This artist’s impression shows how ULAS J1120+0641, a very distant quasar powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, may have looked. This quasar is the most distant yet found and is seen as it was just 770 million years after the Big Bang. This object is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early Universe. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
A team of European astronomers has used ESO’s Very Large Telescope and a host of other telescopes to discover and study the most distant quasar found to date. This brilliant beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early Universe. The results will appear in the 30 June 2011 issue of the journal Nature.
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Scientific equipment belonging to an Enlightenment figure has been found in an archaeological dig at the University.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In the July issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, researchers reveal the prehistoric remains of a BBQ in the valley of the River Tjonger in the Netherlands that took place over 7,700 years ago.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Modern humans never co-existed with Homo erectus -- a finding counter to previous hypotheses of human evolution—new excavations in Indonesia and dating analyses show. The research, reported in the journal PLoS One, offers new insights into the nature of human evolution, suggesting a different role for Homo erectus than had been previously thought.
Last August, 30 years after the Rubik’s cube first appeared, an international team of researchers proved that no matter how scrambled a cube got, it could be solved in no more than 20 moves. Although the researchers used some clever tricks to avoid evaluating all 43 quintillion of the cube’s possible starting positions, their proof still relied on the equivalent of 35 years’ worth of number crunching on a good modern computer.
Palaeontologists have uncovered half-a-billion-year-old fossils demonstrating that primitive animals had excellent vision.
Scientists who pioneered a revolutionary 3-D microscope technique are now describing an extension of that technology into a new dimension that promises sweeping applications in medicine, biological research, and development of new electronic devices. Their reports on so-called 4-D scanning ultrafast electron microscopy, and a related technique, appear in two papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Australian researchers have invented nanotech solar cells that are thin, flexible and use 1/100th the materials of conventional solar cells.
Institute for Solid State Physics, the University of Tokyo and RIKEN announced that researchers from both institutes succeeded in the magnetic control of anomalous Hall effect (AHE) induced by spin chirality. Details were published in Physical Review Letters.
Tohoku University, Osaka University and Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) announced that they succeeded in directly observing electron spins in a topological insulator. The work has been published in Physical Review Letters with the lead author Seigo Souma, Assistant Professor of Tohoku University.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Bartosz Grzybowski, a physical chemist at Northwestern University, and his team of colleagues offer evidence in a paper published in Science, that shows that what scientists have believed to be true about the causes behind the creation of static electricity, is wrong. Instead of one object winding up with more or less electrons as a result of rubbing together, they claim, there is an actual transfer of slight amounts of actual material.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A Princeton researcher and his international collaborators have used lasers to peek into the complex relationship between a single electron and its environment, a breakthrough that could aid the development of quantum computers.
(PhysOrg.com) -- At the smallest scales, magnetism may not work quite the way scientists expected, according to a recent paper in Physical Review Letters by Rafal Oszwaldowski and Igor Zutic of the University at Buffalo and Andre Petukhov of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
(PhysOrg.com) -- "Scientists have been interested in generating and observing macroscopic quantum superpositions in order to test quantum mechanics at the macroscopic scale," physicist Hyunseok Jeong of Seoul National University in Seoul, South Korea, told PhysOrg.com. "There have been many papers in which the authors claim to have generated mesoscopic or macroscopic superpositions, often called 'Schrodinger cat states.' However, quoting A. J. Leggett in 2002, a question from the theoretical side is ‘What is the correct measure of "Schrodinger's-cattiness"?' It has been considered difficult to answer this question with a general measure, and the answer has remained to be 'very much a matter of personal taste,' quoting Leggett again. Our work now provides scientists with a theoretical tool to quantify and compare different types of quantum superpositions. This can be a step toward rigorous tests of quantum mechanics in a macroscopic limit."
(AP) -- Residents downwind of a wildfire that is threatening the nation's premier nuclear-weapons laboratory are worried about the potential of a radioactive smoke plume if the flames reach thousands of barrels of waste stored in above-ground tents.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Two NASA research aircraft will fly over the Baltimore-Washington area of northeastern Maryland through July as part of a mission to enhance the measurement of ground-level air quality from space.
