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Electronic Arts and Maxis have released a new gameplay video of Spore, featuring the game's Producer, Kip Katsarelis. The video depicts Spore's space stage, at which point the player will have evolved its creatures into complex society. The player becomes the leader of the spacefaring civilization / empire,... |
27 August 2008
10:04 GMT |
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Results of computer simulations carried out at the Nagoya University, Japan show that, in the outcome of the tremendously energetic event that gave rise to what we now call the universe, ripples propagating through matter caused clouds of gas to condense and collapse, so as to form the first objects to shine visible ... |
1 August 2008
03:49 GMT |
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Polaris, whose vibrations seem to have almost completely decreased this past century, appears now to have resumed its activity, although astronomers don't quite understand what is triggering the process. Polaris, also known as the Northern Star, is a Cepheid variable star that varies its brightness every four da... |
22 July 2008
06:58 GMT |
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The weight of supermassive black holes found in the center of galaxies is usually estimated by measuring the effects of the huge gravitational fields on the objects located in the vicinity of the black holes in question. Now, a new and precise weighing method developed at the University of California with the help of... |
17 July 2008
11:25 GMT |
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The general belief amongst astrophysicists is that the magnetic field of a galaxy evolves simultaneously with the galaxy, slowly building up in time. New observations of the distant universe on the other hand, appear to suggest that this is not quite true and that young galaxies also possess powerful magnetic fields ... |
17 July 2008
02:51 GMT |
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Currently, our Milky Way galaxy is thought to produce about 10 new stars every year, close to nothing compared to a newly found distant galaxy that appears to generate approximately 4,000 new stars each year. A small calculation reveals that such a galaxy would require as little as 50 million years to evolve into one... |
11 July 2008
03:33 GMT |
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In 1994, Apple code-named the Power Macintosh 7100 "Carl Sagan" after the astronomer and science popularizer. His name was only used internally, as an homage to his work. The code-name might not have caused any problems if Apple hadn't also released models codenamed "Cold Fusion" and "Piltdown Man" at the same t... |
13 June 2008
16:26 GMT |
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One of the most expected launches of the year was carried out yesterday at approximately 12:05 pm EDT from NASA's Launch Complex 17-B at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, with the help of a Delta II rocket. The newest high-energy gamma-ray space observatory GLAST was launched into space and inserted into Ear... |
12 June 2008
03:43 GMT |
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What was before this universe is currently anybody's guess, but it is highly likely that it was preceded by a similar universe and therefore time existed before the Big Bang. The evidence to back this theory is said to be found in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation left behind by the light created when th... |
7 June 2008
05:49 GMT |
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Quasi stellar objects, or quasars, are the most powerful celestial bodies in the universe, capable of emitting enough energy to be observable across the whole visible universe. The European VLBI Network of radio telescopes has now discovered what appears to be the most distant quasar ever detected. Observations were ... |
7 June 2008
03:45 GMT |
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Traditional glass mirrors used in telescope manufacturing are very expensive and extremely hard to build, not to mention that they weigh a 'ton' and are incredibly difficult to maneuver. And then there's always the risk that once completed, they may not turn out to be perfect for the job (remember Hubb... |
2 June 2008
06:31 GMT |
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Gravity Probe B is a NASA satellite currently in Earth's orbit, originally designed to measure relativistic effects predicted by Einstein's General Relativity Theory, such as frame dragging and the geodetic effect. It was launched in 2004 and relies on two high-precision gyroscopes to measure the two effect... |
20 May 2008
04:19 GMT |
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There are a number of people around us who see the universe as a place tuned in precisely to support life, and intelligent beings such as ourselves in particular. This is the basic observation behind what is called the "Anthropic Principle," which is struggling to understand why the constants of the universe are the ... |
17 May 2008
07:12 GMT |
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The letter sent by Albert Einstein to philosopher Eric Gutkind in January 1954 - " one year before the physicist's death" - detailing his beliefs about God and the Jewish people was auctioned on Thursday at Bloomsbury Auctions in London, and sold for the sum of 404,000 US dollars, including the buyer's prem... |
17 May 2008
04:07 GMT |
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The universe is expanding. Not only that, but this expansion seems to be accelerating and is now blamed by physicists on a strange form of energy called dark energy. The problem with dark energy, as it is with dark matter, is that we can't seem to find any direct evidence of its existence. What if this cosmic ac... |
13 May 2008
04:39 GMT |
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Latest observations conducted with the NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer UV space telescope reveal young stars forming in the outer regions of the galaxy, some 100,000 light years away from the galactic nucleus. The galaxy in question is known as M83, a spiral galaxy located about 15 million light-years away, sou... |
18 April 2008
03:19 GMT |
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DAMA, or the Dark Matter collaboration, has just finished its four-year second phase of its experiments and claims to have strong evidence of observing dark matter particles. The same Italian and Chinese collaboration claimed to have had clear evidence of dark matter existence ever since 2003, although other physicis... |
