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The Nobel Prize in chemistry is going to Ramakrishnan, Steitz, Yonath — [7 Oct] The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, has decided to award the Nobel...

The Nobel Prize in physics is going to Kao, Boyle and Smith — [6 Oct] The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, has decided to award the Nobel...

The Nobel in medicine is going to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak — [5 Oct] The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, has decided to award the...

Tyrannosaur design evolved at 'punk size' — [17 Sep] A new dinosaur shows that tyrannosaur design evolved at 'punk size.' The creature,...

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Last updated: Thursday, 19 November 2009 18:18 GMT
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Ghostly 'spokes' puff out from Saturn's ring's

Ghostly 'spokes' puff out from Saturn's ring's

— 15 November 17:06 | Astronomy

Massive, bright clouds of tiny ice particles hover above the darkened rings of Saturn in an image captured by the Cassini spacecraft on 22 September 2009 around the time of Saturn's equinox. During this period, sunlight hits the rings edge-on and shines directly over the equator. The levitating icy particle clouds, which are known as 'spokes' and are as wide as 10,000 kilometres (6,000 miles), appear particularly dramatic because of the unique lighting geometry of the equinox period... — full story


Minuscule
Voices of long-dead stars haunt the galaxy — Mysterious radio blips that come from apparently empty regions of space may be the voices of long-dead stars....
Frog embryos 'smell' predators — Frogs learn to recognise the smell of their enemies while they are still developing as embryos, say scientists....
Polar bear plus grizzly equals? — What do you get if you cross a polar bear with a grizzly brown bear? Scientists can now answer the question, following the...
Ghostly 'dance of a sea dragon' — One of the most elegant courtship rituals in the animal kingdom has been captured on film by a BBC crew....
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Artist's impression of a baby star still surrounded by a protoplanetary disc in which planets are forming. Using ESO's very successful HARPS spectrograph, a team of astronomers has found that Sun-like stars which host planets have destroyed their lithium much more efficiently than planet-free stars. This finding does not only shed light on the low levels of this chemical element in the Sun, solving a long-standing mystery, but also provides astronomers with a very efficient way to pick out the stars most likely to host planets. It is not clear what causes the lithium to be destroyed. The general idea is that the planets or the presence of the protoplanetary disc disturb the interior of the star, bringing the lithium deeper down into the star than usual, into regions where the temperature is so hot that it is destroyed, (c) ESO/L. CalcadaExoplanets clue to sun's curious chemistry

— 12 Nov | Astronomy

'For almost 10 years we have tried to find out what distinguishes stars with planetary systems from their barren cousins,' says Garik Israelian, lead author of a paper appearing this... — full story

The FORS1 instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO's Paranal Observatory was used to take this exquisitely sharp close up view of the colourful Jewel Box cluster, NGC 4755. The telescope's huge mirror allowed very short exposure times: just 2.6 seconds through a blue filter (B), 1.3 seconds through a yellow/green filter (V) and 1.3 seconds through a red filter (R). The field of view spans about seven arcminutes, (c) ESOOpening up a colourful cosmic jewel box

— 29 Oct | Astronomy

Star clusters are among the most visually alluring and astrophysically fascinating objects in the sky. One of the most spectacular nestles deep in the southern skies near the Southern... — full story

On 19 October 2009, the team who built the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, better known as HARPS, the spectrograph for ESO's 3.6-metre telescope, reported on the incredible discovery of some 32 new exoplanets, cementing HARPS's position as the world's foremost exoplanet hunter. One of these is surrounding the star Gliese 667 C, which belongs to a triple system. The 6 Earth-mass exoplanet circulates around its low-mass host star at a distance equal to only 1/20th of the Earth-Sun distance. The host star is a companion to two other low-mass stars, which are seen here in the distance, (c) ESO32 new exoplanets found

— 20 Oct | Astronomy

'HARPS is a unique, extremely high precision instrument that is ideal for discovering alien worlds,' says Stephane Udry, who made the announcement. 'We have now completed our initial... — full story

This image shows an artist's conception of the bubble around our solar system moving through the interstellar medium, the matter that fills the local region of our galaxy. New observations from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn suggest the shape resembles something like a slippery ball moving through smoke, (c) NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPLCassini data help redraw shape of solar system

— 16 Oct | Astronomy

Images from the Ion and Neutral Camera on NASA's Cassini spacecraft suggest that the heliosphere, the region of the sun's influence, may not have the comet-like shape predicted by existing... — full story


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The new dinosaur, Raptorex, from NE China had evolved all the hallmark anatomical features of Tyrannosaurus rex at least 125 million years ago, (c) Todd MarshallTyrannosaur design evolved at 'punk size'

— 17 Sep | Geology and palaeontology

A new dinosaur shows that tyrannosaur design evolved at 'punk size.' The creature, Raptorex, from NE China had evolved all the hallmark anatomical features of Tyrannosaurus rex at least... — full story

This natural colour view of Saturn and Titan was created by combining images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters. The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on 29 January 2008, at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles, or 2.2 million kilometres, from Titan and 630,000 miles, or 1,013,887 kilometres, from Saturn, (c) NASA, JPL, Space Science InstituteUnravelling the chemistry of Titan's hazy atmosphere

— 16 Sep | Astronomy

An international team of scientists has announced the confirmation of a key chemical reaction that forms the molecule triacetylene in the ultra-cold atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan.... — full story

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