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Synopsis: Domenii: Space: Space generale: Celestial body: Star:

A few moments later a flag is waved, red with gold stars on it. This is China's first spacewalk#on 27 september 2008,

It was red with gold stars on it. If you would like to comment on this article

A team at the University of Groningen has demonstrated a way to switch off antibiotic agents after just a few hours using warmth or sunlight.

or exposed to sunlight, they reverted to the Z-form, which is all but useless as an antibiotic.

when powered only by the Sun . If you would like to comment on this slideshow or anything else you have seen on Future,

Flower power, a device due to be launched towards the end of this year by Paris-based wireless tech company Parrot, measures sunlight, soil moisture, temperature and nutrient levels in plants,

and whether they should be moved to change sunlight levels. Flower power and related technologies could be vital in developing countries with dry climates.

In the past decade alone, astronomers have been discovering planets outside our solar system or exoplanets, with astonishing speed.

and located in the so-called Goldilocks zone#an area of space around a parent star that is not too cold or too hot,

Since these planets are expected to be small and faint compared to their sun, spotting them is tricky with existing ground-based optical telescopes."

To tell a parent star and a potentially habitable planet apart, astronomers need incredibly sharp, high-resolution pictures.

the VLT has discovered several worlds outside the Solar system, with the help of an instrument called NACO.

The technology corrects for the blurriness caused by turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere that makes stars twinkle

But even with these adaptive optics tools, existing ground-based telescopes can only"see#planets bigger than Jupiter#gas giants that orbit their parent stars at a huge distance.

among them the search for planets orbiting nearby stars. It will work in the infrared spectrum,

most exoplanets are still found using indirect techniques#such as detecting a wobble in the position of the star that indicates it is being pulled slightly towards an orbiting planet,

when they pass in front of its star. Transiting was used to great success by Kepler, but the method doesn't allow us to calculate a planet's mass#a critical factor in determining its density and hence its rockiness.

It studies space bodies by recording how a planet's gravity makes its parent star appear to vibrate as it rotates around it.

if it wasn't for its proximity to its parent star#the planet lies only 2. 5 million km (1. 6 million miles) away from it,

which is just 1/23rd of the distance from the Sun to Mercury.""By far the most powerful combination right now is the combination of transit detections and Doppler spectroscopy,

and the huge numbers of transit planets discovered by Kepler are all orbiting relatively faint stars

#because Kepler was designed to look at faint stars.##The worlds discovered by Kepler are also thousands of light-years away#totally inaccessible to direct imaging,

but can discern planets around bright nearby stars: Tess, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Due to launch in 2017,

"And if Tess finds a habitable planet around a very nearby star, you can then use the James webb space telescope to measure the composition of its atmosphere.#

#But to really find a habitable Earth-twin orbiting a star just like our Sun,

That's one possibility if Harvard professor Daniel Nocera's idea for a device that can harness and store energy from the Sun comes to fruition.

which focuses the sun rays to create obsidian. Other transformative processes include Ginger Krieg Dosier printed sandstone bricks of bio-manufactured masonry grown using bacteria.

And until the sun comes up really that you know authorities can't get in and really begin to assess

and IFC is instrumental in bringing the project in Chile to life. he Atacama desert receives some of the planet steadiest concentrations of direct sunlight according to First Solar.

the Solartab lets its users charge any mobile device using green, sun-fueled energy. And even more impressively, ipad enthusiasts can charge their beloved touch-screen gadget even

as long as the sun is out, the Solartab will always charge at maximum efficiency. To keep this promise,

After adjusting the angle to the sun current position, all that left to do is plug in any smartphone

and shaded sunlight conditions; conventional systems suffer large efficiency losses, if able to work at all, under such conditions.

Unlike traditional building-applied photovoltaic (PV) systems, restricted to use in direct sunlight on very limited skyscraper rooftop space,

Solarwindow#is designed to operate in sunlight and shaded conditions on the many thousands of square feet of glass surfaces common to today#s high-rise towers#a game-changing advantage.

*Capable of producing power in direct sunlight and shaded or low natural light conditions;**Able to generate significant electricity from both natural and artificial light;*

#MIT Turns Up The Heat On Solar PV You might think that fewer steps in the process of turning sunlight into electricity would be the most efficient way to go.

in order to make use of a wider range of the sun energy. The work here is in the solar realm known as thermophotovoltaics,

T) he team inserted a two-layer absorber-emitter device made of novel materials including carbon nanotubes and photonic crystals between the sunlight and the PV cell.

