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Amazing Image of Curious Clouds Around NGC 3572 Star Cluster

Astronomers at ESO have captured the best image so far of the curious clouds around the star cluster NGC 3572. This new image shows how these clouds of gas and dust have been sculpted into whimsical bubbles, arcs and the odd features known as elephant trunks by the stellar winds flowing from this gathering of hot young stars. The brightest of these cluster stars are much heavier than the Sun and will end their short lives as supernova explosions.

14 Nov 2013

Researchers Measure High Energy Particles Kicked out of Fusion Plasmas

Fusion energy requires confining high energy particles, both those produced from fusion reactions and others injected by megawatt beams used to heat the plasma to fusion temperatures.

14 Nov 2013

Jets from Black Hole System Contain Atomic Matter

An international team of astronomers has answered a long standing question about the enigmatic jets emitted by black holes, in research published today in prestigious journal Nature.

14 Nov 2013

Influence of Quantum Effects on Nanodevices May Have Been Overestimated

New calculations shows that the influence of quantum effects on the operating conditions of nanodevices has, until now, been overestimated

13 Nov 2013

Electrons in Superconductor Demonstrate ‘Split Personality’

Some electrons in a superconducting material behave as if they were in a conventional metal, others as in an unconventional one – depending on the direction of their motion.

13 Nov 2013

Mysterious Asteroid Rotates at High Speed and Loses Mass

Some bodies have a very disturbing effect on the order in the solar system - P/2013 P5 is one of them. With several clearly visible tails, it may look like a comet, but orbits around the Sun within the asteroid belt - and thus cannot be unequivocally classified into either of these two categories. An international team which includes scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research has now used the Hubble space telescope to investigate this mysterious body. Their diagnosis: P/2013 P5 is an asteroid that rotates so rapidly under the radiation pressure of the Sun that it loses material into space.

13 Nov 2013

Comet ISON Could Still Conjure up a Passable Light Show

Soon after its discovery in late summer of last year, the media hyped ISON to be the comet of the millennium. At the time when it is expected to come closest to the Sun, on 28 November 2013, it is supposed to shine as bright as the full moon. And even though the predictions have now been revised, ISON could still conjure up a quite passable light show at the beginning of December.

12 Nov 2013

Throes of Stellar Birth Revealed as Never Before

It's a bouncing baby . . . star! Combined observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the newly completed Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile have revealed the throes of stellar birth as never before in the well-studied object known as HH 46/47.

12 Nov 2013

Comet ISON’s Axis of Rotation Points Towards the Sun

ISON is approaching the Sun. An international observation campaign which involves ground-based telescopes, space probes and space telescopes has been running for some time and is already providing initial findings. The comet is now in the sights of the STEREO twin probes which monitor our Sun and how it affects the space weather from their orbits. The Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau is also integrated into the scientific activities.

11 Nov 2013

New Family of Four-Quark Objects

An international team of high-energy physicists says the discovery of an electrically charged subatomic particle called Zc(4020) is a sign that they have begun to unveil a whole new family of four-quark objects.

11 Nov 2013

Surprising New Class of Quasars Discovered in Distant Galaxies

Like our Milky Way, every known large galaxy has at its center a supermassive black hole, some of which are surrounded by a super-bright disk of hot gas called a quasar -- but now a research team that includes Penn State astronomers has discovered a surprising new class of quasars in distant galaxies that even the most current theories had not predicted.

11 Nov 2013

Astronomers Discover Bizarre Asteroid with Six Comet-Like Tails of Dust

Astronomers have discovered a "weird and freakish object" resembling a rotating lawn sprinkler in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The find, reported online in today's (Nov. 7) issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, has left them scratching their heads and searching for an explanation for the strange asteroid's out-of-this-world appearance.

11 Nov 2013

Researchers Investigate Origins of Young Supermassive Black Holes

Black holes—massive objects in space with gravitational forces so strong that not even light can escape them—come in a variety of sizes. On the smaller end of the scale are the stellar-mass black holes that are formed during the deaths of stars. At the larger end are supermassive black holes, which contain up to one billion times the mass of our sun. Over billions of years, small black holes can slowly grow into the supermassive variety by taking on mass from their surroundings and also by merging with other black holes. But this slow process can't explain the problem of supermassive black holes existing in the early universe—such black holes would have formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang.

8 Nov 2013

Advanced Medical Device Manufacturer Acquires Tetrapod Quantum Dots from Quantum Materials

Quantum Materials Corp. announced today that it has provided Tetrapod Quantum Dots (TQD) to an advanced medical device manufacturer to optimize performance of an "engineered spectrum" quantum dot-enabled light source to better provide useful data to researchers and practitioners that has not been easily discernible until now.

8 Nov 2013