Astronomy and Physics News around the World Jan. 08, 2012
Reported News for this Week:
1. Ohm's law survives at the atomic scale
2. Dazzling Photos of the International Space Station Crossing the Moon!
3. 5 experiments as hard as finding the Higgs 4. Unlocking Cosmology With Type 1a Supernovae 5. Who is the greatest living physicist?
6. Neutrino telescope will be '2nd biggest structure created by mankind' after Great Wall of China
7. Theory — A word that gets no respect
8. Four New Exoplanets to Start Off the New Year!
9. Hiding sound — Acoustic cloaking in thin plates 10. Why Pluto is No Longer a Planet
Ohm's law survives at the atomic scale
A team of researchers from the U.S. and Australia have built low-resistance silicon wires that are just four atoms wide, and they show that Ohm's Law holds at the atomic level. Previous experiments had shown that at widths less than 10 nm, the resistivity of silicon nanowires increased exponentially (Ohm's Law, by contrast, is linear). The researchers were able to get around this exponential increase and follow Ohm's Law, in effect, by heavily doping the silicon nanowires with phosphorus. MORE
Dazzling Photos of the International Space Station Crossing the Moon!
Moon and International Space Station from NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas
This photo was taken in the early evening of Jan. 4, 2012. Equipment: Nikon D3S, 600mm lens and 2x converter, Heavy Duty Bogen Tripod with sandbag and a trigger cable to minimize camera shake.
Camera settings: 1/1600 @ f/8, ISO 2500 on High Continuous Burst. Credit: NASA
Has the International Space Station (ISS) secretly joined NASA’s newly arrived GRAIL lunar twins orbiting the Moon?
No – but you might think so gazing at these dazzling new images of the Moon and the ISS snapped by a NASA photographer yesterday (Jan. 4) operating from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Check out this remarkable series of NASA photos above and below showing the ISS and her crew of six humans crossing the face of Earth’s Moon above the skies over Houston, Texas. (...)
Read the rest of Dazzling Photos of the International Space Station Crossing the Moon! (479 words)
5 experiments as hard as finding the Higgs
Nature - As the media spotlight shines on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and its high-profile hunt for a certain boson, other scientists are pressing forward with experiments that are just as challenging
— and just as potentially transformative. Science writer Nicola Jones discusses how finding exoplanets, measuring the difference in the vibrational spectra of molecular enantiomers, finding the string theory's extra dimensions, finding gravity waves via pulsar timing and metrology experiments to determine fundamental constants are iconic quests that are also important to fundamental physics. MORE
Unlocking Cosmology With Type 1a Supernovae
New research shows that some old stars known as white dwarfs might be held up by their rapid spins, and when they slow down, they explode as Type Ia supernovae. Thousands of these "time bombs" could
be scattered throughout our Galaxy. In this artist's conception, a supernova explosion is about to obliterate an orbiting Saturn-like planet. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)
Let’s face it, cosmologists catch a lot of flack. It’s easy to see why. These are people who routinely publish papers that claim to ever more finely constrain the size of the visible Universe, the rate of its breakneck expansion, and the distance to galaxies that lie closer and closer to the edges of both time and space. Many skeptics scoff at scientists who seem to draw such grand conclusions without being able to directly measure the unbelievable cosmic distances involved. Well, it turns out cosmologists are a creative bunch. Enter our star (ha, ha): the Type 1a Supernova. These stellar fireballs are one of the main tools astronomers use in order to make such fantastic discoveries about our Universe. But how exactly do they do it?
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Read the rest of Unlocking Cosmology With Type 1a Supernovae (553 words)
Who is the greatest living physicist?
Physics World - As scientific community celebrates Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday, Physics World wonders aloud, "Who is the world's greatest living physicists?" Philip Anderson, Steven Weinberg, Frank Wilczek, Ed Witten and Hawking are offered as suggestions. You can weigh in by participating in PW's Facebook poll, where you can also post a comment if you wish to bestow this accolade upon a physicist not listed. MORE
Neutrino telescope will be '2nd biggest structure created by mankind' after Great Wall of China
Daily Mail Online - The KM3NeT, a planned European deep-sea neutrino telescope, will search for neutrinos from distant astrophysical sources like gamma ray bursters, supernovae or colliding stars and will be a powerful tool in the search for dark matter in the universe. It will be constructed in the bed of the Mediterranean Sea as an array of thousands of optical sensors detecting light flashes resulting from neutrino collisions with water molecules. It will also house instrumentation from Earth and marine sciences for long-term and on-line monitoring of the deep sea environment and the sea bottom at depth of several kilometers. MORE
Theory — A word that gets no respect
The Huffington Post - The word theory is used a lot. However, among the lay population there is a fundamental misunderstanding or, in some instances, a purposeful misrepresentation of what the scientific meaning of word "theory" is. Does the misunderstanding and the misrepresentation of the word theory matter? The answer is an emphatic yes. MORE
Four New Exoplanets to Start Off the New Year!
Artist's conception of a "hot Jupiter" orbiting close to its star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC)
It’s only a few days into 2012 and already some new exoplanet discoveries have been announced. As 2011 ended, there were a total of 716 confirmed exoplanets and 2,326 planetary candidates, found by both orbiting space telescopes like Kepler and ground-based observatories. The pace of new discoveries has accelerated enormously in the past few years.
Now there are four more confirmed exoplanets to add to the list.
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Read the rest of Four New Exoplanets to Start Off the New Year! (296 words)
Hiding sound — Acoustic cloaking in thin plates
American Physical Society - A team of German physicists have reported in Physical Review Letters that cloaking devices made of a composite of soft and hard materials can divert elastic vibrational waves around an object as though it was not there. This acoustic cloak is based on a theoretical proposal that adapted the ideas of transformation optics, and consists of a composite structure consisting of only two materials with strongly contrasting Young's moduli. In their experiments and numerical analysis they show the cloaking effect via wavefronts impinging on an inclusion in the elastic medium, where they break around (uncloaked) or seemingly pass straight through (cloaked). MORE
Why Pluto is No Longer a Planet
Let’s find out why Pluto is no longer considered a planet.
Pluto was first discovered in 1930 by Clyde W. Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona.
Astronomers had long predicted that there would be a ninth planet in the Solar System, which they
called Planet X. Only 22 at the time, Tombaugh was given the laborious task of comparing photographic plates. These were two images of a region of the sky, taken two weeks apart. Any moving object, like an asteroid, comet or planet, would appear to jump from one photograph to the next.
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Read the rest of Why Pluto is No Longer a Planet (1,014 words)
