Does it matter if the UK leaves Euratom? On 29 March Theresa May sent a six-page letter notifying the EU of the UK's intention to leave. The Article 50 letter contained a clause little discussed at the time - notifying the EU of the UK's withdrawal from the European Atomic Energy Community, also known a...
A team led by John Lacy of the University of Texas at Austin recently used the instrument TEXES on Gemini North to map the star-forming region IRS2 located deep within the molecular cloud associated with the giant H II region W51. The spatial and spectral performance of TEXES on Gemini allowed the tea...
NASA Selects New Frontiers Mission Concept Study
NASA today announced a mission to fly to Jupiter will proceed to a preliminary design phase. The mission is called Juno, and it is the second in NASA's New Frontiers Program.
The mission will conduct a first-time, in-depth s...
Huge Antarctic iceberg poised to break away An iceberg expected to be one of the 10 largest ever recorded is ready to break away from Antarctica, scientists say. A long-running rift in the Larsen C ice shelf grew suddenly in December and now just 20km of ice is keeping the 5,000 sq km piece from floating...
NGC 741 (also IC 1751, UGC 1413, MCG 1-6-3, 2MASX J01562094+0537437, and PGC 7252) is a magnitude +11.3 elliptical galaxy located 248 ±18 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. The galaxy was discovered by German-British astronomer William Herschel using a 47.5 cm (18.7 inch) f/...
NGC 474 (also Arp 227, MCG 0-4-85, UGC 864, and PGC 4801) is a magnitude +11.3 lenticular galaxy located about 107 ±8 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. NGC 474, together with the nearly face-on spiral galaxy NGC 470, forms a loose pair of galaxies. It is likely that gravitationa...
Title: Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt cycle in 2009-2011: II, The SEB Revival Author: John H. Rogers A Revival of the South Equatorial Belt (SEB) is an organised disturbance on a grand scale. It starts with a single vigorous outbreak from which energetic storms and disturbances spread around the...
Scientists make "squarest" ice crystals ever You won't find ice cubes like this in your freezer. An international team of scientists has set a new record for creating ice crystals that have a near-perfect cubic arrangement of water molecules - a form of ice that may exist in the coldest high-altitud...
Quantum entanglement could be responsible for mass, and could finally explain why the fundamental particles of matter have the mass they do.
Sometimes, the interaction of two particles, say electrons, causes their individual properties, such as spin, to become "entangled".
If y...
The 120 - 270 metre wide asteroid 2017 NH in the constellation Hercules will make a close pass (16.54 LD, 0.04251 AU), travelling at 7.83 km/second, to the Earth-Moon system on the 12th July 2017 @ 19:04 UT ±00:01. Magnitude: 17.2 V See more The Lunar Distance (LD), the distance between Earth and the M...
Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the Russian Parliament, the State Duma, said that the participants of the Economic Forum in St. Petersburg would discuss a possibility of making ruble coins from precious metals. "We could offer the world the Russian ruble made of palladium. It would be a very str...
The Earth now home to nearly 6.5 billion souls, and more than half of them live in just six countries, according to a report from the French Institute for Demographic Studies (IFED).
Out of every 100 people living in the world, 61 live in Asia, 14 in Africa, 11 in Europe, 9 in Latin America, 5 in North...
Astronomers have discovered hundreds of Jupiter-like planets in our galaxy. However, a handful of the planets found orbiting distant stars are more Earth-sized. This gives hope to astrobiologists, who think we are more likely to find life on rocky planets with liquid water. The rocky planets fou...
A new project known as Galaxy Zoo is calling on members of the public to log on to its website and help classify one million galaxies. The hope is that about 30,000 people might take part in a project that could help reveal whether our existing models of the Universe are correct. Computers users undergo...