17 April 2008
11:10 GMT |
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Inflation theory predicts that, right after the Big Bang event, the universe went through a period of rapid expansion in space-time, which left behind a 'gravitational radiation' signature in the form of gravitational waves, distortions in the fabric of space-time, not yet proven to exist. However, a team o... |
16 April 2008
05:14 GMT |
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The Big Bang theory says that the universe began at T=0 as it suffered a sudden expansion into space-time, from a singularity-like object of zero volume but of infinite mass and density. So what was before that? Certainly, things do not just appear out of nowhere. Some kind of structure must have preceded the current... |
10 April 2008
02:37 GMT |
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Take a patch of the sky with an area four times that of the apparent size of the Moon, study it over a period of three years and you may obtain the most sensitive infrared map of the distant universe. By doing so, researchers from the University of Nottingham obtained the image of more than 100,000 galaxies, as they ... |
9 April 2008
04:11 GMT |
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Dark matter is believed to be responsible for more than 70 percent of the total mass of the universe, however somehow we can't find any, even while regular matter represents only 4 percent of the total mass. This means only two things: either dark matter presents weak interactions towards ordinary matter or dark... |
7 April 2008
10:24 GMT |
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During the span of the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting that took place last week in Belfast, astronomers revealed the latest results of their studies. One of the scientists present there, Martin Dominik from the St Andrews University, pointed out that he and his team discovered a distant ... |
7 April 2008
02:55 GMT |
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Graphene, the material discovered by professor Andre Geim and Dr Kostya Novoselov in 2004, was recently used by researchers from The University of Manchester to make direct measurements on the fundamental constants of the universe. The research conducted by professor Andre Geim, took place at The School of Physics an... |
4 April 2008
02:52 GMT |
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The biggest black hole ever found in the universe weighs a staggering 18 billion times the mass of the Sun; however, NASA now discovered what seems to be the smallest black hole ever known. It has a mass 3.8 times that of the Sun and a diameter of about 24 kilometers. It was discovered with the help of NASA's Ro... |
2 April 2008
03:37 GMT |
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Because light does not travel instantaneously through space, when we look towards distant objects in the universe we actually see them as they appeared in their past. By using this property, astronomers are able to observe how galaxies looked, back in the early days of the universe. Just recently, they discovered wha... |
2 April 2008
02:44 GMT |
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LBG-2377 is a galaxy proto-cluster located 11.4 billion light years away from Earth - the most distant galaxies ever observed. In fact, these galaxies are so far away from us, that they appear as they looked when they were in the first days of their lives. Previously, the most distant such galaxy proto-cluster was lo... |
1 April 2008
03:28 GMT |
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Most contemporary scientists would argue that matter and antimatter behave roughly in the same ways, however proving it is some kind of a challenge. Why? Well, mostly because there is hardly any antimatter in the universe today. Creating antimatter particles is relatively easy in our particle accelerators, capturing ... |
27 March 2008
07:30 GMT |
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After two additional years of measurements with NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which narrowed the uncertainty by a few tens of millions of years, last week astronomers finally confirmed the precise age of the universe: 13.73 billion years, give or take 120 million years. "Everything is tightening ... |
27 March 2008
05:49 GMT |
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White dwarfs are stars in their final stages of life. They are extremely brilliant, usually much smaller that the Sun - because they are basically the cores of dead stars - and cool down and reduce their brightness with the passing of time, until they turn into brown dwarfs, star so faint that they cannot be spotted ... |
26 March 2008
11:40 GMT |
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The Australian National University is making an appeal to the inhabitants of all cities across Australia to turn off all lights this Saturday, between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., in order to raise the awareness of the link between the energy consumption around the world and global warming effects. Amateur astronomers will hav... |
26 March 2008
06:49 GMT |
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The most powerful gamma-ray emission ever seen in the universe was detected yesterday by the Swift satellite, and originated from an area of space more than seven thousand times further away than the distance to the Andromeda galaxy. It was probably created by a massive star in the final stages of life that collapsed... |
20 March 2008
11:30 GMT |
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If it were visible from the Earth with the naked eye, it would appear as a structure eight times bigger than the apparent size of the Moon! Measuring more than 270 million light-years across, the newly discovered cloud is the largest structure of dark matter ever observed. The discovery was made by an astronomer from... |
17 March 2008
11:59 GMT |
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The Dark Ages, as we call the period of time between the Big Bang event and the birth of the first star in the universe, is one of the most debated topics in Cosmology, and one of the most unexplored periods in the history of the universe. All this will hopefully change in the near future with the design of the next-... |
12 March 2008
10:25 GMT |
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They are out there, we know what kind of destruction their capable of, however we have also been lucky enough not have such an object forming in the vicinity of our solar system. Or haven't we? Our biggest threat right now, however, doesn't come from black holes, death rays of any kind or other impending di... |
