Hearts Of Galaxies Close In For Cosmic Train Wreck

The galactic cores are in a single, tangled galaxy called NGC 6240, located 400-million light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. Millions of years ago, each core was the dense center of its own galaxy before the two galaxies collided and ripped each other apart. Now, these cores are approaching each other at tremendous speeds and preparing for the final cataclysmic collision. They will crash into each other in a few million years, a relatively short period on a galactic timescale.
The spectacular image combines visible light from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and infrared light from Spitzer. It catches the two galaxies during a rare, short-lived phase of their evolution, when both cores of the interacting galaxies are still visible but closing in on each other fast.
"One of the most exciting things about the image is that this object is unique," said Stephanie Bush of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass., lead author of a new paper describing the observation in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal. "Merging is a quick process, especially when you get to the train wreck that is happening. There just aren't many galactic mergers at this stage in the nearby universe."
NGC 6240 is already putting out huge amounts of infrared light, an indication that a burst of star formation is underway. The extra infrared radiation is common in interacting galaxies; as the two galaxies interact, dust and gas swept up by the collision form a burst of new stars that give off infrared light. Such galaxies are called luminous infrared galaxies. Spitzer's infrared array camera can image the extra heat from newly formed stars, even though their visible light is obscured by thick dust clouds around them.
The blob-like shape of the galaxy is due to the sustained violence of the collision. Streams of millions of stars are being ripped off the galaxy, forming wispy "tidal tails" that lead off NGC 6240 in several directions. But things are about to get even more violent as the main event approaches and the two galactic cores meld into one.
In the center of NGC 6240, the two black holes in the cores will whip up a frenzy of radiation as they careen towards one another head-on, likely transforming the galaxy into a monster known as an ultra-luminous infrared galaxy, thousands of times as bright in infrared as our Milky Way.
Another fascinating aspect of this rare object is that no two galactic mergers are the same. "Not only are there few objects at this stage, but each object is unique because it came from different progenitor galaxies," said Bush. "These observations give us another layer of information about this galaxy, and galactic mergers in general."
Infrared light taken by Spitzer's infrared array camera at 3.6 and 8.8 microns (red) shows cold dust and radiation from star formation; visible light from Hubble (green and blue) shows hot gas and stars.
Other authors of this paper include Zhong Wang, Margarita Karovska and Giovanni Fazio, all of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

practical ways to combat climate change

How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On.

It concerns practical solutions to the biggest global challenge of our generation, and in the pod we discuss the hypocrisy of some of the trendier and more high-profile greenies (Live Earth, anyone?) and ask: can technology solve everything? The book is co-authored by the former government chief scientist Sir David King and it's outnow.

Tsunami Video - Patong Beach, Thailand

Tsunami Video - Patong Beach, Thailand

Video Description:

Taken by a local resident who was about to film a marathon, the video captured the massive earthquake as it shook the town of Banda Aceh. Participants and spectators of the marathon could be seen holding onto the ground as they waited for the quake to subside. Cars were jolted from side to side by the 9.1-strong quake.

Residents soon rushed their way inland as they heard news about the tsunami. The cameraman also captured survivors climbing on the piles of debris gathered by the flowing river, some of whom managed to escape by reaching the river bank.

சுனாமி - கன்னியாகுமரி (Tsunami in Kanyakumari)

Maps of Moon's far side give new clues to its origin

Maps of Moon's far side give new clues to its origin :
BRISBANE: Astronomers have gained new insight into how the Moon formed by combining a new topographical map with knowledge about the Moon's gravity.

The map is the first to cover the Moon from pole to pole and shows craters never before seen, researchers report today in a trio of papers in the U.S. journal Science.

The experts also reveal the first direct observations of gravitational anomalies on the satellite's far side, which, combined with the topographic data, suggest that the Moon has very little water – a key clue to understanding its origin and evolution.

Two-faced Moon
"The surface can tell us a lot about what's happening inside the Moon, but until now mapping has been very limited," said C.K Shum an earth scientist at Ohio State University in the U.S. and co-author of one of the studies. "With this new high-resolution map, we can confirm that there is very little water on the Moon today, even deep in the interior. And we can use that information to think about water on other planets, including Mars."
The data was collected by SELENE, a Japanese satellite that has subsidiary satellites that relay information from the main craft back to Earth, while it is out of sight on the far side of the Moon. That allows the researchers to track the satellite's movements accurately and be certain of the quality of the data, said study co-author Noriyuki Namiki, of Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan.
Using a laser altimeter, SELENE has mapped the Moon's entire surface to a resolution of 15 km (meaning that objects as small as 15-km-wide can be seen). This is up from the previous resolution of 20 to 60 km provided by NASA's 1994 Clementine mission, which only mapped part of the surface.

