Shown here is the crystal structure of molybdenite, MoS2. When hit with a burst of laser light, freed electrons and holes combine to form combinations called trions, consisting of two electrons and one hole, represented here by orange and green balls. (Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT)
via mit
A test version of NASA’s Orion capsule floats in the rear of the USS Anchorage during a recovery drill off the coast of California September 15, 2014. Orion is NASA’s next exploration spacecraft, designed to carry astronauts to destinations in deep space, including an asteroid and Mars. Picture taken September 15, 2014. (Credit: REUTERS/Mike Blake)
via reuters
A few major factors will drive exponential growth in the amount of terabytes falling on us from the skies over the next couple of decades: the increasing speed of commercial satellite deployment, implementation of faster communication technology, and the onset of interplanetary missions. (Credit: SKA Telescope, Golubovich)
via venturebeat
How many exoplanets have been discovered? According to the Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia, a semi-official catalog based in Europe, there were as of the end of September last year 990 confirmed exoplanets and 2,321 candidate exoplanets. (Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation)
via phys.org
A collaborative robot from Rethink Robotics, works on a mocked-up assembly line. Setting limits on the level of pain a robot may (accidentally) inflict on a human is a crucial goal of the first safety standards being drawn up for these “collaborative” robots. (Credit: Rethink Robotics, Simonite)
via technologyreview
Novae typically originate in binary systems containing Sun-like stars, as shown in this artist’s rendering. NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope discovered that a nova in a system like this likely produces gamma rays (magenta) through collisions among multiple shock waves in the rapidly expanding shell of debris. (Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger)
via americaspace
Beam out: elongated “Landau” states – Instead of rotating uniformly at a particular frequency, an international team of researchers has found that electrons in a magnetic field are capable of rotating at three different frequencies, depending on their quantum properties.
via physicsworld
Asteroid 1950 DA. “Following the February 2013 asteroid impact in Chelyabinsk, Russia, there is renewed interest in figuring out how to deal with the potential hazard of an asteroid impact,” said Rozitis. “Understanding what holds these asteroids together can inform strategies to guard against future impacts.” (Credit: NASA)
via tntoday
“The puzzle has been how these ‘seed’ black holes grew into the monsters that we now see within the time available, a few billion years at best,” says Priyamvada Natarajan, who proposes that early quasars took in a “super boost,” feasting from large reservoirs of gas that were part of early star clusters. (Credit: Lollito Larkham/Flickr)
via futurity
Lighting Science created special lightbulbs for the ISS. There are daylight bulbs with bluer light to encourage energy and activity during what would be daytime hours, and then there are lightbulbs that dial back on the blue to boost astronauts’ production of melatonin for a good night’s sleep. (Credit: Lightning Science)
via cnet
Researchers at Washington State University have used a super-cold cloud of atoms that behaves like a single atom to see a phenomenon predicted 60 years ago and witnessed only once since.
via scientificcomputing.com
Colliding galaxy clusters MACS J0717+3745, more than 5 billion light-years from Earth. Background is Hubble Space Telescope image; blue is X-ray image from Chandra, and red is VLA radio image.
via www.astronomy.com
This artistic representation shows the potentially habitable exoplanet Kapteyn b and the globular cluster Omega Centauri in the background. It is believed that this cluster is the remaining core of a dwarf galaxy that merged with our own Milky Way Galaxy billions of years ago bringing Kapteyn’s star along. Image credit: PHL / UPR Arecibo / Aladin Sky Atlas.
via www.sci-news.com
Light from the explosion 12 billion years ago of a massive star at the end of its life reached Earth recently. An image of its peak afterglow, circled with blue and yellow, was captured by Southern Methodist University’s ROTSE-IIIb telescope at McDonald Observatory, Fort Davis, Texas. A bright star sits alongside the afterglow from GRB 140419A. Credit: ROTSE-IIIb, SMU
via phys.org
A computer simulation of gas (in yellow) falling into a black hole (too small to be seen). Twin jets are also shown with magnetic field lines. Alexander Tchekhovskoy (LBNL)
via www.astronomy.com
Rocky world could be the first of an entirely new class of planet. An illustration of mega-Earth Rocky world could be the first of an entirely new class of planet. An illustration of mega-Earth The newly discovered ”mega-Earth” Kepler-10c dominates the foreground in this artist’s conception released by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts on June 2, 2014.
via news.nationalgeographic.com
Penn astrophysicist Mark Devlin and Jackie Tileston, an associate professor of fine arts at PennDesign, collaborated on the ARTacama Project, the “highest known art installation in the world” three miles above sea level in the Chilean mountains.www.upenn.edu
