or even space exploration whenever you have a gripper that is not dexterous like a human hand,
says Yong Zhu, co-senior author of the paper and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State.
#Astronomers discover'young Jupiter'exoplanet The first planet detected by the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) from an international team of astronomers,
& Astronomy at Stony Brook University, is one outside earths solar system at 100 light years away.
The exoplanet is being called a young Jupiter by the researchers because it shares many characteristics of Jupiter.
A paper outlining the full findings is published in Science. Discovery image of the planet 51 Eridani b with the Gemini Planet Imager taken in the near-infrared light on December 18 2014.
The bright central star has been removed mostly to enable the detection of the exoplanet one million times fainter.
Image: J. Rameau, Udem and C. Marois, NRC Herzberg) The finding could serve as a decoder ring for astronomers to understand how planets formed around our sun
because one of the best ways to learn how our solar system evolved is to look to younger star systems in the earlier phase of development.
Stanimir Metchev, a Physics & Astronomy Professor at Western University in Canada and at Stony Brook University, is a co-investigator on the scientific study,
along with Rahul I. Patel, a Phd student in Stony Brooks Department of physics & Astronomy. They are both members of the international Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey (GPIES) team
which is dedicated to imaging and characterising exoplanets, planets discovered outside of earths solar system. The new planet is called 51 Eridani b. The GPI is a new astronomy instrument operated by an international collaboration headed by Bruce Macintosh, a Professor of Physics in the Kavli Institute at Stanford.
The exoplanet is the'faintest'one on record, and also shows the strongest methane signature ever detected on an alien planet,
which should yield additional clues as to how the planet formed. The key to the solar system?
What makes 51 Eridani particularly interesting is that it also harbours dust and ice in the planetary system,"explains Professor Metchev.
These are much like the dust and the ice grains produced by collisions among asteroids and comets in the Solar system."
"Metchev's team conducted a study with data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE TO search for any thermal glow that such dust
and ice can produce.""We found that 51 Eridani is surrounded by warm dust that indicates the presence of an asteroid belt,
"says Patel, who led the WISE study and whose previous work identifying recycled planetary dust, known as debris disks, around close to a hundred other star systems, puts the discovery of the exoplanet in context.
Finding dust around a star is like seeing a large signpost that tells us there might be a planet,
he adds. This is because the dust is created usually when lots of large asteroids collide and destroy each other, usually pushed around by a large planet like 51 Eridani b. Metchev adds,"
"And more data from the European space agency's Herschel Space observatory reveal that 51 Eridani is surrounded also by a more distant and colder cometary belt, much like the Kuiper belt of comets beyond Neptune in the Solar system."
"The two belts the asteroid and the cometary belt around 51 Eridani fall on either side of the newly discovered planet 51 Eridani b."The overall structure bears striking resemblance to our own Solar system,
with Jupiter as the most massive planet orbiting between a belt of asteroids and a belt of comets,"explains Metchev."
"In 51 Eridani, we are therefore seeing what the Solar system resembled at a very young age,
around the time when the Earth was still forming.""A clear line of sight The GPI was designed specifically for discovering
and analyzing faint, young planets orbiting bright stars. NASA's Kepler mission indirectly discovers planets by the loss of starlight
when a planet blocks a star.""To detect planets, Kepler sees their shadow; GPI sees their glow,
"says Macintosh.""What GPI does is referred to as direct imaging.""The astronomers use adaptive optics to sharpen the image of a star,
and then block out the starlight. Any remaining incoming light is analyzed then, the brightest spots indicating a possible planet.
After GPI was installed on the 8-meter Gemini South Telescope in Chile, the team set out to look for planets orbiting young stars.
To date, the astronomers have looked at nearly 100 stars.""51 Eridani is only 20 million years old,
a little more massive than our sun a perfect target,"says James Graham, a professor at UC Berkeley and Project Scientist for GPI.
As far as the cosmic clock is concerned, 20 million years is young for a star,
and this is exactly what made the direct detection of the planet possible, explains Macintosh.""When planets coalesce, material falling into the planet releases energy and heats it up.
Over the next hundred millions years they radiate that energy away, mostly as infrared light,"says Macintosh.