Atmospheric aerosol particles (otherwise known as Particulate Matter) have been masking the true rate of greenhouse gas induced global warming during the industrial period. New investigations show that the aerosol cooling effect will be strongly reduced by 2030, as air pollution abatements are implemented worldwide and the presently available advanced control technologies are utilized. These actions would increase the global mean temperature by ca. 1 degree Celsius. This is one of the main research outcomes of the recently concluded EU EUCAARI (European Integrated project on Aerosol Cloud Climate and Air Quality Interaction) project.
(AP) -- The government sent a plane equipped with radiation monitors over the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory Wednesday as a 110-square-mile wildfire burned at its doorstep, putting thousands of scientific experiments on hold for days.
Epic floods, massive wildfires, drought and the deadliest tornado season in 60 years are ravaging the United States, with scientists warning that climate change will bring even more extreme weather.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The first of two ARTEMIS ("Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun") spacecraft is now in its lunar orbit.
Have you ever seen a low pressure area develop into a full-fledged tropical storm? The GOES-13 satellite has and now you can see it in a new animation released today from NASA and NOAA.
That axiom of sustainability -- "recycle and reuse" -- could help ease concerns about a reliable supply of substances, indispensible for a modern technological society, that are produced almost exclusively in the Peoples' Republic of China. That's the conclusion of a study on these so-called "rare earth" elements in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology.
Small scale convection at the base of the Pacific plate has been simulated in a model of mantle plume dynamics, enabling reasearchers to explain the complex set of observations at the Hawaiian hotspot, according to a new study posted online in the June 26th edition of Nature Geoscience.
The opening of a major urban rail system in Taiwan caused a meaningful reduction in air pollution, according to a forthcoming study by two professors at the University of California, Merced.
As we've recently learned, the ATLAS3D project was able to study 260 individual galaxies and do some very amazing things. By imaging in both red and blue shift, astronomers were able to take stellar measurements and give us a clear picture of galaxy rotation. But looking at a computer generated image gives a picture just like you reading the text in this article – no dimension. By superimposing the velocity of the stars over the plane of the image, a new breakthrough in simulation can be made. And it’s coming straight on for you…
NASA's new Mars probe, a $2.5 billion, nuclear-powered rover the size of a small car, is at the Florida launch site being prepared for its nine-month journey to the red planet, with one key issue still unresolved -- where to land.
The Puyehue-Cordón volcano in Chile continues to spew ash that is still disrupting travel as far as Australia and New Zealand this week. A new animation of satellite imagery just released from the NASA/NOAA GOES Project shows the ash spewing from the volcano.
(PhysOrg.com) -- New samples of rock and sediment from the depths of the eastern Pacific Ocean may help explain the cause of large, destructive earthquakes similar to the Tohoku Earthquake that struck Japan in mid-March.
Stopping people fishing around Caribbean coral reefs by designating them legally protected marine reserves could help some of them survive the effects of a changing climate by more than 50 years.
Pulsars are noted as being some of the universe’s best clocks. Their highly magnetized nature gives rise to beams of high energy radiation that sweep out across the universe. If these beams pass Earth, they can rival atomic clocks in their precision. So precise are these timings, that the first extrasolar planet was discovered through the effects it had on this heartbeat. But in September of 2007, pulsar J1718-3719 appears to have had a seizure.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of European astronomers has used ESO’s Very Large Telescope and a host of other telescopes to discover and study the most distant quasar found to date. This brilliant beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early Universe. The results will appear in the 30 June 2011 issue of the journal Nature.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In December 2010, a pair of mismatched stars in the southern constellation Crux whisked past each other at a distance closer than Venus orbits the sun. The system possesses a so-far unique blend of a hot and massive star with a compact fast-spinning pulsar. The pair's closest encounters occur every 3.4 years and each is marked by a sharp increase in gamma rays, the most extreme form of light.
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