Solscape

Geologie

Robot to study hole in Earth’s crust

British scientists have embarked on a mission to study a gigantic hole in the Atlantic seabed – an enigma that defies traditional geophysical theory and will give researchers an unprecedented look into the center of the Earth. The 12-person team left the Canary Islands on Monday with a new high-tech vessel and a robotic device named TOBI (Towed Ocean Bottom Instrument) that will dig up rock samples at the bottom of the crater and film what it sees. The hole is about 16.400 feet under the surface of the Atlantic and located half way between Tenerife and Barbados. It has a diameter of 10.000 to 13.000 feet. The mysterious orifice is in an undersea mountain range, the kind of structure believed to form when Atlantic tectonic plates separate and volcanic lava surges upward to fill the gap in the earth’s crust. But that did not happen this time. Instead, the hole exposes the mantle.

Scientists uncover the mystery of the Atlantic’s missing crust

8. März 2007
Kosmologie

AEGIS Survey Reveals Principle Of Galaxy Formation

Faced with the bewildering array of galaxies in the universe, from orderly spirals to chaotic mergers, it is hard to imagine a unifying principle that describes them all with mathematical precision. But that is just what astronomers have now discovered. The relation between a galaxy’s mass and the orbital speed of its stars and gas is remarkably consistent over a wide range of galaxy morphologies and over billions of years of galaxy evolution, according to new results from a major survey of distant galaxies. The findings show that certain fundamental properties of galaxies have actually changed very little over the past 8 billion years (this is about half the age of the universe).

http://news.ucsc.edu/2007/03/1080.html

AEGIS – All-wavelength Extended Groth strip International Survey

8. März 2007
Asteroiden & Co.

Scientists find a solar-powered asteroid

An international research team led by Academy Research Fellow Mikko Kaasalainen from the University of Helsinki has found an asteroid whose rotation receives an extra kick from solar radiation. Asteroid 1862 Apollo’s diameter is about 1,5 km, it has a small moonlet, and its orbit crosses that of the Earth. The team reconstructed Apollo’s shape and determined its rotational state using brightness measurements from several years. They found that Apollo’s rotation speed steadily increases, and showed that this is due to the re-radiation of solar energy from its surface. The study is published online in „Nature“.
Acceleration of the rotation of asteroid 1862 Apollo by radiation torques

8. März 2007
Kosmologie

Panorama reveals thousands of growing galaxies

Hundreds of images snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope have been woven together to create a rich tapestry of thousands of galaxies. Astronomers created the panoramic view as part of a five-year project called AEGIS (All-wavelength Extended Groth strip International Survey). Eight of the world’s best space- and ground-based observatories, including Hubble, made surveys inside one patch of the night sky with an area about twice the size of the full Moon. The observatories peered up to 9 billion light years away to see about 150.000 galaxies evolving when the universe was much younger than today. Hubble recorded images of more than 50.000 galaxies in visible light by taking more than 500 separate exposures.
Watch a MPEG-video of the AEGIS strip beginning with its location in the constellation Ursa Major (courtesy NASA/ESA/L. Barranger/STScI):
https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/videos/2007/06/540-Video.html

Hubble Pans Across Heavens to Harvest 50.000 Evolving Galaxies

AEGIS – All-wavelength Extended Groth strip International Survey

6. März 2007
Saturn

Huygens landing site to be named after Hubert Curien

As of March 14, 2007, an epic space mission and one of the founding fathers of the European space endeavour will be forever linked. ESA, the international Committee for Space Research (COSPAR) and NASA have decided to honour Professor Hubert Curien’s contribution to the European space endeavour by naming the Huygens landing site on Saturn’s largest moon Titan after him. The naming ceremony for the Huygens landing site, which will be known as the „Hubert Curien Memorial Station“, will be held at ESA’s Headquarters on March 14, 2007, in the presence of ESA Council delegates and of Professor Curien’s wife, Mrs Perrine Curien, and one of their sons. Huygens‘ landing on Saturn’s largest moon in January 2005 represented one of the greatest successes achieved by ESA. This was made possible thanks to the commitment of a man who, for several decades, worked to promote and strengthen the role of scientific research in his home country France, and in Europe.
Source: ESA
Wikipedia: Hubert Curien

6. März 2007
Paläontologie

Dinosaur had yard-long horns over eyebrows

A new dinosaur species was a plant-eater with yard-long horns over its eyebrows, suggesting an evolutionary middle step between older dinosaurs with even larger horns and the small-horned creatures that followed, experts said. The dinosaur’s horns, thick as a human arm, are like those of triceratops – which came 10 million years later. However, this animal belonged to a subfamily that usually had bony nubbins a few inches long above their eyes.
Michael Ryan, curator of vertebrate paleontology for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, published the discovery in this month’s Journal of Paleontology. He dug up the fossil six years ago in southern Alberta, Canada, while a graduate student for the University of Calgary. Ryan named the new dinosaur Albertaceratops nesmoi, after the region and Cecil Nesmo, a rancher near Manyberries, Alberta, who has helped fossil hunters. The creature was about 20 feet long and lived 78 million years ago. The oldest known horned dinosaur in North America is called Zuniceratops. It lived 12 million years before Ryan’s find, and also had large horns. That makes the newly found creature an intermediate between older forms with large horns and later small-horned relatives.
Article

Images

Southern Alberta Dinosaur Research Group

6. März 2007
Allgemein

Modified ink-jet printer prints artificial bone

A modified ink-jet printer can be used to directly print layer upon layer of artificial bone for quick-fix grafts used in reconstructive surgery.
Jake Barralet of the Faculty of Dentistry at the McGill University in Montréal, Québec, and Uwe Gbureck of the Department for Functional Materials in Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Würzburg, Bavaria, and their team describe a method for „printing“ artificial bone from the same chemical components as living bone and including biomolecules that trigger blood vessel growth to bring the bone to life after it is implanted in the body. The McGill-Würzburg team uses the minerals brushite and hydroxyapatite instead of conventional „ink“ in their printer. By printing one layer on top of another they can build up a highly porous 3D bioceramic material resembling bone at room temperature.
Printing better bones

6. März 2007
Forschung & Technik

Milestone for giant physics lab

The LHC comprises over 1.000 powerful magnets occupying a subterranean tunnel that runs in a ring for 27 km. The magnets carry two beams of particles around the ring at speeds close to the speed of light. At certain points along this ring, the beams cross over, causing some of the particles to collide head-on. Each of the four huge LHC experiments, including the CMS, sits near one of these crossing points. These experiments, or detectors, will capture and measure new particles produced in the collisions. These could point to new phenomena beyond the so-called standard model of physics – a framework to explain the interactions of sub-atomic particles.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6402493.stm

CMS Experiment

6. März 2007

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