This intermediate material collects energy from a broad spectrum of sunlight, heating up in the process.

facing the sunlight, is an array of multiwalled carbon nanotubes, which very efficiently absorbs the light energy and turns it to heat.

could provide efficiency because of their broadband absorption of sunlight; scalability and compactness, because they are based on existing chip-manufacturing technology;

#Smart sensors that harvest power from sun heat or vibrations European researchers have developed advanced energy harvesting technology that allows wireless sensor networks to power themselves from the sun, heat or vibrations.

But what if sensors could harness energy directly from their environment from the sun, from ambient heat, from radio waves or vibrations?

"Harvesting the sun, vibrations and radio waves The SWAP team are studying, testing and deploying novel technologies that enable sensors to use solar

where the sun emits more than 40%of its radiation. By improving the reflectance of the materials,

as darker shades take in far more solar radiation. How not to soak up the rays With COOL-Coverings

adds to the difficulty of cooling down sun-kissed cities. To meet their objectives, the partners incorporated nanoparticles and micro-or nano-sized pigments into coatings and surface layers. e implemented this technology for three types of material:

It demands a lot of sun, good soil, water and cold temperatures. But how do you install an environmentally friendly and sustainable cooling system in a country so warm?

"We all get heat from sun. We feel it on our bodies when it's warm,

but who ever heard of getting cold from sun? That's what MEDISCO is about.

The process involves single axis tracking concentrating collectors that essentially orient panels towards the sunlight.

#From sunlight to jet fuel: EU project makes first'solar'kerosene An EU-funded research project called SOLAR-JET has produced the world's first'solar'jet fuel from water and carbon dioxide (CO2), a promising technology for a better

using simulated sunlight. However, the results give hope that in future any liquid hydrocarbon fuels could be produced from sunlight

CO2 and water. The process In a first step concentrated light-simulating sunlight-was used to convert carbon dioxide

and water to synthesis gas (syngas) in a high-temperature solar reactor containing metal-oxide based materials developed at ETH Zürich.

Although producing syngas through concentrated solar radiation is still at an early stage of development, the processing of syngas to kerosene is already being deployed by companies,

Called supporting cells they form a physical base for the hearing system s##stars##the hair cells in the ear that interact directly with the nerves that carry sound signals to the brain.

when the star has been injured. After some searching the team found that an amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum has the gene ptena

The researchers hypothesized that ramping up the presence of lpten making it the star on the court could overcompensate for the mutated ptena.

not only but also that real skin regeneration is occurring##says Zhaoli Sun director of transplant biology research at Johns Hopkins School of medicine.##

Alexander Star, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, says the new chip,

Star says, nd bacterial infections are a common complication of the implant. Infection can damage the body surrounding the implant,

Star and his team have developed similar chip/nanotube sensors that can be affixed to a toothbrush to detect bad breath (the presence of hydrogen sulfide)

Another Star-developed chip measures acetone in breath, an indicator of diabetes. A National Energy technology Laboratory grant supported the research

Organic molecules usually found in these star-forming regions consist of a single ackboneof carbon atoms arranged in a straight chain.

The two molecules isopropyl cyanide and normal-propyl cyanide are also the largest molecules yet detected in any star-forming region

#Computer recreates powerful solar flares ETH Zurich rightoriginal Studyposted by Barbara Vonarburg-ETH Zurich on September 26 2014physicists have used computers to model solar explosions

Hans Jurgen Herrmann a professor at the Institute for Building materials says solar flares were not the original focus of the work.

Similar patterns to those in solar flares can also be found in earthquakes avalanches or the stock market. olar explosions do not of course have any connection with stock exchange ratessays Hermann

In the case of solar flares the build up of magnetic energy is emitted in sudden bursts. The sun consists of hot plasma made of electrons and ions.

Magnetic field lines extend from the solar surface all the way into the corona. Moving and twisting bundles of field lines form magnetic flux tubes.

The affected solar area lights up as a solar flare. The radiation extends across the entire electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves and visible light to X-rays and gamma rays.

