Although this planet probably cannot support life as we know it the discovery greatly expands the places we can look for potentially habitable worlds outside our solar system.
and his team used a technique called gravitational microlensing to study a binary system with two red dwarfs small stars that are dimmer than the sun. The distance between the stars is about 10 to 15 times that of Earth
and the sun. The team found a planet about twice the mass of Earth orbiting just one of the two stars at about the same distance as we are to our home star.
This shows more than ever that our solar system is not the paradigm in our galaxy says Beaulieu.
But the same planet orbiting a sun-like star in a binary system would be in the habitable zone where conditions could support liquid water
In which case he adds it is a direct remnant of one of the most violent events in our solar system's history.
But it did not yet have an ozone layer to shield the surface from the sun's harshest ultraviolet rays.
while letting enough sunlight through to allow them to photosynthesise. Complex life evolved long before the crater formed
Asteroid and comet impacts are ubiquitous in the solar system so Pontefract thinks impacts could have helped kick-start life on rocky planets
Neighbouring planet Kepler-10b was already famous among planet hunters for being confirmed the first rocky world outside our solar system.
The more we find planets outside the solar system the more we are surprised by the diversity of these new worlds says Dumusque e
#Sun's fractal surprise could help fusion On earth THE sun has thrown us a fractal surprise.
An unexpected pattern has been glimpsed in the solar wind the turbulent plasma of charged particles that streams from the sun. It offers clues for handling plasmas that roil inside nuclear fusion reactors On earth.
and electrons the solar wind streams from the sun and pervades the solar system. Its flow is turbulent containing eddies and moving at different speeds in different directions.
It was thought that this turbulence was similar to that in a fluid behaving like mixing ocean currents
Now Sandra Chapman of the University of Warwick UK and her colleagues have examined the solar wind's behaviour using NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft.
One flies just within Earth's orbit around the sun the other just outside it allowing the pair to obtain unique measurements of solar wind behaviour.
when the movement of the wind's particles is perpendicular to the sun's magnetic field they resemble a fluid with sections that are smooth interrupted by bursts of violence.
These create energy in the same way as the sun by fusing a superheated plasma of hydrogen nuclei to form helium.
Enter the solar wind. Though less dense and cooler than the hydrogen of a fusion reactor the wind is a plasma
The great thing about solar wind turbulence is that the satellites sit right inside so it can be observed in exquisite detail says Steve Cowley of the Culham Centre for Fusion energy UK.
Fresh discoveries have put two moons in our solar system neck and neck in the race.
Both moons are now among the hottest prospects in the solar system for finding alien life
when the sun becomes a red giant in 6 billion years. A lot of things can happen in 6 billion years
Some future extraterrestrials visiting our solar system will be able to look at the naked rocky core of
and take whatever the solar wind gives it it can actually fight back. Earth is surrounded always by a bubble of magnetism called the magnetosphere
which protects us from the bulk of the solar wind a stream of high-energy particles constantly flowing from the sun
. But sometimes the sun's magnetic field lines can directly link up with Earth's in a process called magnetic reconnection which opens up cracks in the magnetosphere.
Gas in Earth's upper atmosphere is ionised by ultraviolet light from the sun and the resulting plasma becomes trapped by magnetic fields in a doughnut-shaped ring around the planet.
Theory had suggested that an extra-strong electric field from the sun can rip plasma away from the plasmasphere during reconnection triggering a plume.
and saw a tendril of increased electron density curling away from the north pole indicating that a plume of plasma was veering off towards the sun. At the same time three of NASA's THEMIS spacecraft
and the sun's says Walsh. It gets to that boundary and helps protect us keeps these solar storms from slamming into us.
here's what it will Do it's the Mount everest of the solar system conquered only by an elite group.
We do however know that high speed impacts are a ubiquitous process as we see impact craters on every solid surface in the solar system says Mark Price at the University of Kent UK.
As impacts between icy bodies occur throughout the solar system then complex organic molecules are also very probably widespread.
Sprint-A will also peer at Jupiter's moon Io the most volcanically active body in the solar system to see how the tiny moon influences Jupiter's mighty auroras.
