Category Astronomy/Space

A team co-led team by the University of Surrey has successfully increased the levels of energy absorbed by wafer-thin photovoltaic panels by 25%. Their solar panels, just one micrometre thick (1μm), convert light into electricity more efficiently than others as thin and pave the way to make it easier to general more clean, green energy.

In a paper published in the American Chemical Society’s Photonics journal, the team detail how they used characteristics of sunlight to design a disordered honeycomb layer which lies on top of a wafer of silicon. Their approach is echoed in nature in the design of butterfly wings and bird eyes...

Astrophysicists studying in unprecedented detail a red giant star named V Hydrae — abbreviated as V Hya — have witnessed the star’s mysterious death throes.

Researchers from UCLA and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that the carbon-rich star has expelled six slowly expanding molecular rings and an hourglass-shaped structure ejecting matter out into space at high speeds, signaling that the star is undergoing rapid evolution as it ends its life in a blaze of glory before shutting down its energy production.

“This is the f...

The further we move away from a heat source, the cooler the air gets. Bizarrely, the same can’t be said for the Sun, but University of Otago scientists may have just explained a key part of why.

Study lead Dr Jonathan Squire, of the Department of Physics, says the surface of the Sun starts at 6000 degree C, but over a short distance of only a few hundred kilometers, it suddenly heats up to more than a million degrees, becoming its atmosphere, or corona.

“This is so hot that the gas escapes the Sun’s gravity as ‘solar wind’, and flies into space, smashing into Earth and other planets.

“We know from measurements and theory that the sudden temperature ju...

Researchers have built the world’s first physics-based computer simulation of oxygen transport on Europa, finding that it’s possible for oxygen to drain through the moon’s icy shell and into its ocean of liquid water — where it could potentially help sustain alien life — by hitching a ride on salt water under the moon’s ‘chaos terrains.’ The results show that not only is the transport possible, but that the amount of oxygen brought into Europa’s ocean could be on a par with the quantity of oxygen in Earth’s oceans today.

This theory has been proposed by others, but the researchers put it to the test by building the world’s first physics-based computer s...