Observations suggest that the solar flares size distributions show a certain degree of regularity statistically speaking. vents can be arbitrarily large

However calculations based solely on plasma turbulence were also unable to reproduce the occurrence of solar flares in full.

and reached a breakthrough. e have been able to reproduce the overall picture of how solar flares occurthe researcher says.

which control the occurrence of solar flares. Demonstrating such temporal-energetic correspondences is the first step towards a prediction model.

The researchers say this technology would be useful in places where sun and radio waves can t always penetrate such as inside walls

which degrade under exposure to sunlight and can also be difficult to align with imaging sensors. oday s color filtering mechanisms often involve materials that are not CMOS-compatible

and his team to absorb specific nonvisible wavelengths of sunlight. e can tune these materials to pick up just the ultraviolet

#Star collision may explain the lonely supernova University of Warwick rightoriginal Studyposted by Tom Frew-Warwick on August 11 2014 A massive collision between white dwarf

since that is where the stars arelyman says. owever a large fraction of these are exploding at huge distances from their galaxies where the number of stellar systems is miniscule. hat we address in the paper is

The deep observation allowed them to rule out the presence of faint dwarf galaxies or globular star clusters at the locations of these nearest examples.

although fainter is the collapse of a massive star in a binary system where material is stripped from the massive star undergoing collapse.

or other massive stars in the vicinity allowing them to reject massive stars as the progenitors of calcium rich transients. t was increasingly looking like hypervelocity massive stars could not explain the locations of these supernovaesays Andrew Levan of the physics department. hey must be lower-mass

longer-lived stars but still in some sort of binary systems as there is no known way that a single low-mass star can go supernova by itself

or create an event that would look like a supernova. he researchers then compared their data to

what is known about short-duration gamma ray bursts (SGRBS). These are seen also often to explode in remote locations with no coincident galaxy detected.

instead between a white dwarf star and neutron star it would fit their observations because: hat we therefore propose is these are systems that have been ejected from their galaxy.

A good candidate in this scenario is a white dwarf and a neutron star in a binary system. The neutron star is formed

when a massive star goes supernova. The mechanism of the supernova explosion causes the neutron star to be kicked to very high velocities (100s of km/s). This high velocity system can then escape its galaxy

and if the binary system survives the kick the white dwarf and neutron star will merge causing the explosive transient. he researchers who say such merging systems of white dwarfs

and neutron stars may produce high energy gamma-ray bursts will next look for any new examples of calcium-rich transients to confirm this.

Such merging systems will contribute significant sources of gravitational waves potentially detectable by upcoming experiments that will shed further light on the nature of these exotic systems.

Through photosynthesis, plants and some bacteria turn sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into food for themselves and into oxygen for animals to breathe.

Solar panels can only generate power when the sun shining, and wind turbines can only generate power when the wind blows.

#Solar cell spikes let in 99%of sunlight The more light absorbed by a solar panel active elements,

A new one-step process to etch nanoscale spikes into silicon lets the maximum amount of sunlight reach a solar cell,

Collecting sunlight using these tiny colloidal quantum dots depends on two types of semiconductors: n-type which are rich in electrons and p-type

planet orbiting another star for the first time. Today s forecast: cloudy. Tomorrow: overcast. Extended outlook: more clouds.

Recent searches for planets around other stars (xoplanets have shown that super-Earths like GJ 1214b are among the most common type of planets in the Milky way galaxy.

Because no such planets exist in our solar system the physical nature of super-Earths is largely unknown.

NASA ESA and G. Bacon (STSCL) via U. Chicago) The researchers describe their work as an important milestone on the road to identifying potentially habitable Earthlike planets beyond our Solar system.

Because of its proximity to our solar system and the small size of its host star GJ 1214b is the most easily observed super-Earth.

It transits or passes in front of its parent star every 38 hours which gives scientists an opportunity to study its atmosphere as starlight filters through it.

which monitors two thousand red dwarf stars for transiting planets. The planet was targeted next for follow-up observations to characterize its atmosphere.

But more than that it may open the door to studies of Earthlike planets around nearby stars. he NASA the National Science Foundation the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

The molecule argon hydride was seen in the crab nebula the remains of a star that exploded 1000 years agothe noble gases

when a massive star explodedsays Haley Gomez of Cardiff University s School of Physics and Astronomy. ot only is it very young in astronomical terms

what happens in these stellar explosions. ast year we used the European space agency s Herschel Space observatory to study the intricate network of gas filaments to show how exploding stars are creating huge amounts of space dust. urther measurements

With hot gas still expanding at high speeds after the explosion a supernova remnant is a harsh hot and hostile environment

craters in the solar system may offer clues as to how the moon formed. A massive impact on the moon about 4 billion years ago left the 2500-mile crater.

