NAUTILUS detects cosmic rays
NAUTILUS was designed to observe the gravitational waves produced by collisions between objects such as black holes or neutron stars. According to the Frascati’s group calculations, signals from...
Adaptive-optics to cover the sky
Adaptive-optic telescopes differ from normal telescopes by using a thin flexible primary mirror that can easily be deformed. A bright guide star near the observing area acts as a “beacon” ...
Astronomy and physics dominate Science top ten
Confirmation that the universe is flat – expanding at just the right rate not to collapse – came from measurements of ripples in the cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang...
Light glimpsed from extra-solar planet
Light from the planet is almost completely obliterated by the bright glare from the star. Although the reflected signal is 10-20,000 times weaker than the glare from tau Bootis, the planet studied by ...
XMM launches
XMM will be in a highly elliptical orbit to keep it away from interference caused by the Sun’s glare. The telescope’s large size and unusual orbit explains why XMM was launched from Ariane...
NASA revises Mars missions
NASA’s Mission Control Center hoped that the Deep Space Two micoprobe had landed safely and gone into a ‘sleep’ safety mode. But all attempts to contact the probes have failed. Durin...
Hubble Space Telescope shuts down
This is only the third time Hubble has been shut down since its launch in 1990. Three weeks of scientific data will be lost. During the repair mission, astronauts will replace all six gyroscopes, a fi...
Eclipse confirms extrasolar planet
According to calculations by Marcy and colleagues, the planet has 63 percent of the mass of Jupiter and orbits the star every 3.5 days. On Thursday, the next time the star is eclipsed, more telescopes...
First evidence for planet orbiting a binary star
The majority of stars in the universe are believed to be in binary systems, but previously no one had produced any evidence to show that such systems could contain planets. The 20 planets that have be...
NASA plans astrometric mission
Like ESA’s recent Hipparcos mission, FAME will use the parallax method to determine the stars’ positions: as the telescope and the Earth orbit the sun, the position of the stars will chang...