Once the astronomers zeroed in on the star, they blocked its light and spotted 51 Eridani b orbiting a little farther away from its parent star than Saturn does from the sun
. Even though the light from the planet is very faint nearly a million times fainter than its star subsequent observations revealed that it is roughly twice the mass of Jupiter.
Other directly-imaged planets are five times the mass of Jupiter or more. In addition to being the faintest planet ever imaged
it's also the coldest 400 Celsius (C), whereas others are around 700 C and features the strongest atmospheric methane signal on record.
Previous Jupiter-like exoplanets have shown only faint traces of methane, far different from the heavy methane atmospheres of the gas giants in our solar system.
All of these characteristics, the researchers say, point to a planet that is very much what models suggest Jupiter was like in its infancy."
"All of the exoplanets astronomers have imaged before have atmospheres that look like stars very cool stars, but still stars,"says Macintosh,
who led the construction of GPI and now leads the survey.""This is the first one that really looks like a planet."
"Of course, it's not exactly like Jupiter. The planet is so young and still has a temperature of 400 C,
which is hot enough to melt lead.""In the atmospheres of the cold giant planets of our solar system carbon is found as methane,
unlike most exoplanets where carbon has mostly been found in the form of carbon monoxide. Since the atmosphere of 51 Eridani is also methane rich,
it signifies that this planet is well on its way to becoming a cousin of our own familiar Jupiter,
"says Mark Marley, an astrophysicist at NASAS Ames Research center r
#Black phosphorus surges ahead of graphene A Korean team of scientists tune BP's band gap to form a superior conductor,
allowing for the application to be produced mass for electronic and optoelectronics devices("Observation of tunable bandgap and anisotropic Dirac semimetal state in black phosphorus").The research team operating out of Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH),
affiliated with the Institute for Basic Science's (IBS) Center for Artificial Low Dimensional Electronic systems (CALDES), reported a tunable band gap in BP,
effectively modifying the semiconducting material into a unique state of matter with anisotropic dispersion. This research outcome potentially allows for great flexibility in the design
and optimization of electronic and optoelectronic devices like solar panels and telecommunication lasers. black phosphorus To truly understand the significance of the team's findings,
it's instrumental to understand the nature of two-dimensional (2-D) materials, and for that one must go back to 2010
when the world of 2-D materials was dominated by a simple thin sheet of carbon,
a layered form of carbon atoms constructed to resemble honeycomb, called graphene. Graphene was heralded globally as a wonder-material thanks to the work of two British scientists who won the Nobel prize for Physics for their research on it.
Graphene is extremely thin and has remarkable attributes. It is stronger than steel yet many times lighter
more conductive than copper and more flexible than rubber. All these properties combined make it a tremendous conductor of heat and electricity.
A defect-free layer is also impermeable to all atoms and molecules. This amalgamation makes it a terrifically attractive material to apply to scientific developments in a wide variety of fields, such as electronics, aerospace and sports.
For all its dazzling promise there is however a disadvantage; graphene has no band gap. Stepping stones to a Unique State A material's band gap is fundamental to determining its electrical conductivity.
Imagine two river crossings, one with tightly-packed stepping-stones, and the other with large gaps between stones.
The former is far easier to traverse because a jump between two tightly-packed stones requires less energy.
A band gap is much the same; the smaller the gap the more efficiently the current can move across the material and the stronger the current.
"Since before Newton held a prism to a ray of sunlight and saw a spectrum of colour,
or monochromatic light oscillates at all points in space with the same frequency but varying relative delays, or phases.
Polarization refers to the trajectory of the oscillations of the electromagnetic field at each point in space.
Unlike conventional solar cells that directly absorb sunlight and convert it into electricity, an LSC absorbs the light on a plate embedded with highly efficient light-emitters called lumophores that then re-emit the absorbed light at longer wavelengths, a process known as the Stokes shift.
thus allowing arge scale exploration alloy materials space, according to their article. They specifically concentrated on the electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide on metal electrodes ecause of the current interest in this process for sustainable production of fuels and value added chemicals,
They are planned also for use in the next Mars rover vehicle.""But if they become easier and cheaper to make,
they could be used widely in many applications including as exceptionally strong components in personal electronic devices, in space exploration vehicles,
or ionized, from its orbit around a helium atom. Like all subatomic particles, electrons occupy a realm governed by quantum mechanics.
