carbon tagged posts

Planetary delivery explains enigmatic features of Earth’s carbon and nitrogen. Most of Earth’s essential elements for life – including most of the carbon and nitrogen in you – probably came from another planet.

Earth most likely received the b...

Astronauts could someday benefit from recycling human waste on long space trips using a yeast and  a carbon fixing cyanobacteria or algae
Credit: American Chemical Society

Imagine you’re on your way to Mars, and you lose a crucial tool during a spacewalk. Not to worry, you’ll simply re-enter your spacecraft and use some microorganisms to convert your urine and exhaled CO2 into chemicals to make a new one. That’s one of the ultimate goals of scientists who are developing ways to make long space trips feasible. Astronauts can’t take a lot of spare parts into space because every extra ounce adds to the cost of fuel needed to escape Earth’s gravity...

They played a key role in demonstrating the unusual behavior of carbon: Tim Schleif (left) and Joel Mieres Perez (right). Credit: © RUB, Marquard

Chemists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum have found evidence that carbon atoms cannot only behave like particles but also like waves. This quantum-mechanical property is well-known for light particles such as electrons or hydrogen atoms. However, researchers have only rarely observed the wave-particle duality for heavy atoms, such as carbon. “Our result is one of few examples showing that carbon atoms can display quantum effects,” says Sander. Specifically, carbon atoms can tunnel. They thus overcome an energetic barrier, although they do not actually possess enough energy to do that.

Wolfram Sander explains the paradox: “It’s as though a tiger has ...

This is an artist’s impression of gas generation from the collision between objects in a debris disk. Credit: RIKEN

By examining the atomic carbon line from 2 young star systems – 49 Ceti and Beta Pictoris – researchers had found atomic carbon in the disk, the first time this observation has been made at sub-millimeter wavelength, hinting that the gas in debris disks is not primordial, but rather is generated from some process of collisions taking place in the debris disk. Many young stars, as well as more middle-aged stars like our sun, have “debris disks” – like the Oort Cloud in our own solar system – that are believed to be remnants of the system’s formation. Recently, radio observations have detected gas within a number of such discs, but it was not clear why the gas was there...