NASA's black-hole-hunter spacecraft, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has "bagged" its first 10 supermassive black holes. The mission, which has a mast the length of a school bus, is the first telescope capable of focusing the highest-energy X-ray light into detailed pictures.
Much like the particles he studies, University of Cincinnati graduate student Fady Bishara is an object in motion. He moved to the U.S. from Egypt at 17 years old, studied engineering in Cleveland and moved to Cincinnati a few years after graduation for a job. While here he decided to move from engineering to study theoretical physics.
In 2012, Astronomy & Astrophysics published a statistical study of the isotopic records of solar activity, in which Abreu et al. claimed that there is evidence of planetary influence on solar activity. A&A is publishing a new analysis of these isotopic data by Cameron and Schüssler. It corrects technical errors in the statistical tests performed by Abreu et al. They find no evidence of any planetary effect on solar activity.
Physicists from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg have reached an important milestone and have made the first South African contribution of a “piece of hardware” to the ATLAS Experiment on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN).
Astronomers using a worldwide network of radio telescopes have found strong evidence that a powerful jet of material propelled to nearly light speed by a galaxy's central black hole is blowing massive amounts of gas out of the galaxy. This process, they said, is limiting the growth of the black hole and the rate of star formation in the galaxy, and thus is a key to understanding how galaxies develop.
Astronomers are constantly on the hunt for ever-colder star-like bodies, and two years ago a new class of objects was discovered by researchers using NASA's WISE space telescope. However, until now no one has known exactly how cool their surfaces really are - some evidence suggested they could be room temperature.
Data from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft reveal that neutral interstellar atoms are flowing into the solar system from a different direction than previously observed.
The University of Southampton is launching the largest photonics and electronics institute in the UK on Thursday 12 September.
After decades of searching for the Higgs boson, a theoretical subatomic particle that is a cornerstone of the structure of matter, international scientists announced in July 2012 that they had evidence of its existence.
In all the centuries that humans have studied chemical reactions, just 36 basic types of reactions have been found. Now, thanks to the work of researchers at MIT and the University of Minnesota, a 37th type of reaction can be added to the list.
By David L. Chandler
5 Sep 2013
A team of University of California, Riverside physicists recently received recognition for their work on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) pixel detector, a particle tracker integral to the study of fundamental particle physics. Martina Malberti, Kira Burt, Manuel Olmedo and Mauro Dinardo make up part of the group responsible for repairing malfunctioning channels in the forward pixel detector.
Nuclear magnetic resonance -- that phenomenon where nuclei of certain atoms, when in a magnetic field, take in and give off measurable amounts of electromagnetic radiation -- is everywhere.
For three weeks in August, leading physicists from all over the world attended the Mass 2013 conference at CP³-Origins in Odense, Denmark. Lots of new calculations were presented, among them the results of the project ‘Dark Matter from a Composite Goldstone Boson’ – a lattice study of SU(2) gauge theory with two fundamental fermions.
A joint Australian-German research team led by Curtin University’s Dr Christian Hirt has created the highest-resolution maps of Earth’s gravity field to date – showing gravitational variations up to 40 per cent larger than previously assumed.
No one knows for sure, but it is not unlikely that the universe is constructed in a completely different way than the usual theories and models of today predict. The most widely used model today cannot explain everything in the universe, and therefore there is a need to explore the parts of nature which the model cannot explain. This research field is called new physics, and it turns our understanding of the universe upside down. New research now makes the search for new physics easier.