A bull's-eye in the hunt for planets: astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have discovered and directly imaged a faint celestial body that orbits the star GJ 758. Its mass is estimated to be between 10 and 40 Jupiter masses. Accordingly, it is either a giant planet or a brown dwarf, a would-be sun. One thing is certain: with a temperature of around 330 degrees Celsius, GJ 758 B is the coldest companion of a Sun-like star ever to be directly imaged (arXiv.org/abs/0911.1127).
Heavens
"Astronomers are left in the dark, and for once, we do not enjoy it," says Christine Nicholls from Mount Stromlo Observatory, Australia, lead author of a paper reporting the study. "We have obtained the most comprehensive set of observations to date for this class of Sun-like stars, and they clearly show that all the possible explanations for their unusual behaviour just fail."
RENO, Nev. – Graham Kent, Nevada Seismological Laboratory director at the University of Nevada, Reno is leading the installation, testing and maintenance of a novel way to monitor forests fires and other environmental data with the prototype of a new camera system developed by Sony-Europe.
The new 360-degree, solar-powered camera and wi-fi system was installed at Tahoe City, Calif. in anticipation of its debut Dec. 12 via the Internet from Copenhagen during the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
The "walls" of System 97W have been breached, and residents in the Western Pacific Ocean no longer have a tropical cyclone to worry about today. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center cancelled their "formation alert" for System 97W. System 97W is following in Nida's footsteps and is headed for dissipation. Nida has now officially dissipated.
An international team of scientists that includes an astronomer from Princeton University has made the first direct observation of a planet-like object orbiting a star similar to the sun.
The finding marks the first discovery made with the world's newest planet-hunting instrument on the Hawaii-based Subaru Telescope and is the first fruit of a novel research collaboration announced by the University in January.
What happens when a really gargantuan star – one hundreds of times bigger than our sun – blows up? Although a theory developed years ago describes what the explosion of such an enormous star should look like, no one had actually observed one – until now. An international team, led by scientists in Israel, and including researchers from Germany, the US, UK and China, tracked a supernova – an exploding star – for over a year and a half, and found that it neatly fits the predictions for the explosion of a star of over 150 times the sun's mass.
NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites flew over Tropical Depression Nida and System 97W in the Western Pacific Ocean and noticed that one is fading while the other is powering up.
The Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies on NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of the two storms in one satellite pass. Nida still had a swirl to its clouds although the system has continued to weaken. On the visible imagery, System 97W currently appears as a rounded area of clouds with no established center.
Noted for harbouring Eta Carinae — one of the wildest and most massive stars in our galaxy — the impressive Carina Nebula also houses a handful of massive clusters of young stars. The youngest of these stellar families is the Trumpler 14 star cluster, which is less than one million years old — a blink of an eye in the Universe's history. This large open cluster is located some 8000 light-years away towards the constellation of Carina (the Keel).
HOUSTON - Latino men who are more adapted to U.S. culture are more likely to quit smoking than their less-acculturated counterparts, according to research by scientists at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center published in the December issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, which has a special emphasis on tobacco.
(Dec. 3, 2009) – The worldwide safety experience of endoscopist-administered propofol sedation now exceeds 600,000 patients. The low rate of serious adverse events underscores the safety of nonanesthesiologist-administered propofol (NAAP) for gastrointestinal (GI) procedures, provided that it is administered by a team of individuals who have received training specific to the administration of propofol according to the "Position statement: nonanesthesiologist administration of propofol for GI endoscopy" issued by the four major gastroenterology and hepatology societies.
Researchers used the PVC method to produce the first high-quality BNNTs that are long enough to be spun into macroscopic yarn, in this case centimeters long. A cotton-like mass of nanotubes was finger-twisted into a yarn about one millimeter wide, indicating that the nanotubes themselves are about one millimeter long.
Every cook knows the ingredients for making bread: flour, water, yeast, and time. But what chemical elements are in the recipe of our universe?
Most of the ingredients are hydrogen and helium. These cosmic lightweights fill the first two spots on the famous periodic table of the elements.
Less abundant but more familiar to us are the heavier elements, meaning everything listed on the periodic table after hydrogen and helium. These building blocks, such as iron and other metals, can be found in many of the objects in our daily lives, from teddy bears to teapots.
Bethesda, MD (Dec. 1, 2009) — The combination of sigmoidoscopy and fecal immunochemical test (FIT) detects advanced proximal (right-sided) tumors better than either test alone, according to a new study in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute. African Americans, the elderly and women have a higher incidence of proximal colon tumors.
Berkeley, CA – An extraordinarily bright, extraordinarily long-lasting supernova named SN 2007bi, snagged in a search by a robotic telescope, turns out to be the first example of the kind of stars that first populated the Universe. The superbright supernova occurred in a nearby dwarf galaxy, a kind of galaxy that's common but has been little studied until now, and the unusual supernova could be the first of many such events soon to be discovered.
Researchers of the University of Granada have developed an intelligent engine searcher to catalogue the documentary collections of the Andalusian Parliament. This prototype, so called SEDA, is an information recovery system for structured documents, based on artificial intelligence techniques, to search and recover documents belonging to the Parliamentary Report and the Official Gazette of the Andalusian Parliament.