At 2500 kilometers across the SPA is the largest impact basin on the Moon and perhaps the largest in the solar system.

For nearby observers it briefly appeared brighter than the sun and caused some severe sunburns.

and that it last went through a significant shock event about 115 million years after the formation of the solar system 4567 million years ago.

and more efficient at harvesting energy from the sun. For solar panels wringing every drop of energy from as many photons as possible is imperative.

and most of the energy from the sun is in the visible and infrared spectrum. â#Finding a material that exhibits the bulk photovoltaic effect for visible light would greatly simplify solar cell construction.

Moreover it would be a way around an inefficiency intrinsic to interfacial solar cells known as the Shockley-Queisser limit where some of the energy from photons is lost as electrons wait to make the jump from one material to the other. hink of photons coming from the sun

but not all applications. or observations of rare objects like optical pulsars and high redshift galaxies ARCONS small field of view (20 arc seconds by 20 arc seconds

which data was collected on optical pulsars compact binaries high redshift galaxies and planetary transits. RCONS is very sensitive

and take spectra of planets around nearby stars. Source: UC Santa Barbar

#Wireless device grabs lost energy from Wi-fi Using inexpensive materials configured and tuned to capture microwave signals researchers have designed a power harvesting device with efficiency similar to that of modern solar panels.

The component converts heat from the sun into infrared light which can be absorbed by solar cells to make electricity a technology known as thermophotovoltaics.

A typical solar cell has a silicon semiconductor that absorbs sunlight directly and converts it into electrical energy.

Instead of sending sunlight directly to the solar cell thermophotovoltaic systems have an intermediate component that consists of two parts:

an absorber that heats up when exposed to sunlight and an emitter that converts the heat to infrared light

our solar system orbiting a white dwarf star 170 light years away. Using observations obtained with the Hubble Space Telescopeâ

Evidence for water outside our solar system has previously been found in the atmosphere of gas giants

In the study published in Science researchers suggest it is most likely that the water detected around the white dwarf GD 61 came from a minor planet at least 90 kilometers (56 miles) in diameterâ

##but potentially much biggerâ##that once orbited the parent star before it became a white dwarf.

From the amount of rocks and water detected in the outer envelope of the white dwarf the researchers estimate that the disrupted planetary body had a diameter of at least 90 kilometers.

It is likely that the object was as large as Vesta the largest minor planet in the solar system.

In its former life GD 61 was a star somewhat bigger than our Sun and host to a planetary system.

and became a white dwarf yet parts of its planetary system survived. The water-rich minor planet was knocked out of its regular orbit

Researchers believe that destabilizing the orbit of the minor planet requires a so far unseen much larger planet going around the white dwarf. t this stage in its existence all that remains of this rocky body is simply dust

and debris that has been pulled into the orbit of its dying parent starâ#says Boris Gänsicke professor of physics at the University of Warwick. owever this planetary graveyard swirling around the embers of its parent star is a rich source

and waterâ##are key in the hunt for habitable planets outside our solar system so itâ#very exciting to find them together for the first time outside our solar system.?

The finding of water in a large asteroid means the building blocks of habitable planets existedâ ##and maybe still existâ##in the GD 61 system and likely also around substantial number of similar parent starssays lead author Jay Farihi from the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. hese water-rich building blocks

. or their analysis the researchers used ultraviolet spectroscopy data obtained with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on board the Hubble space telescope of the white dwarf GD 61.

The Hubble and Keck data allows the researchers to identify the different chemical elements that are polluting the outer layers white dwarf.

Using a sophisticated computer model of the white dwarf atmosphere developed by Detlev Koester at the University of Kiel they were able to infer the chemical composition of the shredded minor planet.

#Densest galaxy is jam-packed with stars Michigan State university right Original Studyposted by Tom Oswald-Michigan State on September 25 2013 Astronomers have discovered the densest galaxy in the nearby universe.