By firing two time-delayed, ultrashort laser pulses at a helium atom, the researchers found that the distribution of momentum values for these intersecting electron waves can take the form of a two-armed vortex that resembles a spiral galaxy.
a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a member of UCLA California Nanosystems Institute, is published Sept. 21 in the online edition of the journal Nature Materials("Three-dimensional coordinates of individual atoms
"For more than 100 years, researchers have inferred how atoms are arranged in three-dimensional space using a technique called X-ray crystallography,
noninvasive 3d biomedical imaging photonic chips aerospace photonics micromachines laser tweezing the process of using lasers to trap tiny particles.
#Highest efficiency hydrogen production under natural sunlight Researchers at the University of Tokyo and Miyazaki University have produced hydrogen under natural sunlight at an energy conversion efficiency of 24.4,
and it is possible to produce hydrogen under sunlight at a high efficiency with an appropriate system design for each installation,
So far, physicists have assumed that it is impossible to directly access the characteristics of the ground state of empty space.
A sailor will use cues such as the stars or landmarks to determine where their ship is on a map,
The robot was able to detect loops in the path through the office space and,
In the scheme, laser pulses, functioning as three-dimensional lenses in both time and space, can compress electron pulses to attosecond durations and sub-micrometer dimensions,
Compressing Electron Pulses In time and Space Short pulse durations are critical for high temporal resolution in ultrafast electron imaging techniques.
such as transporting substances through outer space, shaping the earth's surface and processing ozone-damaging molecules in the stratosphere.
night-vision goggles and smoke detectors to surveillance systems and satellites--that rely on electronic light sensors. Integrated into a digital camera lens, for example, it could reduce bulkiness and boost both the acquisition speed and quality of video or still photos.
Jingchuan Sun, an EM expert in Li's lab, was essential to the success of the work.
"Sun said.""Our lab has expertise and a decade of experience using electron microscopy to study DNA replication,
A Layered Manganese Oxide To Capture Sunlight for Water-Splitting Catalysis"),Assistant professor of Chemical engineering Jose L. Mendoza-Cortes details how this new material efficiently captures sunlight and then,
and it could turn rain water into energy with the help of the sun."But, unlike many other energy sources,
and you do need not a large amount to capture enough sunlight to carry out fuel generation
#Ultrasensitive sensors made from boron-doped graphene Ultrasensitive gas sensors based on the infusion of boron atoms into graphene--a tightly bound matrix of carbon atoms--may soon be possible, according to an international team of researchers
#Scientists discover the gene that will open the door for space-based food production Queensland University of Technology (QUT) scientists have discovered the gene that will open the door for space-based food production.
--and space was an intriguing option.""So the recent film The Martian, which involved an astronaut stranded on Mars growing potatoes
while living in an artificial habitat, had a bit more science fact than fiction than people might think,
or when the sun goes down remains a challenge, largely due to cost. Now researchers are developing a new battery that could bring the price of storage to more affordable levels.
Facebook Reveals Facebook has entered the virtual digital assistant space with a new service for its millions of Messenger users,
Facebook M can complete the tasks on behalf of the userfacebook M brings something new to the virtual digital assistant space
a space that is vastly dominated by Siri from Apple and Google Now from you know where.
The analysis showed that the chemically fixed brain was much smaller in volume, showing a significant loss of extracellular space the space around neurons.
The new paper suggests that the narrow spaces between ocular dominance columns associated with the left and right eye are where the brain coordinates each eye working field of vision.
those narrow spaces can function with either eye uch like a bilingual person living near the border of two countries,
because more information can be collected in a shorter space of time. Dr. Gaur added: his device could transform the way people with severe muscular weakness
but even a state-of-the-art humanoid such as NASA Robonaut has only 42 sensors in its hand and wrist.
developed together with researchers at Intelligent Fiber optic Systems Corp.,with support from NASA, Sept. 29 at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2015, in Hamburg, Germany.
which protect the organisms from negative effects of sunlight, such as DNA damage. The research also shows that the exact manner in which the photoreceptors bind to the DNA is novel.