Rigid crust
From Earth we always see the same side of the Moon (the near side) as its rotation is tidally locked with ours.
The new map shows the substantial differences between the Moon's near and far sides. The side of the Moon that faces Earth is covered with low-lying, smooth, dark volcanic rock, while the on the far side there are older, heavily cratered highlands.
The map also gives hints about the Moon's interior, because it doesn't show the surface crust bending over areas of unusually high gravity on the far side. The rigidity of the crust suggests that there is very little water even deep inside the Moon, the researchers said, because water would make the Moon's crust more flexible.

"The abundance of water is a key parameter to understanding the formation and evolution of the Moon," said co-author of one study Araki Hiroshi, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo.
The lack of water suggested by SELENE supports the theory that the Moon was formed in a giant collision between a still-molten Earth and a wandering proto-planet. Astronomers believe that such an impact would have heated the debris that became the Moon, evaporating off its water and explaining why the Moon is dry even though it is close to a watery Earth.
Astrophysicist Sarah Maddison, of Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, said that getting a good map of the whole Moon was an important step, because knowing the exact shape of the Moon gave researchers better information about its gravity.

Earth On Steroids? Unraveling the Mystery of Super-Earths

Not long ago, the only planets astronomers could find orbiting other stars were massive, gaseous worlds that had more in common with Jupiter than our own small, rocky planet.

As observation techniques have advanced, however, scientists have begun discovering a newer, smaller type of planet - the tantalizingly named "Super Earth."

"A 'Super Earth' is generally considered to be a planet that's up to about 10 times the mass of the Earth," explains JPL scientist Steve Edberg. "Planets bigger than that tend to be gaseous, like Uranus or Neptune."

Super Earths are notable because, unlike gas giant planets, they're small enough to have terrestrial surfaces or liquid oceans that could support life as we know it.

And while none of the Super Earths discovered so far would be a good place to take a vacation, scientists are hopeful that they'll find one with the right chemical composition and at the right distance from its star to support living things.

So what's life on a Super Earth like? First of all, cautions Edberg, it's important to remember that a planet's mass and size are two different things. "The relationship between a planet's size and its mass isn't linear," Edberg explains. "A world that's 10 times the mass of Earth will not be 10 times as big in diameter; it'll actually be quite a bit smaller than that."

You might also feel a bit heavier than normal if you were to visit a Super Earth, says Edberg, because "a bigger planet is going to have more gravity...it's also probably going to have a thicker, more dense atmosphere than Earth's."

Despite these differences, Edberg points out that under the right conditions, a Super Earth could harbor living things. "You might not get redwood trees and basketball players," he says, "but you'd still have the right ingredients for life to get established."

And as the Super Earth discoveries begin to pile in, chances are that the discovery of such an Earthlike planet may be just around the corner.

Scientists make advances on "nano" electronics

Two U.S. teams have developed new materials that may pave the way for ever smaller, faster and more powerful electronics as current semiconductor technology begins to reach the limits of miniaturization.

One team has made tiny transistors -- the building block of computer processors -- a fraction of the size of those used on advanced silicon chips.

Another has made a film material capable of storing data from 250 DVDs onto a surface the size of a coin.

Both advances, published on Thursday in the journal Science, use nanotechnology -- the design and manipulation of materials thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. Nanotechnology has been hailed as a way to make strong, lightweight materials, better cosmetics and even tastier food.

"We have demonstrated that we can make important technologies that are significantly smaller than existing devices," Jeremy Levy of the University of Pittsburgh said in a statement.

Levy's team created its nanotech transistors using two ceramic crystal materials known as lanthanum aluminate and strontium titanate. When sandwiched together, these natural insulators conduct electricity as a positive charge is passed across them.

Using the tip of an atomic force microscope, Levy's team applied voltage to etch a tiny conducting wire between the two materials, which can later be erased by reversing the charge, much like a child's Etch A Sketch drawing toy.

"The transistor we made is arguably the smallest one that has ever been produced in a deterministic and reliable fashion. And we did it using an instrument that can be miniaturized down to the size of a wristwatch," Levy said in an e-mail.

He said the same materials can be used to make atom-sized transistors for computers, memory devices and sensors.

"In terms of simplicity, it's striking," Alexander Bratkovsky, a scientist for Hewlett-Packard Co who is familiar with the work, said in a statement.

