Physics and Astronomy

Jubilant astronomers today unveiled humankind`s most spectacular views of the Universe as captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope`s new Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). They also reported that Hubble is operating superbly since the March servicing mission and are looking forward to more pictures from the newly revived NICMOS camera.

“The ACS is opening a wide new window onto the Universe. These are among the best images of the distant Universe humans have ever seen,” says Johns Hop

Dark-matter detector could pin down the Universe’s missing mass.

Researchers in London are building a cheap dark-matter detector that should be able to spot the exotic particles called WIMPs that are suspected of hiding most of the Universe’s missing mass 1 .

A prototype of the detector has just shown, for the first time, that it can spot something as close to a WIMP as it’s possible to produce in the lab.

WIMP stands for ’weakly interacting massiv

Succession of relationships keeps heavenly bodies young

Astronomers have uncovered a scandalous degree of promiscuity in the cosmos. Clusters where stars gather more densely than usual are veritable hotbeds of partner-swapping. Some stars engage in half a dozen or so relationships during their lifetime 1 .

Star clusters range from loose groups of ten thousand or so stars to dense globular clusters of a million or more. They exist throughout galaxies like ours

It sounds like a photographer’s worst nightmare: the light of the flashbulb causes the subject of the photo to burst into flames. But that’s exactly what happened recently when researchers snapped a picture of some single-walled carbon nanotubes, tiny cylinders of pure carbon. The findings, described in a report published in the current issue of the journal Science, suggest that the minute straws could be used as triggering devices or for remote light-induced ignition.

The discovery was ma

Cosmologists claim Universe has been forming and reforming for eternity.

The Universe was not born in one Big Bang, it has been going through cycles of creation and annihilation for eternity, according to a controversial new mathematical model 1 .

It’s a compelling claim. The new cyclic model removes a major stumbling block common to existing theories of the Universe – namely, that physics can’t explain what came before the Big Bang.

Becaus

Far away among the stars, in the Ara constellation of the southern sky, a small black hole is whirling space around it. If you tried to stay still in its vicinity, you couldn’t. You’d be dragged around at high speed as if you were riding on a giant flywheel.

In reality, gas falling into the black hole is whirled in that way. It radiates energy, in the form of X-rays, more intensely than it would do if space were still by tapping into the black hole’s internal energy stream.