An international team of astronomers from the Galaxy and Mass Assembly Survey analysed starlight from more than 200,000 galaxies to find the universe is emitting far less energy than it once was.
from the International Centre for Radio astronomy Research, said scientists came to this conclusion after conducting the largest multi wavelength survey ever put together. e used as many space
and ground-based telescopes we could get our hands on to measure the energy output of over 200,000 galaxies across as broad a wavelength range as possible,
In total the team measured outputs across 21 different wavelengths from ultraviolet (characterises younger stars) to the far infrared (characterises younger stars.
#NASA Mars isolation experiment begins SIX people are about to shut themselves inside a dome in Hawaii for a year,
in the longest US isolation experiment yet aimed at helping NASA prepare for a pioneering journey to Mars. The crew includes a French astrobiologist, a German physicist and four Americans a pilot, an architect, a doctor/journalist and a soil
The men and women have their own small rooms, with space for a sleeping cot and desk,
only going outside if dressed in a spacesuit, and having limited access to the internet.
NASA current technology can send a robotic mission to the Red planet in eight months, and the space agency estimates that a human mission would take between one and three years.
With all that time spent in a cramped space without access to fresh air, food,
or privacy, conflicts are certain to occur. The US space agency is studying how these scenarios play out On earth in a program called Hawaii Space exploration Analog
and Simulation (HI-SEAS) before pressing on toward Mars, which NASA hopes to reach sometime in the 2030s.
The first HI-SEAS experiment involved studies about cooking on Mars, and was followed by a four-month and an eight-month cohabitation mission.
NASA is spending $us1. 2 million ($a1. 67 million) on these simulations, and has received just funding of another million for three more in the coming years according to principal investigator Kim Binsted. hat is very cheap for space research,
she told AFP. t is compared really inexpensive to the cost of a space mission going wrong. Binsted said that during the eight-month cohabitation mission
which ended earlier this year, conflicts did arise but the crew was able to work through their problems. think one of the lessons is that you really can prevent interpersonal conflicts.
It is going to happen over these long-duration missions, even with the very best people,
she told AFP. ut what you can do is help people be resilient so they respond well to the problems
This year, for the first time, there was none only dry earth. The state's governor, Jerry brown, made the journey for the annual measurement
according to Jay Famiglietti of NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory in California. The current drought in the Sierra nevada,
These molecules then diffuse into a cavity just outside the placenta, known as the intervillous space.
He borrowed the algorithm his colleagues used to analyse the Earth vibrations, and incorporated it into his modified MRI SCANNER.
#First pocket rockets take tiny satellites for a spin The next giant leap in space exploration could start with a small spin around the lab. A new propulsion system for shrunk-down satellites called Cubesats just passed a key lab test,
Cubesats, cheap, simple satellites built from off-the-shelf parts, promise a revolution in space exploration but only if only we can steer them.
Because they are so simple to build, they could open up space exploration to students and countries that lack their own space programmes,
says Paulo Lozano at the Massachusetts institute of technology. e want to offer space access to people who don currently have space access,
Lozano told a meeting of science writers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Sunday. About 10 of the 1-kilogram satellites can hitch a ride into space with a larger payload.
Once theye there, they can do serious science, from climate modelling to exoplanet hunting. But they are stuck also in that orbit for their entire working lives.
Not only does this limit their usefulness, but Cubesats can become dangerous space junk. f little satellites had the capability to move,
we could do a lot of things that currently we cannot, Lozano says. So Lozano and his colleagues are designing a miniature propulsion system small enough to fit in your pocket that can steer Cubesats around low-Earth orbit
or even out of the solar system altogether. Instead of chemical fuel, which is heavy and inefficient, they use an ionic liquid,
made entirely of positively or negatively charged ions. Because the material is liquid at room temperature, it is safer and simpler to take it into space than a plasma or gas.
Applying an electric field can send these ions streaming away from the satellite at high speeds
producing a force in the opposite direction. The theory was sound, but a few questions kept Lozano up at night.
Would the ions left behind corrode the spacecraft? Would the spacecraft itself remain neutrally charged,
or would the positive ions left behind pull the negative ions back in, cancelling out the thrust?
