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Planets Can Develop in Crowded Clusters Jam-Packed With Stars

All stars begin their lives in groups. Most stars, including our Sun, are born in small, benign groups that quickly fall apart. Others form in huge, dense swarms that survive for billions of years as stellar clusters. Within such rich and dense clusters, stars jostle for room with thousands of neighbors while strong radiation and harsh stellar winds scour interstellar space, stripping planet-forming materials from nearby stars.

27 Jun 2013

Radio Telescope Detects Raw Material for Making the First Stars in Galaxies

The telescope is CSIRO's Australia Telescope Compact Array telescope near Narrabri, NSW. "It one of very few telescopes in the world that can do such difficult work, because it is both extremely sensitive and can receive radio waves of the right wavelengths," says CSIRO astronomer Professor Ron Ekers.

27 Jun 2013

Sound Sculptor to Explore World’s Largest Particle Accelerator

The second winner of Prix Ars Electronica Collide @ CERN, American sound sculptor, Bill Fontana2, begins his arts residency at CERN3 on 4 July 2013. Matching a great artist with a great scientist, Bill Fontana will start working with theorist Subodh Patil, his science inspiration partner during his time at CERN.

27 Jun 2013

Seven Worlds Orbit Nearby Star

An international team of astronomers has found that a nearby star previously thought to host two or three planets is in fact orbited by six or seven worlds, including an unprecedented three to five “super-Earths” in its habitable zone, where conditions could be right for life.

26 Jun 2013

Super-Earths Discovered in Gliese 667C Star’s Habitable Zone

A team of astronomers has combined new observations of Gliese 667C with existing data from HARPS at ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope in Chile, to reveal a system with at least six planets. A record-breaking three of these planets are super-Earths lying in the zone around the star where liquid water could exist, making them possible candidates for the presence of life. This is the first system found with a fully packed habitable zone.

26 Jun 2013

IBM's World Community Grid Enables Extensive Investigation of Quantum Chemicals

The search for more versatile and less expensive materials for solar energy received a boost today as Harvard launched a free database that catalogues the suitability of 2.3 million organic, carbon compounds for converting sunlight into electricity.

25 Jun 2013

Quantum Character of Light Transport Observed in Photosynthesis

Photosynthetic organisms, such as plants and some bacteria can whisk away 95 percent of the sunlight they absorb in less than a couple of trillionths of a second to drive the metabolic reactions that provide them with energy.

24 Jun 2013

Physicists Build Tabletop Particle Accelerator

Physicists at The University of Texas at Austin have built a tabletop particle accelerator that can generate energies and speeds previously reached only by major facilities that are hundreds of meters long and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build.

21 Jun 2013

Hubble Produces Vivid Image of Interacting Galaxies

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced this vivid image of a pair of interacting galaxies known as Arp 142. When two galaxies stray too close to each other they begin to interact, causing spectacular changes in both objects. In some cases the two can merge — but in others, they are ripped apart.

21 Jun 2013

TRIUMF Lab Director to Lead Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Nigel Lockyer, director of Canada’s TRIUMF laboratory for particle and nuclear physics and a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of British Columbia, has been selected to become the next director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

21 Jun 2013