Kategorie: Allgemein

Physicists from the University of Manchester and the Max-Planck Institute in Germany have created a new kind of membrane that is only one atom thick. It’s believed that this super-small structure can be used to sieve gases, make ultra-fast electronic switches and image individual molecules with unprecedented accuracy.
Wissenschaftler stellen hauchdünne Membranen her

A flat screen that can be rolled up and put into a jacket pocket – organic transistors with low energy consumption could make this possible. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart and at the Universities of Stuttgart and Erlangen have constructed complementary circuits from organic transistors characterised by low supply voltages and low consumption values. These energy-saving electronic components consist of two different transistor types.
Scientists construct complementary circuits from organic materials

Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who authored the best-selling book „A Brief History of Time“, soon will experience a brief history with weightlessness. Hawking, who uses a wheelchair and is almost completely paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, plans to go on a weightless flight on April 26, 2007, officials at the Zero Gravity Corporation at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, said Thursday. Hawking will be flying aboard a specially configured Boeing 727 aircraft that travels a curving parabolic path.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6409597.stm

Scientists taking their first „sniffs of air“ from planets outside our solar system are a bit baffled by what they did not find: water. One of the more basic assumptions of astronomy is that the two distant, hot gaseous planets they examined must contain water in their atmospheres. The two suns the planets orbit closely have hydrogen and oxygen, the stable building blocks of water. These planets‘ atmospheres – examined for the first time using light spectra to determine the air’s chemical composition – are supposed to be made up of the same thing: good old H2O. But when two different teams of astronomers used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope for this new type of extrasolar planet research, they both came up dry, according to their studies published in Thursday’s edition of „Nature“ and the online version of the „Astrophysical Journal Letters“. The study of one planet found hints of fine silicate-particle clouds. Research on the other planet found no chemical fingerprints for any of the molecules scientists were seeking.
So far, scientists have found 213 planets outside our solar system, but only 14 have orbits that make it possible for this type of study; only eight or nine of those are close enough to see. One team studied the closest, which goes by the catchy name HD 189733b. It is about 360 trillion miles from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula. The other planet, HD 209458b, studied by the other team, is about 900 trillion miles away in the constellation Pegasus and it is the one with the strange silicate clouds.
NASA’s Spitzer First To Crack Open Light of Faraway Worlds

Off to one corner of NGC 346, a star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud, there’s an amazing collision between two stars. Well, not the stars themselves, but the powerful winds they are ejecting. The two stars are collectively known as HD 5980. They are a binary system of stars separated by only 90 million kilometres; this is roughly half the distance from the Earth to the Sun. One star has 50 times the mass of the Sun, while the other weighs in at 30 times the mass of the Sun. And both are radiating more than a million times the energy of the Sun. Both stars are producing terrifyingly strong solar winds, each dumping the mass of the Earth into space every month, and then accelerating this mass away with the pressure from all the photons they’re emitting. Since the stars are so close to each other, their solar winds interact. ESA’s XMM-Newton Observatory measured the X-ray output from this collision zone, and found that the energy from only X-rays is 10 times the amount of energy output by our own Sun.
First X-ray detection of a colliding-wind binary beyond the Milky Way

More than three centuries ago, Sir Isaac Newton reflected on the similarities between the sense of hearing and the sense of sight. Newton’s speculations were impossible to test scientifically – until now. A novel Brandeis University study confirms the Newtonian idea that sight and sound are indeed parallel – at least when it comes to encoding and retrieving short-term memories from the two senses.
K. Visscher, E. Kaplan, M.J. Kahana & R. Sekuler: Auditory short-term memory behaves like visual short-term memory (PDF, 975 KB)

In keeping with the first and second south polar passes (in 1994 and 2000), the latest high-latitude excursion of the joint ESA-NASA Ulysses mission has already produced some surprises. In mid-December 2006, although very close to the minimum of its 11-year sunspot cycle, the Sun showed that it is still capable of producing a series of remarkably energetic outbursts. The solar storms, which were confined to the equatorial regions, produced quite intense bursts of particle radiation that were clearly observed by near-Earth satellites. Surprisingly, similar increases in radiation were detected by the instruments on board Ulysses, even though it was three times as far away and almost over the south solar pole.

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Surprises_from_the_Sun_s_South_Pole

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta 2 rocket roared away from Cape Canaveral at 6:01 p.m. EST today carrying a quintet of NASA probes that seek to understand the physics of Earth’s auroras.
THEMIS and ARTEMIS

Probably the most famous photograph ever taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is of the „Pillars of Creation“, a star-forming region inside the Eagle Nebula (M16). Astronomers always wanted to know just how much star formation is actually going on inside the nebula. So one of Hubble’s co-observatories, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, has observed the region too, and helped answer that question.
The Eagle Nebula (M16): Peering Into the Pillars Of Creation

A bunch of rowdy comets are colliding and kicking up dust around a dead star, according to new observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The dead star lies at the center of the much-photographed Helix nebula, a shimmering cloud of gas with an eerie resemblance to a giant eye.
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