Science | WPN World People News

A group of astronomers has been able to follow stardust being made in real time — during the aftermath of a supernova explosion. For the first time they show that these cosmic dust factories make their grains in a two-stage process, starting soon after the explosion, but continuing for years afterwards. The team used ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in northern Chile to analyse the light from the supernova SN2010jl as it slowly faded.

Schematic showing how sand is turned into pure nano-silicon.

This gif of membrane-anchored Ras (red) and SOS molecules (green) shows individual SOS molecules corraled in nanofabricated patches where all the Ras molecules they activate can be trapped.

Yaoyi Li (foreground) and Mingxing Chen, UWM physics postdoctoral researchers, display an image of a ribbon of graphene 1 nanometer wide. In the image, achieved with a scanning-tunneling microscope, atoms are visible as "bumps."

This artist's rendering shows a newly discovered planet (far right) orbiting one star (right) of a binary star system. The discovery, made by a collaboration of international research teams and led by researchers at The Ohio State University, expands astronomers' notions of where to look for planets in our galaxy. The research was funded in part by NASA.

How to manufacture transparent and conductive carbon nanosheet using PIM-1 polymer solution: (a) Quart substrate is being coated with PIM-1 polymer solution with ladder structure and conducts heating in high temperature to manufacture carbon nanosheet. Without any additional process OSC (organic solar cell) can be made directly on the sheet to manufacture solar cells. (b), (c), (d) show thickness, surface resistivity and transparency of the carbon nanosheet, respectively in relation to the concentration of PIM-1. Also, the new method easily controls the unwanted effects from the electronic and optical characteristics of carbon nanosheet, which is produced when the polymer solution is concentrated. As the high molecule solution concentration gets higher as shown in (Axis X, (b),(c)), the thicker it gets as shown in Figure (b) but, it becomes less resistant as shown in Figure (c), and the current flow better.

From top to bottom: Extinction map at 3, 2 and 1 kiloparsec. The map is coloured according to how much dust lies in each direction in the northern Milky Way. The red/brown areas are dustiest directions.

NASA's NEOWISE mission captured a series of infrared images of comet C/2012 K1 -- also referred to as comet Pan-STARRS -- as it swept across our skies in May 2014.