Hidden Details of Earth’s Atmosphere Revealed By Orbiting Spacecraft

Watching the stars set from the surface of the Earth may be a romantic pastime but when a spacecraft does it from orbit, it can reveal hidden details about a planet’s atmosphere.

The technique is known as stellar occultation. Jean-Loup Bertaux, Service d’Aeronomie du CNRS, France was the first to suggest its use on an ESA mission. It works by watching stars from space, while they drop behind the atmosphere of a planet under investigation, before disappearing from view below the planet’s horizon.

Bonn astronomers simulate life and death in the universe

Stars always evolve in the universe in large groups, known as clusters. Astronomers distinguish these formations by their age and size. The question of how star clusters are created from interstellar gas clouds and why they then develop in different ways has now been answered by researchers at the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at the University of Bonn with the aid of computer simulations. The scientists have solved – at least at a theoretical level – one of the oldest astronomical puzzles, namely the question of whether star clusters differ in their internal structure. The findings have now been published in the science journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” (MNRAS 380, 1589).

Chance Encounter With Comet Nets Surprising Results

Comets are made of the most primitive stuff in the solar system. As hunks of rock and ice that never coalesced into more planets, they give researchers clues to the evolution of solar systems.

Understanding The Big Bang: Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider Aids Search For Quark-gluon Plasma

A large scale STAR experiment is currently under way at Brookhaven National Laboratory, with the Sun Grid Compute Utility from Sun’s Network.com delivering large-scale computing power and related resources on a utility basis as the project requires.