An international team of astronomers, led by an MIT astronomer, have observed the sharpest resolution images to date of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. They used a combination of radio wave emissions captured by telescopes ...
Ares I Passes Preliminary Design Review
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently held a successful preliminary design review for the Ares I rocket – NASA’s crew launch rocket scheduled to replace the aging space shuttle sometime in the next decade. Over 1,100 specialists reviewed ...
Luminous Object Confirmed as Supernova
An international team of astronomers have confirmed that a radio and x-ray luminous object is indeed a supernova, as has long been suspected. Located only 12 million light years away in a nearby galaxy, there is an abundance of observational ...
MAVEN – New NASA Mission to Mars
The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder was selected by NASA to lead a new upcoming space mission to Mars. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Environment spacecraft is scheduled for launch in 2013 ...
NASA to go Nuclear on the Moon
NASA has announced the development of an energy generator for the moon based on nuclear power. The new power system should have sufficient power to service astronauts’ research needs. Although still in its initial stages, several companies are already working ...
2008 Nobel Prize in Physics
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is awarding the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics to Yoichiro Nambu of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, Makoto Kobayashi of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, and ...
Dark Matter Filament Detected Near the Milky Way
Scientists at the Tel Aviv University discovered a string of galaxies only 15 million light years from the Milky Way. This group stands out because despite no apparent mutual interaction they display similar behavior. They all had recent star formation ...
GLAST Performance Meets Expectations
NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), recently renamed the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in honor of Enrico Fermi, has begun its exploration of the universe. The spacecraft and its revolutionary instruments passed their orbital checkout with flying colors. In ...
Antimatter Bounces Off Matter
A team of Italian researchers, part of the OBELIX collaboration, used data taken from CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, from 1990 until 1996 and after careful analysis reported a surprising finding: a good fraction of a low energy antimatter ...
Higgs Will Wait – LHC Temporarily Shut Down
During its first week of operation, the performance of CERN’s new collider exceeded expectations. Only days later a fault occurred, involving a liquid helium leak and demanding a shutdown of the collider. Repairs require heating the collider and will therefore ...