Physics & Mathematics

Albert Einstein may have been right that gravity travels at the same speed as light but, contrary to a claim made earlier this year, the theory has not yet been proven. A scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) says the announcement by two scientists, widely reported this past January, about the speed of gravity was wrong.Stuart Samuel, a participating scientist with the Theory Group of Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division, in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, has demonstrated that an “ill-advised” assumption made in the earlier claim led to an unwarranted conclusion.

Recent results of a joint experiment conducted by 460 physicists from 57 research institutions in 12 countries strongly indicate that the scientists have succeeded in reproducing matter as it first appeared in the universe; this matter is called the quark-gluon plasma. The experiment, called PHENIX and conducted at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, has brought together physicists from Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Russia, Sweden and the United States. The Israeli team is led by Prof. Itzhak Tserruya, head of the Weizmann Institute’s Particle Physics Department. Tserruya and his colleagues have designed and built unique particle detectors that are a central part of PHENIX’s detecting system.

Astronomers Steve Howell of the University of California, Riverside and Thomas E. Harrison and Heather Osborne of New Mexico State University have found from their observations of over a dozen mass-losing stars in ‘cataclysmic variables’ that most of the secondary stars do not appear to be normal main sequence stars in terms of their apparent abundances. To various degrees, each star seems to have low to no carbon and other odd mixtures of elements such as sodium and calcium, the astronomers announced today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Nashville, Tenn.

Space just got skinnier: an inflatable fabric airlock could become standard equipment on future space stations after breezing through its prototype testing in April. The inflatable airlock, developed in conjunction with Clemson University’s Clemson Apparel Research, is a prototype designed to permit astronauts to exit from vehicles and structures into space. It’s part of NASA Johnson Space Center’s Advanced Inflatable Airlock (AIA) program.