Extreme UV from the sun gets bent at the boundary where a planet's atmosphere meets space
But we also know that the sun pumps out a constant stream of charged particles called the solar wind
Earth is protected from the solar wind by a relatively strong global magnetic field which repels charged particles from the sun explains Nick Schneider of the Laboratory for Atmospheric
and Space Physics in Boulder Colorado who has worked on Sprint-A. Still the solar wind would have been much stronger
when the sun was young and more active. Because Venus is closer to the sun the solar wind might have stripped gaseous water from its early atmosphere leaving a thick haze of mostly carbon dioxide that turned the planet's surface into a hellish desert.
And while Mars is farther away it has no global magnetic field. It is thought the solar wind thinned the Red planet's atmosphere over time making it cold and dry.
It turns out that most atmospheres have lost a lot of gas over their lifetimes. On Mars it may be as much as 99 per cent.
What drives the escaping is a big question says Schneider. Solar stripping is a leading hypothesis
Sprint-A will help from afar by looking for the extreme UV radiation generated as the solar wind slams into the upper atmospheres of both Mars
By observing this phenomenon we will investigate how the solar wind affects the upper atmosphere of planets and how the planetary atmosphere escapes into outer space.
But it is clear from our solar system that a lot of other factors come into play says Schneider d
whether it is small and compact like our sun or big and bloated like a red giant the type of star the sun will swell into in about 5 billion years.
But such estimates are crude with uncertainties of more than 90 per cent. Much more accurate size and mass measurements boasting uncertainties of just 2 per cent come from studying vibrations within the star called starquakes.
or asteroseismology signals from sun-like stars says Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard of Aarhus University in Denmark who leads a consortium of researchers who analyse Kepler's starquake data.
#Solar system has shaped a tail like a four-leaf clover Lucky us! Our solar system has a tail reminiscent of a four-leaf clover according to new observations of the plasma bubble that shields the solar system from the rest of the galaxy.
The discovery should help us better understand how our star interacts with the Milky way including how harmful cosmic rays from interstellar space manage to sneak through the solar system's magnetic barrier.
The sun is currently zipping through one of the Milky way's spiral arms at a relative speed of about 23 kilometres per second ploughing through thin clouds of interstellar dust and gas.
At the same time a stream of particles blowing out from the sun the solar wind inflates a bubble of plasma around the solar system called the heliosphere Astronomers have assumed long that the sun's motion through the galaxy squashes
and spreads the heliosphere into a bullet shape with an extended tail at the back (see image).
But until now it has been hard to see for sure what our own sun's tail might look like.
IBEX creates images of the solar system's borders by observing neutral atoms produced when charged particles from the solar wind collide with other charged particles in the outer heliosphere Some of these neutral atoms are bounced back towards us.
They are deflected not by magnetic fields as they travel so neutral atoms faithfully record the point of collision.
and paint a picture of the solar system using atoms instead of light Christian says. One surprise is that
The four lobes might be a reflection of solar activity at the time the particles left the sun says IBEX principal investigator David Mccomas. The particles took a few years to reach the tail
when the sun was minimally active. Around solar minimum you get slow solar wind around low to mid-latitudes from the sun
and high speed around high latitudes says Mccomas . But he expected this would create more of a solid horizontal band of slow particles across the tail not the odd lobes.
At solar maximum the bands of slow and fast particles streaming away from the sun break down so the tail may change its shape
when the sun's activity reaches its peak says Mccomas. Ultimately a better understanding of the tail
and where material from our solar system affects the rest of the galaxy and how the galaxy influences us.
Our own sun and the Earth and all of us are made up of atoms that came out of other stars'stellar winds long ago says Mccomas. There's a big recycling process that occurs
or our sun leaves the region of the sun and gets mixed in with the rest of the stuff.
But some manage to impinge on our solar system and previous observations have shown that they seem to come mostly from the tail's direction says Dingus.
It could be that the heliotail is acting as a funnel for cosmic rays allowing them to leak into the solar system where the sun's influence is weakest.
For a star like our sun a dusty clump in the same orbit as Earth can grow to about a metre wide.
#Antares rocket launch heats up private space race Watch out Spacex there's a new commercial rocket in town.