THIN FILM

Meanwhile, a team from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of California Berkeley said they had found a faster, more efficient way of making a thin semiconductor film that they think could dramatically improve data storage.

Many teams have tried to use polymers to create sheets of semiconductor films but the material often lost its structure when spread over large surfaces.

To overcome this, the team lead by Thomas Russell of the University of Massachusetts heated sapphire crystals to create a specific pattern of ridges on the surface. This served as a guide for the semiconductor film.

"We applied a simple concept to solve several problems at once, and it really worked out," Russell said in a statement.

Indian Ocean due huge quake 'in next 30 years'

JAKARTA: The Indian Ocean could be due another massive earthquake within the next 30 years, one that could rival the magnitude of the one that caused the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.
Researchers made the prediction after studying corals, which show rings of growth from which past sea levels can be inferred.
Earthquakes push the land up, depressing the sea level in the area and preventing corals from growing upwards. Sea levels then rise as the land subsides, leaving the history of the earthquake imprinted in the coral growth patterns.
Growth patterns
The scientists analysed coral growth over the last 700 years in the shallow reefs along the 700-kilometre 'Sunda megathrust' fault — a boundary between tectonic plates off the Mentawai Islands in western Sumatra, Indonesia.
This section of the Sunda fault had been inactive for at least 50 years until a magnitude 8.4 earthquake in September 2007.
Using the coral data the scientists found three previous sets of large earthquakes. If the cycles continue to be consistent — beginning every 200 years — the next earthquake is due within the next few decades.
Danny H. Natawidjaja, an author of the paper and a senior researcher at the Research Centre for Geotechnology of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, said that the probability of a large earthquake in western Sumatra in the next 30 years is more than 70 per cent.
"We call this scientific prediction a geological warning system," he said.
Difficult to predict
He added that the sea level off the Mentawai Islands is rising at about one centimetre per year, which is to be expected prior to an earthquake as the land subsides and the fault accumulates strain between the two plates.
But M. Riyadi, head of the seismic and tsunami section at the Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency, said there is no way to predict the next earthquake precisely. For example, after the Indian Ocean tsunami, it was only three months before the next big earthquake hit the island of Nias in 2005.
"We have no precise prognosis on the return period, therefore scientific predictions are all welcome, but the most important thing is mitigation. We must be prepared whether the earthquake hits us in 30 years or as soon as next week," Riyadi said.

Earth under threat from dark comets

SYDNEY: Comets could be the most significant impact hazard to Earth, with sky surveys underestimating the number that are potentially devastating by a factor of between 10 and 100, British astrophysicists say.
Astronomers may be missing these so-called 'dark comets' because their icy and reflective surfaces have become hidden under an obscuring layer of dust.
Near Earth objects (NEOs) are comets or asteroids that have been nudged into a possible collision path with the Earth. The international program to discover NEOs; Spaceguard, which includes NASA's NEO program, has identified around 6,000 NEOs so far, most of which are asteroids.
History of violence
But dark comets with unpredictable orbits may pose a greater threat than asteroids, which are easier to spot, according to astrophysicists Bill Napier, from the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology in Wales, and David Asher, from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland.
"We may be dealing with a population of dark objects, carrying a lot of kinetic energy, which are not being properly picked up in the Spaceguard surveys," the researchers write in the February issue of the journal Astronomy & Geophysics.
Some comets scoot into the range of Earth from near Jupiter or further out, but appear regularly, like Halley's Comet. Others originate in the distant Oort cloud, a spherical comet nursery predicted to exist around one light-year from the Sun. These have orbits in the range of a million years, and are harder to predict or to spot, especially if they are too far away from the Sun to develop a characteristic comet tail as their icy surface melts.
When the Solar System passes through the galactic plane – the flattened disc of the Milky Way galaxy – molecular clouds may send Oort cloud objects hurtling into the inner Solar System, said the researchers.
Galactic mix-up
They say the timing of the Solar System's passage through the galactic plane – around 20 to 30 million years – closely matches spikes in the distribution of large impact craters on Earth for the past 250 million years. They conclude that comets have been responsible for most of Earth's impact craters and may pose an unrecognised risk to our civilisation.
Current NEO programs might be "monitoring a swarm of bees while standing on a railway line with an express train due," says the study.

