Category: Stars in their eyes
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Why gamma ray bursts are not standard candles
A revolution is currently underway in our knowledge of gamma ray bursts thanks to NASA’s Swift telescope which has been looking out for them from its perch in orbit since 2004. But in the wild enthusiasm to embrace the firehose of data that Swift is sending back, it looks as if astronomers have made a…
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The mystery of the Plutonic color scheme
Pluto’s three satellites, Hydra, Nix and Charon, are all a similar shade of grey. In fact, Nix and Hydra have exactly the same colour to within our ability to measure it. Pluto, on the other hand, is a beautiful shade of red. How come? The current thinking is that Charon, Hydra and Nix are a…
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Dark energy linked to supervoids and superclusters
“The most profound puzzle of contemporary physics” is how Benjamin Granett and colleagues from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu describe the problem of dark energy. And they’re not kidding. What we have is the extraordinary observation that type 1a supernovas in the most distant galaxies in the universe are dimmer than they ought to…
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How ESA plans to search for other Earth’s
We’re getting close to the day when we’ll spot an Earth-like planet orbiting another star. Astronomers have already seen a number of superEarth candidates–rocky planets in the habitable zone that are many times larger than Earth. They’ve even begun to analyse the atmosphere of these places and got some idea of what it might be…
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Blind date gives astronomers a new love of the stars
When it comes to studying the night sky, astronomers aren’t short of images. There are huge archives of both amateur and professional images taken in the the age before digital imaging. The Harvard College Observatory Astronomical Plate Stacks contain enough images to cover the entire sky 500 times over. But although the image quality is…
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First evidence that water forms in interstellar space
Water is the most abundant solid material in space. Astronomers see it on various planets, on moons, in comets and in interstellar clouds. But how did it get there? Nobody really knows how water could possibly form in the freezing darkness of interstellar space. At least they didn’t until now. Today, Akira Kouchi and buddies…
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First superheavy element found in nature
The hunt for superheavy elements has focused banging various heavy nuclei together and hoping they’ll stick. In this way, physicists have extended the periodic table by manufacturing elements 111, 112, 114, 116 and 118, albeit for vanishingly small instants. Although none of these elements is particularly long lived, they don’t have progressively shorter lives and…
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ET more likely to pick up radar bursts than radio transmissions
Radar astronomy is a crucial tool in measuring the trajectories of Earth-crossing asteroids. If we’re going to be hit, radar is how we’ll work out when. The technique has also been used to image various bodies such as the asteroid 216 Kleopatra, to measure distances with extreme accuracy and to test relativity by monitoring the…
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Diamonds in the sky: a miner’s guide
Astronomers have recently wondered whether carbon might form a supercooled liquid under the huge pressures that exist in side carbon-rich white dwarf stars and even inside medium-sized gaseous planets such as neptune and uranus. If that’s the case, then small disturbances in the liquid could trigger the formation of diamonds the size of automobiles. The…
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How Hawking radiation may explain dark energy
In 1993, the Dutch Nobel prize-winning physicist Gerard t’Hooft suggested that all the information in a region of space can be represented as a hologram, an idea that implies that the laws of physics that govern our universe are somehow encoded on its (higher dimensional) boundary. This idea, known as the holographic principle, has a…