This August, Lozano and his students tested the complete system, Cubesat and all. They put it in a vacuum chamber
and magnetically levitated it to mimic the conditions in space, and placed the thrusters on opposite sides of the Cubesat to push it in a circle,
rather than having it fly around the lab. One thruster emitted positive ions and the other negative ones, keeping the Cubesat neutrally charged.
After 20 minutes of continuous firing, the Cubesat spun at about 2 rotations per minute.
Lozano says this would be enough to take a Cubesat from an altitude of 400 kilometres up to 800 kilometres
or to deorbit it at the end of its life. t produces the force it should be producing given the amount it was told emitting,
using up all the fuel without corroding the spacecraft. his is one of the other show stoppers we had at the beginning:
How long until the satellites are ready for flight? The team has given three of their propulsion systems to the NASA Glenn Research center in Ohio,
where they are running more tests. t up to them if they want to fly them, Lozano says. hope maybe this year
From the lab to the stars After creating the DWLS, Escuti looked for potential applications.
And that search brought him to a team of astronomers at Leiden University including Frans Snik, Matthew Kenworthy,
For years, astronomers have devised telescopes that, in theory, can use light to help them unravel the mysteries of the universe.
"Light is everything in astronomy--it's the carrier of almost all information and knowledge we have of the universe,
"The astronomers I am working with at Leiden had ideas for novel components and instrument designs that could make better use of the light collected by telescopes,
"Escuti says.""They wanted to know if we could make holograms with specific characteristics that had previously been technologically impossible.
his team has provided the astronomers with geometric phase holograms that they have used build advanced coronagraphs--telescopes that can see things close to stars--to study exoplanets beyond our solar system."
"They wanted to redistribute the blazing light of the halo around a star, so that the faint light coming from a planet orbiting that star can be observed with better contrast
--and then analyze the planet's light to learn about its composition and other characteristics,
"Escuti says.""They're now able to do that with better performance than ever before. We've been working with them for a few years now,
"With these components and techniques, we have for the first time in perhaps many decades fundamentally expanded the astronomer's toolkit for manipulating light from astronomical sources,
Down to earth applications In addition to astronomy, the DWLS has found use in creating geometric phase holograms for use in mobile displays, holographic imaging,
and remote-sensing devices for everything from satellites to cameras. One high-profile application was the visually impressive"Rainbow Station,
Escuti is continuing to work on new applications with direct support from the National Science Foundation and the Jet propulsion laboratory
but also to greatly improve the precision of atomic clocks, telescopes, and GPS equipment. The research was performed by scientists from the Laser Physics
meaning light no longer behaves as a moving wave, traveling through space in a series of crests and troughs.
The crests and troughs oscillate only as a variable of time, not space.""This uniform phase allows the light to be stretched or squashed, twisted or turned, without losing energy.
#Liquid Water Likely Flows On the Salty Hills of Mars It almost as if our moon turned blood red last night to herald NASA latest Red planet news. At 11:30 EDT,
NASA Headquarters will hold a press conference to discuss their most recent finding: new data that suggests liquid water exists on Mars even today.
This could be the first time in mission history that we have definitive reason to believe there might be microbial life on our closest neighbor.
In a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, Dr. Alfred S. Mcewen and other scientists identified waterlogged molecules salts of a type known as perchlorates in readings from orbit. hat
In 1972, NASA Mariner 9 spacecraft discovered evidence of erosion features on Mars that implicated the presence of water at some point in the planet past.
the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) aboard the European space agency Mars Express spacecraft took a photo of a water ice crater 35 meters in diameter at the Martian north pole.
Finally, in March of this year, NASA and colleagues at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) uncovered evidence of a massive ancient ocean that once covered almost half of Mars northern hemisphere.
But until now, scientists had not yet found any signs of liquid water on the present-day surface of Mars
In 2011, Dr. Mcewen (a planetary geologist at the University of Arizona and principal investigator of images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) spotted dark streaks sloping down some of Mars canyons and mountains.
but measurements indicate very low humidity on Mars only enough for 10 microns, or about 1/2, 500th of an inch, of rain across the planet if all of the wetness were wrung out of the air.
That idea cannot be ruled entirely out if the lower part of the atmosphere turns out more humid than currently thought.
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