Rob McNaught an astronomer from Australia's Siding Spring observatory in Coonabarabran, New South Wales, who has had several comets named after him, agreed that dark, inactive comets would be under-represented in the Near Earth Object surveys.
But Paul Francis, from the Australian National University in Canberra, said the researcher's theory was "speculative", in particular because impact craters were hard to date accurately.
"The best guess from the rate at which these comets come in is that they are not a risk," said Francis. He said a comet impact of a similar scale to the one that wiped out over 2,000 square kilometres of forest at Tunguska in Siberia was a "one-in-10-million-year event", while a continent destroying impact was a one-in-60-million-year event.
"That's not to say it may not happen for 20 million years and may happen tomorrow, but it's not very likely."

New Imaging Technique Reveals Atomic Structure Of Nanocrystals

A new imaging technique developed by researchers at the University of Illinois overcomes the limit of diffraction and can reveal the atomic structure of a single nanocrystal with a resolution of less than one angstrom (less than one hundred-millionth of a centimeter).

Optical and electronic properties of small assemblages of atoms called quantum dots depend upon their electronic structure – not just what's on the surface, but also what's inside. While scientists can calculate the electronic structure, they need to know where the atoms are positioned in order to do so accurately.

Getting this information, however, has proved to be a challenge for nanocrystals like quantum dots. Mapping out the positions of atoms requires clues provided by the diffraction pattern. But quantum dots are so small, the clues provided by diffraction alone are not enough.

By combining two sources of information – images and diffraction patterns taken with the same electron microscope – researchers at the U. of I. can achieve sub-angstrom resolution of structures that were not possible before.

"We show that for cadmium-sulfide nanocrystals, the improved image resolution allows a determination of their atomic structures," said Jian-Min (Jim) Zuo, a professor of materials science and engineering at the U. of I., and corresponding author of a paper that describes the high-resolution imaging system in the February issue of Nature Physics.

Images from electron microscopy can resolve individual atoms in a nanocrystal, but the atoms soon suffer radiation damage, which limits the length of observations. Patterns from X-ray diffraction can be used to determine the structure of large crystals, but not for nanocrystals, which are too small and don't diffract well.

To achieve sub-angstrom resolution, Zuo and colleagues developed a reiterative algorithm that processes and combines shape information from the low-resolution image and structure information from the high-resolution diffraction pattern. Both the image and the diffraction pattern are taken with the same transmission-electron microscope.

"The low-resolution image provides the starting point by supplying missing information in the central beam and supplying essential marks for aligning the diffraction pattern," said Zuo, who also is a researcher at the university's Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory. "Our phase-retrieval algorithm then reconstructs the image."

To demonstrate the technique, the researchers took a new look at cadmium-sulfide quantum dots.

"We chose cadmium-sulfide quantum dots because of their size-dependent optical and electronic properties, and the importance of atomic structure on these properties," Zuo said. "Cadmium-sulfide quantum dots have potential applications in solar energy conversion and in medical imaging."

Using the reiterative algorithm, the smallest separation between the cadmium and sulfide atomic columns was measured at 0.84 angstroms, the researchers report.

"Since low-resolution images can be obtained from different sources, our technique is general and can be applied to non-periodic structures, such as interfaces and local defects," Zuo said. "Our technique also provides a basis for imaging the three-dimensional structure of single nanoparticles."

With Zuo, co-authors of the paper are former doctoral student and lead author Weijie Huang (now at Dow Chemical Co.), U. of I. professor of materials science and engineering Moonsub Shim, former postdoctoral research associate Bin Jiang (now at FEI Co.), and former doctoral student Kwan-Wook Kwon (now at LAM Research).

The U.S. Department of Energy, the American Chemical Society and the National Science Foundation funded the work.

All - Nobel - Physics

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen
All Nobel Laureates in Physics

The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to 183 individuals since 1901. (John Bardeen was awarded the prize in both 1956 and 1972.) Click on a name to go to the Laureate's page.