11 March 2008
07:02 GMT |
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More than eighteen years after it was launched into space, the Hubble Space Telescope is still the spearhead of our space exploration program, systematically mapping and bringing new and wondrous insight into what we call home, our universe. Recently, the Walters Art Museum has organized an exposition named "Maps: Fi... |
10 March 2008
10:17 GMT |
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The most powerful ground based telescope in the world, the Large Binocular Telescope located on Mount Graham, equipped with two 8.4 meter mirrors and the only operational telescope functioning in binocular light, has recently released its first three images featuring a galaxy more than 102 million light years away fr... |
6 March 2008
04:36 GMT |
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The universe is certainly not empty, that's a fact, but its not very dense either. Today, the visible universe consists mostly of empty space, void, while ordinary matter accounts for only 4 percent of the total mass. So where is the rest of 95 percent of the universe's mass? In dark energy and dark matter,... |
6 March 2008
03:03 GMT |
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With the fitting of the last major component of what is now the worlds largest particles accelerator, the build of Large Hadron Collider has been completed. All that remains now is to connect all the smaller components of the collider, in the hope that, by the end of this year, the preliminary experiments may begin. ... |
5 March 2008
04:20 GMT |
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As a bit of a space freak myself, coming across this trio of iPhone web apps was a bit of a shock, but a pleasant one nonetheless. Apple's official website provides descriptions and links to iSkyGaze, Starry Night Mobile and LookUp, three spacey web apps designed to show you the stars and their exact locations, ... |
4 March 2008
08:58 GMT |
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A decade has passed since physicists postulated the existence of dark matter and dark energy in order to complement the missing matter in the universe; however, its constituents are still eluding detection. Aside the weakly interacting neutrino particles described in the Standard Model of the universe, scientists are... |
4 March 2008
02:44 GMT |
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We have yet to find direct evidence of dark energy existence, fact which is kind of annoying for most cosmologist. But do we really need it to explain the absence of more than a quarter of the matter in the universe? Well apparently not, according to a study published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Carbon... |
29 February 2008
03:29 GMT |
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If you think our Sun is a big star, you've seen nothing! Behemoths as large as 120 solar masses lie all around the universe. Theory predicts that stars cannot grow larger than 150 times the mass of the Sun, either that or something drastic must happen, as stellar evolution models cannot explain such objects. Two... |
28 February 2008
02:52 GMT |
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The Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Cryogenic Dark Matter Search Experiment spokesperson, Blas Cabrera, from Stanford University, claims that their scientists are currently spearheading the search for the best candidates for dark matter. The CDMS experiment is located in a mine in So... |
27 February 2008
11:01 GMT |
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How can something exist in two distinct forms at the same time? Physics clearly states that light experiences particle-wave duality, while common sense tells us this is impossible. However, all objects no matter how massive behave in a particle-wave manner. And why is the speed of light the maximum possible speed in ... |
27 February 2008
08:48 GMT |
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Cosmological theories trying to explain the universe as we see it today postulate that, only a few moments after the Big Bang, the matter in the universe should have been composed of equal amounts of regular matter and anti-matter, but this is not what we are observing today, is it? We are not made half of matter and... |
14 February 2008
06:16 GMT |
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Measuring the mass of macroscopic objects is relatively easy, however when we're talking about elementary particles with masses lower than E-30 kilograms (one followed by 30 zeros!), the mass of the electron, things tend to get rather complicated. Usually, the mass of particles is calculated through mathematical... |
13 February 2008
09:25 GMT |
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Using the help provided by a gravitational lensing phenomenon created by a large galaxy cluster, known as Abell 1689, astronomers from NASA have discovered, with the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, what seems to be one of the youngest and brightest galaxies in the universe, located more than 12.8 billion light y... |
12 February 2008
10:30 GMT |
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Divine intervention versus random processes in the universe and the question why. Why are we here, why does the universe exist and, mostly, why is it the way we see it today? The most likely answer that one can get from a physicist is that the universe is the way it is, because if it wasn't, then we wouldn'... |
9 February 2008
06:50 GMT |
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Some may say that such actions are close to impossible, but researchers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, RHIC for short, have already achieved the performance of correcting the trajectory of particles traveling at 99,995 percent of the speed of light, by measuring fluctuations of particle beams as they speed t... |
7 February 2008
08:50 GMT |
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The Polar Research Institute of China has completed the installation of the robotic observatory PLATeau only after two weeks from their arrival at the Dome Argus location on the Antarctic continent, the highest point of the Antarctic Plateau. PLATO has been built by the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, and i... |
4 February 2008
09:23 GMT |
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