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The bright B spectral class star S2 has been observed by astronomers since 1995, because it is revolving around the radio source known as Sagittarius A, which most likely is the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way. Given that the object spins around the dark behemoth once every 16 years, it has already concluded a full orbit around the radio source since being discovered... Among its most important points is the fact that the orbit of an object located close to a star or black holes exerting a strong gravitational pull do not respect the rules...

Twenty years ago this week, a pair of previously unknown scientists stunned the world by announcing they'd done the impossible by achieving nuclear fusion in a lab flask at room temperature. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons quickly became celebrities as the news media hailed them for discovering a cheap source of nearly limitless power. But it all fell apart as other scientists couldn't duplicate their results, and the pair later admitted they'd made mistakes in the experiments. Now a U.S. Navy researcher, speaking on the anniversary of and in the same city where they made their announcement, thinks Fleischmann and...

An international team measures the charge radius of the hydrogen nucleus and stumbles across some mysteries of physics Big problems sometimes come in small packages. The problem with which physicists must now concern themselves measures a mere 0.0350 millionth of a millionth of a millimetre. This is precisely the difference between the new, smaller, dimension of the proton, the nucleus of the hydrogen atom, and the value which has been assumed so far. Instead of 0.8768 femtometres it measures only 0.8418 femtometres. At the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, an international team of researchers including physicists from the Max Planck...

Surprise To Physicists -- Protons Aren't Always Shaped Like A Basketball PHILADELPHIA -- When Gerald A. Miller first saw the experimental results from the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, he was pretty sure they couldn't be right. If they were, it meant that some long-held notions about the proton, a primary building block of atoms, were wrong. But in time, the findings proved to be right, and led physicists to the conclusion that protons aren't always spherically shaped, like a basketball. "Some physicists thought they did the experiment wrong," said Miller, a University of Washington physics professor. "Even I thought...

The theory of evolution requires unfathomable lengths of time – eons ... billions and billions of years. Even with all that time, it's still hard to imagine how complex biochemicals such as hemoglobin or chlorophyll self assembled in the primordial goo. But to those of us who question the process, the answer is always the same. Time. More time than you can grasp – timespans so vast that anything is possible, even chance combinations of random chemicals to form the stunning complexities of reproducing life. Modern physics is now considering a theory that could throw into confusion virtually all of...

Indiana University Scientists First To Detect Rare Nuclear Fusion Violating Charge Symmetry BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Scientists at the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility in Bloomington have made the first unambiguous detection of a rare process, the fusion of two nuclei of heavy hydrogen to form a nucleus of helium and an uncharged pion. The pion is one of the subatomic particles responsible for the strong force that holds every nucleus together. The achievement will be announced Saturday (April 5) at the meeting of the American Physical Society in Philadelphia. "Scientists have searched for this rare fusion process since the 1950s," said...

When researchers found an unusual linkage between solar flares and the inner life of radioactive elements on Earth, it touched off a scientific detective investigation that could end up protecting the lives of space-walking astronauts and maybe rewriting some of the assumptions of physics.> Checking data collected at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and the Federal Physical and Technical Institute in Germany, they came across something even more surprising: long-term observation of the decay rate of silicon-32 and radium-226 seemed to show a small seasonal variation. The decay rate was ever so slightly faster in winter than in summer....

PASADENA, Calif. -- Astronomers have devised a new method for measuring perhaps the greatest puzzle of our universe -- dark energy. This mysterious force, discovered in 1998, is pushing our universe apart at ever-increasing speeds. For the first time, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope were able to take advantage of a giant magnifying lens in space -- a massive cluster of galaxies -- to narrow in on the nature of dark energy. Their calculations, when combined with data from other methods, significantly increase the accuracy of dark energy measurements. This may eventually lead to an explanation of what the...

Amateur astronomy lost one its most iconic figures today. Jack Horkheimer, known to millions as public television's ebullient "Star Gazer," died this afternoon at age 72. The exact cause of death was not disclosed, though he had been battled chronic respiratory problems for decades.

A "galactic lens" has revealed that the Universe will probably expand forever. Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos. Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the Universe. Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the Universe was to keep on expanding. It will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland, researchers say. The study, conducted by an international team led by Professor Eric Jullo of Nasa's...

