TUCSON, Ariz. (Nov. 10, 2010) — A unique underground surveillance system tested by UA researchers could be used to watch the entire U.S.-Mexico border continuously.
The border-monitoring system, known as Helios, consists of laser pulses transmitt…
A dubious old saw says that lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice. Now new research shows just how frequently lightning strikes the ground in multiple places. Arizona atmospheric scientists have recently confirmed that cloud-to-ground lightning commonly strikes the ground in two or more places. The finding means that the chances of being struck are about 45 percent higher than people generally assume.
Astronomers have discovered three of the oldest, most distant quasars yet found — quasars close to the Big Bang that began the universe. Xiaohui Fan of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory in Tucson, Ariz., will present the results at the American Astronomical Society’s meeting in Seattle. Fan, leader of the team that discovered the objects, explained that these distant quasars — compact but luminous objects thought to be powered by super-massive black holes — reach back to a time when the universe was just 800 million years old. The highest redshift quasar is roughly 13 billion light years away and was discovered recently in the constellation Ursa Major.