Researchers have developed technology for large-scale solar power installations to self-clean.
Find dusting those tables and dressers a chore or a bore? Dread washing the windows? Imagine keeping dust and grime off objects spread out over an area of 25 to 50 football fields. That’s the problem facing companies that deploy large-scale solar power installations, and scientists have now presented the development of one solution — self-dusting solar panels ― based on technology developed for space missions to Mars.
In a report at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) on August 22, they described how a self-cleaning coating at first glance of solar cells could increase the efficiency of producing electricity from sunlight and reduce maintenance costs for large-scale solar installations. Continue Reading »
The discovery of nine new transiting exoplanets has been announced at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting. When these new results were combined with earlier observations of transiting exoplanets astronomers were surprised to find that six out of a larger sample of 27 were found to be orbiting in the opposite direction to the rotation of their host star — the exact reverse of what is seen in our own solar system. Continue Reading »
The Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw has started work on developing a geological penetrator CHOMIK (the Polish word for hamster), intended for the Russian space mission Phobos Sample Return. The return spacecraft will reach Earth in mid-2014 with a soil sample collected by the penetrator on the surface of the Martian moon Phobos. Continue Reading »
The cosmos is filled with stars. However, the closest star beyond the Sun is so far away, that it would take the fastest spacecraft 75,000 years to reach it. Astronomers can’t study the cosmos by sending probes to gather information about other stars, as we do with our own Sun and its planets. Fortunately they don’t have to. The information comes to us at the speed of light! Continue Reading »
For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island recently discovered a law of nature had been broken.
Action still resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, gravity kept the Earth circling the Sun, and conservation of energy remained intact. But for the tiniest fraction of a second at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists created a symmetry-breaking bubble of space where parity no longer existed. Continue Reading »
Supermassive black holes found at the centers of distant galaxies undergo huge growth spurts as a result of galactic collisions, according to a new study by astronomers at Yale University and the University of Hawaii.
Their findings appear in the March 25 edition of Science Express. Continue Reading »
Quasars are active and very powerful black holes at the centre of distant galaxies. The black holes are extremely massive weighing between 100 million and 10 billion solar masses and rotating around the super massive black hole is a disc of gas and dust. The inner ring of the disc moves faster than the outer rings. Continue Reading »
Flowing lava can carve or build paths very much like the riverbeds and canyons etched by water, and this probably explains at least one of the meandering channels on the surface of Mars. These results were presented on March 4, 2010 at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Jacob Bleacher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Whether channels on Mars were formed by water or by lava has been debated for years, and the outcome is thought to influence the likelihood of finding life there. Continue Reading »
Even the biggest Star Trek fan would probably have trouble understanding the technical details of the research done by Queen’s University Particle Astrophysics Professor Wolfgang Rau of Kingston, Canada.
Professor Rau is the only Canadian researcher among the group of 60 scientists involved in the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment (CDMS) whose latest findings are published in the latest edition of Science. Professor Rau says the project is among the top two or three most important experiments on this subject in the world. Continue Reading »
Jets of particles streaming from black holes in far-away galaxies operate differently than previously thought, according to a study published today in Nature. The new study reveals that most of the jet’s light—gamma rays, the universe’s most energetic form of light—is created much farther from the black hole than expected and suggests a more complex shape for the jet. Continue Reading »
