RECENT NEWS: 2
RECENT NEWS: 1 | LATEST NEWS | NEWS ARCHIVES
(Dec 12, 2011) The discovery of the Higgs boson would undoubtedly be the biggest scientific breakthrough of the century so far. Arguably, it would be the most important discovery since Crick and Watson worked out the structure of DNA nearly 60 years ago. On Tuesday, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider will say how close they are when they present the results from two of the experiments searching for the Higgs. Read more. BBC |
(Dec 10, 2011) Science fiction writer Brian Aldiss is well-known for his vivid imaginings of alien lanscapes. His Heliconia has similarities with the most Earthlike planet found to date. But does the real exoplanet harbor the same lush flora and fauna as its fanciful counterpart? Read more. The Guardian |
(Dec 9, 2011) The physics buzz reached a frenzy in the past few days over the announcement that the teams at the Large Hadron Collider are planning to release what is widely expected to be tantalizing – although not conclusive – evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle hypothesized to be the origin of the mass of all matter. Many physicists have already swung into action, swapping rumors about the contents of the announcement and proposing grand ideas about what those rumors would mean, if true. Read more. Scientific American |
(Dec 8, 2011) This color view of a mineral vein called "Homestake" comes from the panoramic camera (on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. The vein is about the width of a thumb and about 18 inches (45 cm) long. Opportunity examined it in November 2011 and found it to be rich in calcium and sulfur, possibly the calcium-sulfate mineral gypsum. Read more. NASA/JPL |
(Dec 7, 2011) Discovery of an "Earth-like" planet has generated a wave of excitement, but our fascination with finding other habitable worlds goes back a long way, argues science fiction writer Robert J Sawyer. The most famous words in all of science fiction are Captain Kirk's opening narration from Star Trek, in which he explains that the Enterprise's mission is "to explore strange new worlds". But what we really want is familiar new worlds – worlds like good old mother Earth, worlds where we might find "new life and new civilizations." Read more. BBC |
(Dec 6, 2011) Voyager 1 has entered a new region between our solar system and interstellar space. Data obtained from Voyager over the last year reveal this new region to be a kind of cosmic purgatory. In it, the wind of charged particles streaming out from our sun has calmed, our solar system's magnetic field is piled up, and higher-energy particles from inside our solar system appear to be leaking out into interstellar space. Read more. NASA/JPL |
(Dec 6, 2011) When searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, it's a tricky job to know where to look. Space is big, and the odds of detecting a transmission from an alien are vanishingly small. But with the help of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, some of the guesswork is about to be cut out of the SETI equation. Read more. Discovery News |
(Dec 6, 2011) In a week a space superlatives, ESO's Very Large Telescope has picked up the fastest rotating star found so far. This massive bright young star lies in our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers think that it may have had a violent past and has been ejected from a double star system by its exploding companion. Read more. ESO |
(Dec 5, 2011) Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an Earthlike planet in the habitable zone around a star not unlike our own. The planet, Kepler 22-b, lies about 600 light-years away and is about 2.4 times the size of Earth, and has a temperature of about 22C. It is the closest confirmed planet yet to one like ours – an "Earth 2.0". Read more. BBC |
(Dec 5, 2011) A US team has found the two biggest supermassive black holes known to science, Nature journal reports. Sitting at the centres of two nearby galaxies, the two objects have masses close to 10 billion times greater than our Sun. Such large black holes had been suspected to exist, but, until now, the biggest known was some 6.3 billion times the mass of the Sun. Read more. BBC |
(Dec 5, 2011) In recent months, news headlines have been dominated by one story from the world of particle physics – those befuddling faster-than-light neutrinos. Such is the interest in those speedy subatomic particles that developments in the search for the elusive Higgs boson have been all-but eclipsed. But next Tuesday, at a seminar in Geneva, scientsists will announce the results of their latest analysis of data from the two big experiments being used to hunt for the Higgs. Read more. BBC |
(Dec 5, 2011) For the first time since joining the spacefaring community in 1970, China is poised to eclipse the number of U.S. space launches in a single year. Launching clandestine military payloads, navigation and communications satellites, research platforms and pathfinders for its manned space program, Chinese Long March rockets have blasted off 17 times this year. One of the missions failed to reach orbit in August. Read more. Spaceflight Now |
(Dec 4, 2011) The launch of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory was so precise that an early course correction maneuver was postponed for another month or more. That first of six planned adjustments during the 254-day journey from Earth to Mars had been scheduled for 15 days after the mission's Nov. 26 launch. Now, the correction maneuver won't be performed until later in December or possibly January. As of 9 a.m. PST (noon EST) on Friday, Dec. 2, the spacecraft had traveled 10.8 million miles (17.3 million km) of its 352-million-mile flight to Mars. Read more. NASA/JPL |
(Dec 3, 2011) Rumors are circulating that a signal for the Higgs boson has been seen at an energy of 125 GeV with 2–3 sigma significance. This would be a great result if confirmed because at this mass the standard model has problems with vacuum stability that are likely to require supersymmetry or something similar to stabilize. Read more. viXra log |
(Dec 3, 2011) It is looking increasingly grim for Russia's Mars mission Phobos-Grunt, which has been stuck circling the Earth since its launch in early November. Apart from some brief radio contact with the wayward probe just over a week ago, there has been total silence from the spacecraft. The European Space Agency announced on Friday that it was now ceasing any further attempts to get a signal. Read more. BBC |
(Dec 3, 2011) Kepler now has another planet to add to its growing list. A research team led by Steve Howell, NASA Ames Research Center, has shown that one of the brightest stars in the Kepler star field has a planet with a radius only 1.6 that of the Earth and a mass no greater that 10 Earth masses, circling its parent star with a 2.8-day period. Read more. NASA/Kepler |
(Dec 2, 2011) Far beyond the orbit of Pluto, the two aging Voyager spacecraft have detected ultraviolet light that confirms that a type of radiation known as Lyman-alpha emissions come from parts of the Milky Way where stars are born. It isn't a surprising find, but it's important because it helps confirm an old hypothesis about star formation. Read more. Nature |
(Dec 1, 2011) The runup to Christmas looks exciting for the Large Hadron Collider. Staff at the laboratory have arranged a special seminar on Tuesday 13 December at which the latest results in the search for the Higgs boson will be made public. The presentation is due to happen directly after the lab's scientific policy committee has convened one of its regular meetings behind closed doors. Read more. The Guardian |