ITHACA, N.Y. — It's the Clark Kent of oxide compounds, and – on its own – it is pretty boring. But slice europium titanate nanometers thin and physically stretch it, and then it takes on super hero-like properties that could revolutionize electronics, according to new Cornell research. (Nature, Aug. 19, 2010.) Researchers report that thin films of europium titanate become both ferroelectric (electrically polarized) and ferromagnetic (exhibiting a permanent magnetic field) when stretched across a substrate of dysprosium scandate, another type of oxide. The best simultaneously ferroelectric, ferromagnetic material to date pales in comparison by a factor of 1,000. Simultaneous...

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, European astronomers have for the first time demonstrated that a magnetar — an unusual type of neutron star — was formed from a star with at least 40 times as much mass as the Sun. The result presents great challenges to current theories of how stars evolve, as a star as massive as this was expected to become a black hole, not a magnetar. This now raises a fundamental question: just how massive does a star really have to be to become a black hole?To reach their conclusions, the astronomers looked in detail at the...

Surprisingly large matter/antimatter asymmetry discovered in Fermilab experimentsA large collaboration of physicists working at the Fermilab Tevatron particle collider has discovered evidence of an explanation for the prevalence of matter over antimatter in the universe. They found that colliding protons in their experiment produced short-lived B meson particles that almost immediately broke down into debris that included slightly more matter than antimatter. The two types of matter annihilate each other, so most of the material coming from these sorts of decays would disappear, leaving an excess of regular matter behind. This sort of matter/antimatter asymmetry accounts for the fact that...

Physicists from UCLA and Japan have discovered evidence of "natural nuclear accelerators" at work in our Milky Way galaxy, based on an analysis of data from the world's largest cosmic ray detector. The research is published Aug. 20 in the journal Physical Review Letters. Cosmic rays of the highest energies were believed by physicists to come from remote galaxies containing enormous black holes capable of consuming stars and accelerating protons at energies comparable to that of a bullet shot from a rifle. These protons — referred to individually as "cosmic rays" — travel through space and eventually enter our galaxy....

Initially hailed as a solution to the biggest question in computer science, the latest attempt to prove P ≠ NP – otherwise known as the "P vs NP" problem – seems to be running into trouble. Two prominent computer scientists have pointed out potentially "fatal flaws" in the draft proof by Vinay Deolalikar of Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California. Since the 100-page proof exploded onto the internet a week ago, mathematicians and computer scientists have been racing to make sense of it. The problem concerns the speed at which a computer can accomplish a task such as factorising a...

College Park, MD (August 10, 2010) -- Just as the path of photons of light can be directed by a mirror, atoms possessing a magnetic moment can be controlled using a magnetic mirror. Research reported in the Journal of Applied Physics investigates the feasibility of using magnetic domain walls to direct and ultimately trap individual atoms in a cloud of ultracold atoms. "We are looking for ways to build magnetic systems that can manipulate atoms," says author Thomas Hayward of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. "By using soft ferromagnetic materials, in the form of nanostructures, we can...

In January, the true colour of the Universe was declared as somewhere between pale turquoise and aquamarine, by Ivan Baldry and Karl Glazebrook at John Hopkin's University in Baltimore Maryland. They determined the cosmic colour by combining light from over 200,000 galaxies within two billion light years of Earth. The data came from the Australian 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. The new colour is much more subdued Glazebrook now says the true colour this data gives is closer to beige. "I'm very embarrassed," he says, "I don't like being wrong." The ...

ON THE night of 30 June 2005, the sky high above La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands crackled with streaks of blue light too faint for humans to see. Atop the Roque de los Muchachos, the highest point of the island, though, a powerful magic eye was waiting and watching. MAGIC - the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescope - scans the sky each night for high-energy photons from the distant cosmos. Most nights, nothing remarkable comes. But every now and again, a brief flash of energetic light bears witness to the violent convulsions of a faraway galaxy. What MAGIC...

Physicists struggling to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics have hailed a theory – inspired by pencil lead – that could make it all very simpleIT WAS a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski proclaimed, "and...

Inner space and outer space: Representing the bookends of atomic discovery, they are the two big attractions for the hundreds of visiting scientists who each year conduct research at ORNL's Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility. Holifield's ability to create and analyze isotopes that exist for only seconds gives researchers a unique glimpse into the inner workings of atomic nuclei, as well as how they interact with each other and with high-energy particles. Understanding these processes provides astrophysicists with insights they will need to continue to unravel the mystery of how the same processes could have created of all of the...