Astronomers from Cardiff University are involved in a race against time to uncover the hidden secrets of the Universe. The team, from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, are completing the very first survey for cosmic hydrogen – the primeval gas which emerged from the Big Bang to form all the stars and galaxies we can see today.
Missing: around 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas charged with global warming. Every year, industry releases about 22 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And every year, when scientists measure the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it doesn?t add up ? about half goes missing. Figuring in the amount that could be soaked up by oceans, some 7 billion tons still remain unaccounted for. Now, a study conducted at the edge of Israel?s Negev Desert has come up with what might be a piece of the puzzle.
North Carolina chemists have developed a method of growing one-atom-thick cylinders of carbon, called “nanotubes,” 100 times longer than usual, while maintaining a soda-straw straightness with controllable orientation. Their achievement solves a major barrier to the nanotubes’ use in ultra-small “nanoelectronic” devices, said the team’s leader. The researchers have also grown checkerboard-like grids of the tubes which could form the basis of nanoscale electronic devices.
Using the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope and helped by a gigantic cosmic lens conveniently provided by nature, an international team of astronomers has discovered that a young galaxy had a central disk of gas in which hundreds of new stars were being born every year — at a time when the Universe was only a fraction of its current age.
Findings of a National Academies’ National Research Council report released on the cumulative effects of oil and gas exploration on the Alaska North Slope region present “a classic case of the tradeoffs that society faces when natural resource development is balanced against a desire to preserve and protect the environment,” according to NRC researchers.
Using a sensitive new imaging instrument on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, researchers have discovered a large and surprisingly dense gas cloud sharing an orbit with Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. Stretching millions of miles around Jupiter, the donut-shaped cloud, known as a “torus,” is believed to result from the uncommonly severe bombardment of ion radiation that Jupiter sends toward Europa. That radiation damages Europa’s surface, kicking up and pulling apart water-ice molecules and dispersing them along Europa’s orbit into a neutral-gas torus with a mass of about 60,000 tons.
An Ohio astronomer and her colleagues have detected a type of hot gas in space that could account for part of the “missing” matter in the universe. A gas cloud, one trillion times more massive than our sun and more than 150 times hotter, surrounds our local group of galaxies, the astronomers reported in the journal Nature. Though vast, this gas cloud is only part of larger rivers of gas that wind between all the galaxies of the universe.