future nuclear fusion power plants.

Toroidal tokamaks, doughnut-shaped experimental fusion reactors, use a complex system of magnetic fields to hold a plasma together. Electrical currents flowing in the plasma itself are essential for making the internal magneti