How small cosmic seeds grow into big stars

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New images provide the most detailed view yet of stellar nurseries within the Snake nebula. These images offer new insights into how cosmic seeds can grow into massive stars. Stretching across almost 100 light-years of space, the Snake nebula is located about 11,700 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.

via Science Daily

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'Super-Earths' may be dead worlds: Being in habitable zone is not enough

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In the last 20 years the search for Earth-like planets around other stars has accelerated, with the launch of missions like the Kepler space telescope. Using these and observatories on the ground, astronomers have found numerous worlds that at first sight have similarities with the Earth. A few of these are even in the ‘habitable zone’ where the temperature is just right for water to be in liquid form and so are prime targets in the search for life elsewhere in the universe. New results suggest that for some of the recently discovered super-Earths, such as Kepler-62e and -62f, being in the habitable zone is not enough to make them habitats.

via Science Daily

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SMA unveils how small cosmic seeds grow into big stars

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New images from the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA) telescope provide the most detailed view yet of stellar nurseries within the Snake nebula. These images offer new insights into how cosmic seeds can grow into massive stars.



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The Carina Nebula Posters

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space

after scouring the Zazzle market place for a while, I settled on this as my choice for today. By toemann09, another talented creative from the Zazzle community!

The Carina Nebula Posters

tagged with: carina nebula, nebula, space, stars, astronomy, telescope, hubble

This is a stunning image of The Carina Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

»visit the toemann09 store for more designs and products like this
Click to customize with size, paper type etc.
via Zazzle Astronomy market place

Aurora over New Zealand

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Sometimes the more you look at an image, the more you see. Such may be the case for this beautiful nighttime panorama taken last week in New Zealand. Visible right off, on the far left, are common clouds, slightly altered by the digital fusion of combining 11 separate 20-second exposures. More striking, perhaps, is the broad pink aurora that dominates the right part of the image, a less common auroral color that is likely tinted by excited oxygen atoms high in Earth's atmosphere. Keep looking and you might notice a bright light just beyond the mountain on the left. That is the rising Moon -- and an even closer look will reveal faint crepuscular rays emanating from it. Musing over the image center may cause you to notice the central band of the Milky Way Galaxy which here appears to divide, almost vertically, the left clouds from the right aurora. Inspecting the upper right of the image reveals a fuzzy patch, high in the sky, that is the Small Magellanic Cloud. Numerous stars discretely populate the distant background. Back on Earth, the image foreground features two domes of the Mt. John University Observatory and a camera tripod looking to capture much of this scene over a serene Lake Tekapo. Tomorrow's picture: open space

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A Nobel laureate's formula for the universe

Nobel laureate François Englert at CERN last week. The equation on the blackboard describes the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism that gives particles mass (Image: Maximilien Brice)

A Nobel laureate and a blackboard at CERN is all you need to explain the fundamental physics of the universe. At least, that's what François Englert convinced us on his visit to CERN last week.

Englert shared the 2013 Nobel prize in physics with Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles". In the video below, he explains how he and Higgs manipulated equations containing mathematical constructs called scalar fields to predict the existence of the Brout-Englert-Higgs field.

Nobel laureate François Englert explains the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism that gives particles mass, with the help of a blackboard (Video: CERN)

According to Englert, the equation describing this mechanism is built in two parts. One part consists of scalar fields; the other consists of constructs called gauge fields. Englert explains that a big problem in particle physics in the 1960s was to find a gauge field that had mass. Solving that problem - working out how a gauge field could have mass -would help to explain other problems in physics, such as how to mathematically describe short-range interactions inside the nuclei of atoms. But Englert says that you cannot easily just add mass to a gauge field "off-hand". He needed another theoretical approach.

The key was to add a new part – a new scalar field – to the equation describing the mass mechanism. Part of this new scalar field could be mathematically simplified. What came out of the algebraic manipulation was a term that gave rise to "a condensate spread out all over the universe". Then, the interaction between the condensate and another part of the equation could be generalized, says Englert, to give mass to elementary particles. Easy peasy!

"I know this is extremely abstract," says a modest Englert of his explanation. "But if I have two minutes [to explain it], I can hardly do more!"

Find out more about the Higgs boson in the pages below.

via CERN: Updates for the general public

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2014/02/nobel-laureates-formula-universe

Constellations Poster

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space

after scouring the Zazzle market place for a while, I settled on this as my choice for today. By vladstudio, another talented creative from the Zazzle community!

Constellations Poster

tagged with: artsprojekt, constellations, unitization, orion, constellation, network topology, asterism, astronomy, chunking, unitisation, celestial sphere, redundancy, night sky, topology, list of constellations, configuration, international astronomical union, plan, ptolemy, design, almagest, nicolas louis de lacaille, former constellations, chinese constellation, nakshatra, astrology

Space is never-ending source of inspiration for me! I wanted to draw a map of constellations in Photoshop, so I found suitable projection in Internet and used it as a reference.

»visit the vladstudio store for more designs and products like this
Click to customize with size, paper type etc.
via Zazzle Astronomy market place

New approach to chip design could yield light speed computing

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Researchers are the first to create a device that integrates both optical and electronic signals to perform the most elementary computational operations that could inform 'light speed' computing.

via Science Daily

Technique to create holes in graphene could improve water filters, desalination

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A new technique produces highly selective filter materials that could lead to more efficient desalination. Scientists succeeded in creating subnanoscale pores in a sheet of the one-atom-thick material, which is one of the strongest materials known.

via Science Daily

Graphene's bonding effect on platinum nanoparticles characterized: Lower costs in fuel cell production?

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Physicists have found that platinum nanoparticles limit their size and organize into specific patterns when bonded to freestanding graphene. While displaying this behavior, the bonded platinum nanoparticles maintain an effective surface area functioning as a catalyst for chemical reactions, a discovery that could lower the production costs of platinum-catalyzed fuel cells.

via Science Daily

Microanalysis technique makes the most of small nanoparticle samples

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Sensitive chemical analyses of minute samples of nanoparticles can be done by, essentially, roasting them on top of a quartz crystal, new research demonstrates. Chemical analysis of nanoparticles is a challenging task, and not just because they're small. They're also complicated. The technique, 'microscale thermogravimetric analysis,' holds promise for studying nanomaterials in biology and the environment, where sample sizes often are quite small and larger-scale analysis won't work.

via Science Daily