After a few delays due to weather and a technical glitch the Antares launch vehicle lifted off on its maiden flight on 21 april.
Antares built by spaceflight company Orbital Sciences of Dulles Virginia lifted off from the Mid-atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island Virginia at 22.00 GMT.
Antares was designed to deliver the company's Cygnus cargo craft to the ISS. For the test flight the rocket climbed high into a clear blue sky carrying a mock cargo ship with the same mass
Mars is going to pass behind the sun from Earth's perspective for the entire month of April blocking communications between the rover and mission control.
#8th-century tree rings hint at close-range space blast A blast of radiation that hit Earth circa AD 770 may have been caused not by a solar flare but by the energetic debris from the collision of two nearby neutron stars.
There is nothing similar anywhere else in around 3000 years of tree ring records leading Miyake to suggest a massive solar flare as the cause.
and there is no historical record of such an energetic solar flare. The aurora would have been seen up to tropical latitudes says Valeri Hambaryan of the University of Jena Germany.
It should absorb virtually all wavelengths of light that reach Earth s surface from the sun but not much of the rest of the spectrum since that would increase the energy that is reradiated by the material
and has the additional benefits of absorbing sunlight from a wide range of angles and withstanding extremely high temperatures.
The sunlight s energy is converted first to heat which then causes the material to glow emitting light that can in turn be converted to an electric current.
In order to take maximum advantage of systems that concentrate sunlight using mirrors the material must be capable of surviving unscathed under very high temperatures Chou says.
And since the new material can absorb sunlight efficiently from a wide range of angles Chou says we don t need really solar trackers
In this paper the authors demonstrated in a system designed to withstand high temperatures the engineering of the optical properties of a potential solar thermophotovoltaic absorber to match the sun s spectrum.
but also light much as window blinds tilt to filter the sun. Researchers say the work could lead to waterproofing and anti-glare applications such as smart windows for buildings and cars.
or sunlight says Yangying Zhu a graduate student in MIT s Department of Mechanical engineering. So you could filter how much solar radiation you want coming in and also shed raindrops.
#Steam from the sun A new material structure developed at MIT generates steam by soaking up the sun. The structure a layer of graphite flakes
When sunlight hits the structure surface, it creates a hotspot in the graphite, drawing water up through the material pores,
if scaled up, the setup would likely not require complex, costly systems to highly concentrate sunlight.
who led the development of the structure. specially in remote areas where the sun is the only source of energy,
Cutting the optical concentration Today, solar-powered steam generation involves vast fields of mirrors or lenses that concentrate incoming sunlight, heating large volumes of liquid to high enough
when exposed to sunlight, vaporizing the surrounding water molecules as steam. But initiating this reaction requires very intense solar energy about 1, 000 times that of an average sunny day.
is that steam-generating applications can function with lower sunlight concentration and less-expensive tracking systems. his is a huge advantage in cost-reduction,
From sun to steam The approach itself is relatively simple: Since steam is generated at the surface of a liquid,
Ghasemi looked for a material that could both efficiently absorb sunlight and generate steam at a liquid surface.
As sunlight hits the structure, it creates a hotspot in the graphite layer, generating a pressure gradient that draws water up through the carbon foam.
and exposing it to a solar simulator a light source that simulates various intensities of solar radiation.
but the exact reason why the compound is so effective at blocking such a broad spectrum of sunlight has remained something of a mystery.
#Getting more electricity out of solar cells When sunlight shines on today solar cells, much of the incoming energy is given off as waste heat rather than electrical current.
In most photovoltaic (PV) materials, a photon (a packet of sunlight) delivers energy that excites a molecule,
which makes up almost half the sun electromagnetic radiation at the Earth surface. According to their estimates, applying their technology as an inexpensive coating on silicon solar cells could increase efficiency by as much as 25 percent.
and pilot their technology in outdoor solar systems. Unified Solar now becomes the finalist in the energy category in the MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition,
Sun exposure to solar panels produces about 0. 5 percent of wasted heat per Degree celsius increase.
