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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have imaged what may be water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. This finding bolsters other Hubble observations suggesting the icy moon erupts with high altitude water vapor plumes.

Researchers have created an exotic 3-D racetrack for electrons in ultrathin slices of a nanomaterial they fabricated at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Researchers at Nanoscience Center of University of Jyväskylä in Finland have succeeded in producing short chains and rings of gold nanoparticles with unprecedented precision. They used a special kind of nanoparticles with a well-defined structure and linked them together with molecular bridges. These structures – being practically huge molecules – allow extremely accurate studies of light–matter interaction in metallic nanostructures and plasmonics.

This artist's illustration shows a gas giant planet circling a pair of red dwarf stars.
The Saturn-mass planet orbits roughly 300 million miles from the stellar duo. The two red dwarf stars are a mere 7 million miles apart. The illustration is based on Hubble Space Telescope observations that helped astronomers confirm the existence of a planet orbiting two stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, located 8,000 light-years away.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers has been able to study stellar evolution in real time. Over a period of 30 years dramatic increases in the temperature of the star SAO 244567 have been observed. Now the star is cooling again, having been reborn into an earlier phase of stellar evolution. This makes it the first reborn star to have been observed during both the heating and cooling stages of rebirth. The team, led by Nicole Reindl of the University of Leicester, UK, publish their results in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Many galaxies are found to have an extremely bright core powered by a supermassive black hole. These cores make “active galaxies” some of the brightest objects in the Universe. They are thought to shine so brightly because hot material is glowing fiercely as it falls into the black hole, a process known as accretion. This brilliant light can vary hugely between different active galaxies, so astronomers classify them into several types based on the properties of the light they emit.

Light is widely used for communications, carrying phone conversations and video signals through fiber-optic cables around the world in pulses composed of many photons. Single photons are the weakest signal that can be transmitted, and they too have a wide range of applications, including observing how single molecules or atoms behave (link is external), implementing an encryption technique called quantum key distribution, and creating high-resolution maps (link is external). However, single photons of light typically have very little energy, making them difficult to detect.

After more than 12 years studying Saturn, its rings and moons, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has entered the final year of its epic voyage. The conclusion of the historic scientific odyssey is planned for September 2017, but not before the spacecraft completes a daring two-part endgame.

Dr. Lingkui Meng, Dr. Yasutomo Segawa, Professor Kenichiro Itami of the JST-ERATO Itami Molecular Nanocarbon Project, Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (ITbM) of Nagoya University and Integrated Research Consortium on Chemical Sciences, and their colleagues have reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, on the development of a simple and effective method for the synthesis of thiophene-fused PAHs.

Flexible yet robust - this is one reason why nature codes genetic information in the form of a double helix. Scientists at TU Munich have now discovered an inorganic substance whose elements are arranged in the form of a double helix.