Category Astronomy/Space

Part of the Stratos II rocket. Credit: Image courtesy of Radboud University

Stratos II+, a rocket built entirely by students of Delft University of Technology, will be launched again on Wed Oct 14. The first attempt in 2014 unfortunately failed due to technical problems. The rocket will hold an antenna to intercept radio signals below 30 MegaHertz and a digital receiver. The payload from Nijmegen is part of a preparatory programme for a radio telescope on the moon. Such a telescope would, for the first time, enable researchers to measure radiation generated shortly after the Big Bang.

Building a radio telescope on the moon involves special requirements regarding the weight, dimensions, power consumption, as well as the processing and transfer of data...

Copper phenanthroline complexes in the solid phase can act as efficient molecular hole transporting material (HTM) for hybrid solar cells. We prepared solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells with the organic dye LEG4 and bis(2,9-dimethyl-1,10-phenanthroline)copper(I/II) (Cu(dmp)2) and achieved power conversion efficiencies of more than 8% under 1000 W m−2 AM1.5G illumination, with open-circuit potentials of more than 1.0 V. The successful application of a copper-complex based HTM paves the way for low-cost and efficient hybrid solar cells, as well as for other opto-electronic devices. Credit: Marina Freitag et al. “High-efficiency dye-sensitized solar cells with molecular copper phenanthroline as solid hole conductor,” Energy Environ. Sci. (2015). DOI: 10.1039/C5EE01204J

A group of resear...

Figure showing the different size scales of accreting objects. Credit: Simone Scaringi

Accretion is the growth in mass of an object by gravitationally collecting material from its surroundings. “In our paper (Astrophysical accretion is a universal process in objects from proto-stars to supermassive black holes), we discovered a relationship that spans the range of different types of accreting objects, from proto-stars, much like our sun was at its time of birth, to white dwarfs to supermassive black holes with a billion times the mass of the sun located in galaxies millions of light-years away,” Maccarone said.

“In these systems there is some characteristic timescale for the variability – typically the large brightenings and fadings occur with that timescale...

The inner core is Earth’s deepest layer. It is a ball of solid iron just larger than Pluto which is surrounded by a liquid outer core. The inner core is a relatively recent addition to our planet and establishing when it was formed is a topic of vigorous scientific debate with estimates ranging from 0.5 billion to 2 billion years ago.
Credit: Kay Lancaster, Department of Earth, Ocean and Ecological Sciences

The inner core is Earth’s deepest layer. It is a ball of solid iron just larger than Pluto which is surrounded by a liquid outer core. Liverpool University’s School of Environmental Sciences analysed magnetic records from ancient igneous rocks and found that there was a sharp increase in the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field between 1 and 1.5 billion years ago.

This increased magn...