The problem with solar power is that sometimes the sun doesn shine. Now a team at MIT and Harvard university has come up with an ingenious workaround a material that can absorb the sun heat
and store that energy in chemical form, ready to be released again on demand. This solution is no solar-energy panacea:
since it makes the sun energy, in the form of heat, storable and distributable, says Jeffrey Grossman, an associate professor of materials science and engineering,
Exposing them to sunlight causes them to absorb energy and jump from one configuration to the other,
taking in energy from the sun, storing it indefinitely, and then releasing it on demand.
while the sun isn out, being able to store heat for later use could be a big benefit.
and can withstand extreme temperatures, sun exposure, and heavy wear, says Doyle, the senior author of a paper describing the particles in the April 13 issue of Nature Materials.
Plants typically make use of only about 10 percent of the sunlight available to them,
and it works much more reliably than lidar in bright sunlight when ambient light can yield misleading readings.
the Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical engineering at MIT. hat pretty much a description of what the ankle is.
First the cell absorbs sunlight which excites electrons in the active layer of the cell.
#Toward a low-cost'artificial leaf'that produces clean hydrogen fuel For years scientists have been pursuing artificial leaf technology a green approach to making hydrogen fuel that copies plants'ability to convert sunlight into a form of energy they can use.
Peidong Yang Bin Liu and colleagues note that harnessing sunlight to split water and harvest hydrogen is one of the most intriguing ways to achieve clean energy.
Producing hydrogen at low cost from water using the clean energy from the sun would make this form of energy
and exposed to sunlight produces hydrogen gas. The scientists say that the technique could allow their technology to be scaled up at low cost.
Last spring Fan received a proof-of-concept grant from the Department of energy through the North Central Regional Sun Grant Center to determine
Sun Grant promotes collaboration among researchers from land-grant institutions government agencies and the private sector to develop
While they are not nearly as efficient as silicon-based solar cells in collecting sunlight and transforming it into electricity,
The new dye-sensitized solar cells were as much as 20 percent better at converting sunlight into power,
Over the years scientists have been very successful at making complex 3d shapes from DNA using diverse strategies said Wei Sun a postdoctoral scholar in the Wyss'Molecular Systems Lab
and functionally-relevant materials such as gold and silver Sun said. Just as any expanding material can be shaped inside a mold to take on a defined 3d form the Wyss team set out to grow inorganic particles within the confined hollow spaces of stiff DNA nanostructuresthe concept can be likened to the Japanese method of growing watermelons in glass cubes.
Professor Evans and his team have all of the membrane proteins required to construct a fully working mimic of the way plants capture sunlight.
It should absorb virtually all wavelengths of light that reach Earth's surface from the sun but not much of the rest of the spectrum since that would increase the energy that is reradiated by the material
and has the additional benefits of absorbing sunlight from a wide range of angles and withstanding extremely high temperatures.
The sunlight's energy is converted first to heat which then causes the material to glow emitting light that can in turn be converted to an electric current.
In order to take maximum advantage of systems that concentrate sunlight using mirrors the material must be capable of surviving unscathed under very high temperatures Chou says.
And since the new material can absorb sunlight efficiently from a wide range of angles Chou says we don't need really solar trackers
In this paper the authors demonstrated in a system designed to withstand high temperatures the engineering of the optical properties of a potential solar thermophotovoltaic absorber to match the sun's spectrum.
Guo J. F. Liu J. Sun C. N. Maleksaeedi S. Bi G. et al. Effects of nano-Al2o3 particle addition on grain structure evolution and mechanical behaviour of friction-stir-processed Al.
Researchers have known long that some single-celled organisms use a protein called bacteriorhodopsin (br) to absorb sunlight
If the researchers wanted to power their generators with sunlight, they'd need to improve on that.
acts as a large solar system that can be used to recharge portable electronics and lights for the upcoming night of camping."
calibrated to one Sun illumination (natural sunlight). The measurement itself is conceptually simple:""We're applying an oscillating voltage across the device
"We do this underneath the simulated sunlight. Mathematically, we're looking at the phase shifting of the current out relative to the voltage in."
