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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Primordial Black Holes may have helped to Forge Heavy Elements

    August 6, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist’s depiction of a neutron star. Credit Credit: NASA

    Artist’s depiction of a neutron star. Credit Credit: NASA

    Astronomers like to say we are the byproducts of stars, stellar furnaces that long ago fused hydrogen and helium into the elements needed for life through the process of stellar nucleosynthesis. As the late Carl Sagan once put it: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.” But what about the heavier elements in the periodic chart, elements such as gold, platinum and uranium?

    Astronomers believe most of these “r-process elements” – elements much heavier than iron – were created, either in the aftermath of the collapse of massive stars and the associated supernova explosions, or in the merging of b...

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    Primordial Asteroids discovered

    August 6, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Astronomers have identified the oldest asteroid families and, by process of elimination, the oldest intact asteroids in the main belt. A team including SwRI scientists developed a technique to identify ancient asteroid families that have drifted apart. Asteroid surfaces heat up during the day (as illustrated by this image) and cool down at night, giving off radiation that can act as a sort of mini-thruster. This force can cause asteroids to drift widely over time, making it difficult to identify families of fragments leftover after asteroid collisions eons ago. Credit: Image Courtesy of NASA/GSFC

    Astronomers have identified the oldest asteroid families and, by process of elimination, the oldest intact asteroids in the main belt. A team including SwRI scientists developed a technique to identify ancient asteroid families that have drifted apart. Asteroid surfaces heat up during the day (as illustrated by this image) and cool down at night, giving off radiation that can act as a sort of mini-thruster. This force can cause asteroids to drift widely over time, making it difficult to identify families of fragments leftover after asteroid collisions eons ago. Credit: Image Courtesy of NASA/GSFC

    Discoveries include a void in the main belt and the oldest family of asteroids...

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    First observation of the hyperfine splitting in antihydrogen

    August 5, 2017, Categories  Physics, Astronomy/Space

    Antimatter research laboratory. Credit: Professor Niels Madsern

    Antimatter research laboratory. Credit: Professor Niels Madsern

     
    Swansea University scientists at CERN have again made a landmark finding, taking them one step closer to answering the question of why matter exists and illuminating the mysteries of the Big Bang and the birth of the Universe. The physicists from the University’s College of Science, working with an international collaborative team at CERN, describe the first observation of spectral line shapes in antihydrogen, the antimatter equivalent of hydrogen.
     
    Professor Mike Charlton said: “The existence of antimatter is well established in physics, and it is buried deep in the heart of some of the most successful theories ever developed...
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    Twilight Observations Reveal Huge Storm on Neptune

    August 5, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Images of Neptune taken during twilight observing revealed an extremely large bright storm system near Neptune's equator (labeled 'cloud complex' in the upper figure), a region where astronomers have never seen a bright cloud. The center of the storm complex is ~9,000 km across, about 3/4 the size of Earth, or 1/3 of Neptune's radius. The storm brightened considerably between June 26 and July 2, as noted in the logarithmic scale of the images taken on July 2. Credit: N. Molter/I. De Pater, UC Berkeley & C. Alvarez, W. M. Keck Observatory

    Images of Neptune taken during twilight observing revealed an extremely large bright storm system near Neptune’s equator (labeled ‘cloud complex’ in the upper figure), a region where astronomers have never seen a bright cloud. The center of the storm complex is ~9,000 km across, about 3/4 the size of Earth, or 1/3 of Neptune’s radius. The storm brightened considerably between June 26 and July 2, as noted in the logarithmic scale of the images taken on July 2.
    Credit: N. Molter/I. De Pater, UC Berkeley & C. Alvarez, W. M. Keck Observatory

    Striking images of a storm system nearly the size of Earth have astronomers doing a double-take after pinpointing its location near Neptune’s equator, a region where no bright cloud has been seen before...

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