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Close Investigation of Two Very Different, Distant Dwarf Planets

The solar system is teeming with tiny rocks – but officially there are only five dwarfs: Ceres, Eris, Haumea, Makemake and Pluto. While the Dawn space probe is currently exploring Ceres, the New Horizons mission will hurtle past big brother Pluto on 14 July and record data and images of this faraway world en passant. The researchers will thus have a chance to more closely investigate two very different, distant dwarf planets.

24 Apr 2015

Spin Phenomena Interdisciplinary Center Opens at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) today officially opened its new Spin Phenomena Interdisciplinary Center (SPICE), which will facilitate interactions between the many diverse fields that study spin-related phenomena – at a level that each field could not achieve on its own.

24 Apr 2015

Researchers Await First Light of ESPRESSO Spectrograph on ESO's Very Large Telescope

The exoplanet 51 Pegasi b [1] lies some 50 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Pegasus. It was discovered in 1995 and will forever be remembered as the first confirmed exoplanet to be found orbiting an ordinary star like the Sun [2]. It is also regarded as the archetypal hot Jupiter -- a class of planets now known to be relatively commonplace, which are similar in size and mass to Jupiter, but orbit much closer to their parent stars.

24 Apr 2015

Celestial Bodies with Frozen Water Also Orbit Further Inside the Solar System

Celestial bodies made up of frozen water orbit not only at the outer limits of our solar system but also further inside.

24 Apr 2015

ICARUS Liquid-Argon Neutrino Detector to Travel from Italy to CERN to the U.S.

A group of scientists led by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia will transport the world's largest liquid-argon neutrino detector across the Atlantic Ocean to its new home at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

24 Apr 2015

Capturing Chondrules Using Gravitational Force Led to Formation of Asteroids

Fragments of asteroids regularly land on Earth as meteorites. If you examine such a find, you can see that it comprises millimetre-sized round stones, known as chondrules. These small particles are believed to be the original building blocks of the solar system. However, the research community has not previously been able to explain how the chondrules formed asteroids. A new study shows that asteroids were formed by capturing chondrules with the help of gravitational force.

24 Apr 2015

Students Successfully Image Photons Forming Pairs

In the quantum world of light, being distinguishable means staying lonely. Only those photons that are indistinguishable can wind up in a pair, through what is called Hong-Ou-Mandel interference. This subtle quantum effect has been successfully imaged for the first time by two doctoral students from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw.

23 Apr 2015

Life Around Tau Ceti Star Seems Unlikely

As the search continues for Earth-size planets orbiting at just the right distance from their star, a region termed the habitable zone, the number of potentially life-supporting planets grows. In two decades we have progressed from having no extrasolar planets to having too many to search. Narrowing the list of hopefuls requires looking at extrasolar planets in a new way. Applying a nuanced approach that couples astronomy and geophysics, Arizona State University researchers report that from that long list we can cross off cosmic neighbor Tau Ceti.

23 Apr 2015

Cosmic Rays Help Measure Electric Fields Within Thunderclouds

How is lightning initiated in thunderclouds? This is difficult to answer – how do you measure electric fields inside large, dangerously charged clouds? It was discovered, more or less by coincidence, that cosmic rays provide suitable probes to measure electric fields within thunderclouds. This surprising finding is published in Physical Review Letters on April 24th. The measurements were performed with the LOFAR radio telescope located in the Netherlands.

23 Apr 2015