"Co-authors are Xiaoping Hong, Jonghwan Kim, Su-Fei Shi, Yu Zhang, Chenhao Jin, Yinghui Sun, Sefaattin Tongay, Junqiao Wu and Yanfeng Zhang.
which degrade under exposure to sunlight and can also be difficult to align with imaging sensors.
It's a pitfall that could be important to understand in the development of long-lasting solar cells where sun could provide risky heat into the equation.
Collecting sunlight using these tiny colloidal quantum dots depends on two types of semiconductors: n-type which are rich in electrons;
and hold sunlight to drive the chemical reactions involved in water splitting. Semiconductors like silicon and gallium arsenide are excellent light absorberss is clear from their widespread use in solar panels.
While the overall efficiency of this cell is still low compared to other types about 9 percent of the energy of sunlight is converted to electricity the rate of improvement of this technology is one of the most rapid seen for a solar technology.
and thus boosting their overall efficiency in converting sunlight into electricity. Many approaches to creating low-cost large-area flexible and lightweight solar cells suffer from serious limitations such as short operating lifetimes
Just as a glass lens can be used to focus sunlight to a certain spot, these plasmonic nanostructures concentrate incoming light into hotspots on their surface,
The telescope's measurements will provide astronomers with clues to events early in the solar system's history according to the agency's description of the project.
Bill Joy-Chief Scientist and Cofounder-Sun Micro Systems sums it up best in this Wired article.
and is part of a star group named after Beta pictoris that also came together about 12 million years ago.
There is a planet in orbit around Beta pictoris itself but PSO J318. 5-22 has a lower mass
A Bright Flash From The Sun At 8: 30 p m. Eastern time yesterday a solar flare peaked on the surface of the sun emitting an intense burst of radiation.
The sun is currently undergoing a solar maximum a peak of activity that occurs about every 11 years making solar flares like this more likely.
#How Technology Will Make Everyone A Great Photographer At the end of May the Chicago Sun-Times laid off all its staff photographers.
#As one might expect the Sun-Times decision has met with criticism. It s been called â##shortsightedâ
#and â##idiotic. â#There s even a Tumblr of head-to-head comparisons between the Sun-Times
And in theory it will give the Sun-Times even more reach by leveraging the cameras already in place at news events.#
The Sun-Times to benefit from that type of machine vision the software will need to process larger image batches from multiple sources.
In time those pieces may come together proving that the Sun-Times decision wasn t foolish it was just a bit before its time.#
#One In Five Sun-Like Stars Have Earthlike Planets Back in February a team at Harvard announced they had found a possible Earthlike planet just 13 lightyears away.
and one-thousandth as bright as the sun. But in this week's PNAS Online Early Edition a team of researchers from#University of California at#Berkeley released a study that looks at how common Earth-size planets
are around stars that are more like our sun. The study found that for stars that more closely resemble our sun about 22 percent
The habitable zone includes orbits where planets receive the same amount of stellar energy from a star as the Earth receives from the sun. Earth-size planets include those that are between one and two times the size of Earth.
These stars'surface temperatures range from just a bit hotter than the sun's 5778 Kelvin to as cool as 4100 Kelvin all of which are hotter than the M-class red dwarfs studied previously.
or at all and get a job after graduation. â#Doing scientific research in Antarctica is incredibly important and expensive According to a March 2012 article in the NSF-funded Antarctic Sun
zee44. comwhen the shark looks up from the depths of the water seeing the surface with the swimmer having the sun overhead silhouetting the swimmer the happy shark with open its mighty jaws with delight of his soon to be eaten meal of
what he believes is a seal shadowing the sun. Of course biting the diver will be a little a big wad of gume with the camouflage rubber wet suit.
Since the lunar environment has none of the resources needed for agriculture (except for sunlight) just how would this take some of the strain off earth's resources?
But don't forget as far as sunlight is concerned. On the moon you have 14 of our days of sunlight and then 14 of our days of dark.
But don't forget as far as sunlight is concerned. On the moon the sunlight is moderated not by an atmosphere.
Agreed d
#This Woman Sees 100 Times More Colors Than The Average Person When Concetta Antico looks at a leaf she sees much more than just green.
Around the edge I ll see orange or red or purple in the shadow; you might see dark green
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