The stars are about 25 times closer than those in the Milky way. Imagine the distance between the sun and the star nearest to itâ##a star called Alpha centauri.

That's a distance of about 4 light years. Now imagine as many as 10000 of our suns crammed into that relatively small space. his galaxy is more massive than any ultra-compact drawfs of comparable sizesays Jay Strader assistant professor of physics

and astronomy at Michigan State university nd is arguably the densest galaxy known in the local universe. s detailed in the recent edition of the publication Astrophysical Journal Letters the ultra-compact dwarf galaxy was found in near

This would make the density of stars about 15000 times greater than that found in Earth's neighborhood in the Milky way. raveling from one star to another would be a lot easier in M60-UCD1 than it is in our galaxystrader says. ince the stars are so much closer in this galaxy

but assumed they were either single stars or very-distant galaxies. Another intriguing aspect of this galaxy is the presence of a bright X-ray source in its center.

One explanation for this is a giant black hole weighing in at some 10 million times the mass of our sun. Astronomers are trying to determine

either as really jam-packed star clusters or if they are galaxies that get smaller because they have ripped stars away from them.

The possible massive black hole combined with the high galaxy mass and sun-like levels of elements found in the stars favor the latter idea.

A giant black hole at the center of M60-UCD1 helps tip the scales against the scenario where this galaxy was once a star cluster

since such large black holes are not found in these types of objects. The galaxy was discovered using NASA's Hubble space telescope.

That is roughly the same efficiency at which the best commercially available solar cells convert sunlight into electricity.

##Solar steam kills germs while off the grid RICE (US) A new sterilization system uses nanomaterials to convert 80 percent of the energy in sunlight into heat,

director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) at Rice university. olar steam efficiency at converting sunlight directly into steam opens up new possibilities for off-grid sterilization that simply aren available today In a previous study last year,

Halas and colleagues showed that olar steamwas so effective at direct conversion of solar energy into heat that it could even produce steam from ice water. t makes steam directly from sunlight,

and exposed to sunlight, the particles heat up so quickly they instantly vaporize water and create steam.

##Dynamo accounts for Sun s weather cycle University of Chicago University of Leeds rightoriginal Studyposted by Richard Mellor-Leeds on May 23 2013u.

what drives the generation of astrophysical magnetic fields like the Sun s. Scientists have known since the 18th century that the Sun regularly oscillates between periods of high and low solar activity in an 11-year cycle

but have been unable to fully explain how this cycle is generated. It has become increasingly important to be able to understand the Sun#s magnetic activity as it is the changes in its magnetic field that are responsible for#space weather#phenomena including solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

When this weather heads in the direction of Earth it can damage satellites endanger astronauts on the International space station and cause power grid outages on the ground.

which makes up the Sun. More importantly it does so in the extreme parameter regime that is relevant to astrophysical bodies.#

#Previously dynamos for large highly conducting bodies such as the Sun would be overwhelmed by small-scale fluctuations in the magnetic field.

The presence of spots on the Sun has been known since antiquity and further analyzed after the invention of the telescope by Galileo in the 16th century.

At the start of the 20th century it was recognized then that these sunspots were the result of the Sun#s magnetic field.

and the filters gradually degrade under exposure to sunlight. The Rice researchers stumbled upon the new technique while studying the hypothesis that cephalopods such as octopus and squid

#New Spanish streetlight powered by the sun and the wind The light is being developed through a collaboration between the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Spanish startup Eolgreen.

Spain University of Seville is also working on a solar wind-powered streetlight, while New york-based Urban Green energy already manufacturers one r

Professor Sun Xiaowei and colleagues at NTU have developed a self-powered smart window that is bi-functional.

"says Sun. The scientists also used a small section of their device to power a red LED,

Sun and team are now focusing on further improving the performance of their device and are looking into commercializing the technology,

and can be used easily outdoors, even in full sunlight. As a result, the new technology lends itself to applications such as 3d electronic billboards that could display different ads at the same time, dependent upon the angle of the viewer."

#Panasonic#s new technology purifies water with sunlight and photocatalysts Drinking clean water is something that many people in the world can't take for granted as they rely on polluted sources

In response to that problem Panasonic is developing a new technology that looks to the sun to clean water extracted from the ground.

The company recently presented a system that uses sunlight and photocatalysts to purify polluted water at a high reaction rate to improve access to clean water where it's needed.

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