Jump down to: 1980 1960 1940 1920 1901

2008 - Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi, Toshihide Maskawa
2007 - Albert Fert, Peter Grünberg
2006 - John C. Mather, George F. Smoot
2005 - Roy J. Glauber, John L. Hall, Theodor W. Hänsch
2004 - David J. Gross, H. David Politzer, Frank Wilczek
2003 - Alexei A. Abrikosov, Vitaly L. Ginzburg, Anthony J. Leggett
2002 - Raymond Davis Jr., Masatoshi Koshiba, Riccardo Giacconi
2001 - Eric A. Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, Carl E. Wieman
2000 - Zhores I. Alferov, Herbert Kroemer, Jack S. Kilby
1999 - Gerardus 't Hooft, Martinus J.G. Veltman
1998 - Robert B. Laughlin, Horst L. Störmer, Daniel C. Tsui
1997 - Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, William D. Phillips
1996 - David M. Lee, Douglas D. Osheroff, Robert C. Richardson
1995 - Martin L. Perl, Frederick Reines
1994 - Bertram N. Brockhouse, Clifford G. Shull
1993 - Russell A. Hulse, Joseph H. Taylor Jr.
1992 - Georges Charpak
1991 - Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
1990 - Jerome I. Friedman, Henry W. Kendall, Richard E. Taylor
1989 - Norman F. Ramsey, Hans G. Dehmelt, Wolfgang Paul
1988 - Leon M. Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, Jack Steinberger
1987 - J. Georg Bednorz, K. Alex Müller
1986 - Ernst Ruska, Gerd Binnig, Heinrich Rohrer
1985 - Klaus von Klitzing
1984 - Carlo Rubbia, Simon van der Meer
1983 - Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, William A. Fowler
1982 - Kenneth G. Wilson
1981 - Nicolaas Bloembergen, Arthur L. Schawlow, Kai M. Siegbahn
1980 - James Cronin, Val Fitch
1979 - Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, Steven Weinberg
1978 - Pyotr Kapitsa, Arno Penzias, Robert Woodrow Wilson
1977 - Philip W. Anderson, Sir Nevill F. Mott, John H. van Vleck
1976 - Burton Richter, Samuel C.C. Ting
1975 - Aage N. Bohr, Ben R. Mottelson, James Rainwater
1974 - Martin Ryle, Antony Hewish
1973 - Leo Esaki, Ivar Giaever, Brian D. Josephson
1972 - John Bardeen, Leon N. Cooper, Robert Schrieffer
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1970 - Hannes Alfvén, Louis Néel
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1968 - Luis Alvarez
1967 - Hans Bethe
1966 - Alfred Kastler
1965 - Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, Richard P. Feynman
1964 - Charles H. Townes, Nicolay G. Basov, Aleksandr M. Prokhorov
1963 - Eugene Wigner, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, J. Hans D. Jensen
1962 - Lev Landau
1961 - Robert Hofstadter, Rudolf Mössbauer
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1959 - Emilio Segrè, Owen Chamberlain
1958 - Pavel A. Cherenkov, Il´ja M. Frank, Igor Y. Tamm
1957 - Chen Ning Yang, Tsung-Dao Lee
1956 - William B. Shockley, John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain
1955 - Willis E. Lamb, Polykarp Kusch
1954 - Max Born, Walther Bothe
1953 - Frits Zernike
1952 - Felix Bloch, E. M. Purcell
1951 - John Cockcroft, Ernest T.S. Walton
1950 - Cecil Powell
1949 - Hideki Yukawa
1948 - Patrick M.S. Blackett
1947 - Edward V. Appleton
1946 - Percy W. Bridgman
1945 - Wolfgang Pauli
1944 - Isidor Isaac Rabi
1943 - Otto Stern
1942 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
1941 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
1940 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
1939 - Ernest Lawrence
1938 - Enrico Fermi
1937 - Clinton Davisson, George Paget Thomson
1936 - Victor F. Hess, Carl D. Anderson
1935 - James Chadwick
1934 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
1933 - Erwin Schrödinger, Paul A.M. Dirac
1932 - Werner Heisenberg
1931 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
1930 - Sir Venkata Raman
1929 - Louis de Broglie
1928 - Owen Willans Richardson
1927 - Arthur H. Compton, C.T.R. Wilson
1926 - Jean Baptiste Perrin
1925 - James Franck, Gustav Hertz
1924 - Manne Siegbahn
1923 - Robert A. Millikan
1922 - Niels Bohr
1921 - Albert Einstein
1920 - Charles Edouard Guillaume
1919 - Johannes Stark
1918 - Max Planck
1917 - Charles Glover Barkla
1916 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
1915 - William Bragg, Lawrence Bragg
1914 - Max von Laue
1913 - Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
1912 - Gustaf Dalén
1911 - Wilhelm Wien
1910 - Johannes Diderik van der Waals
1909 - Guglielmo Marconi, Ferdinand Braun
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1907 - Albert A. Michelson
1906 - J.J. Thomson
1905 - Philipp Lenard
1904 - Lord Rayleigh
1903 - Henri Becquerel, Pierre Curie, Marie Curie
1902 - Hendrik A. Lorentz, Pieter Zeeman
1901 - Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen