Science | WPN World People News

The HARPS instrument at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile has been used to make the most complete census of comets around another star ever created. A French team of astronomers has studied nearly 500 individual comets orbiting the star Beta Pictoris and has discovered that they belong to two distinct families of exocomets: old exocomets that have made multiple passages near the star, and younger exocomets that probably came from the recent breakup of one or more larger objects. The new results will appear in the journal Nature on 23 October 2014.

Schematic of the electrochemical cell – a silicon nitride (Si3N4) membrane separates the liquid from vacuum region of the x-ray source; a 20nm thin-film gold electrode is deposited on liquid side of the membrane. Detection of x-ray absorption is via fluorescence emission on the vacuum side or electron emission at the gold electrode.

A sketch (not to scale) showing axions (blue) streaming out from the Sun, converting in the Earth's magnetic field (red) into X-rays (orange), which are then detected by the XMM-Newton observatory.

Polycrystalline model of copper with grain boundaries, built in and visualized by Virtual NanoLab. The structure contains over 1 million atoms, but can readily be calculated using ATK-Classical.

This cloud in the stratosphere over the north pole of Titan is similar to Earth's polar stratospheric clouds.

This rolling two year contract will enable Haydale, in collaboration with Tantec, to continue to develop its plasma functionalisation process to meet customer specific needs, both in terms of quantity of materials and the level of functionalisation required.