Physical Sciences

New Technique Studies How Plastic Solar Cells Turn Sunlight into Electricity
A plot of the wavelength of emitted infrared light vs. the time delay of the light emission provides information about the path of an electron within a plastic solar cell. This information about how the cell makes an electric current from light will lead to improvements in the efficiency and usable lifetime of solar cells.
Twin Star Explosions Fascinate Astronomers
Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler
Ultraviolet Light Reveals Secrets of Nanoscale Electronic Materials
In this diagonally striped picture, the distance between each line is about 0.4 nanometers and each of the bands is several nanometers.
Astronomers See Inside a Quasar for the First Time
A mosaic of X-ray images of the quasar Q2237+0305, magnified by a gravitational lens. The bright spots are four magnified images of the same quasar, which change in brightness over time. Credit: C.S. Kochanek, Ohio Sate University
Scientists Snap First Images of Brown Dwarf in Planetary System
This is an artist's concept of the star HD 3651 as it is orbited by a close-in Saturn-mass planetary companion and the distant brown dwarf companion discovered by Spitzer infrared photographs. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / T. Pyle (SSC)
Earth-Like Planets May Be Common in Known Planetary Systems
This image shows the differences (not to scale) between the inner regions of our Solar system, and a simulated planetary system containing a "hot Jupiter".
Planet or a Failed Star? . . . Discovery Reveals One of the Smallest Stellar Companions Ever Seen
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows one of the smallest objects ever seen around a normal star. Astronomers believe the object is a brown dwarf because it is 12 times more massive than Jupiter. The brown dwarf candidate, called CHXR 73 B, is the bright spot at lower right. It orbits a red dwarf star, dubbed CHXR 73, which is a third less massive than the Sun. At 2 million years old, the star is very young when compared with our middle-aged 4.6-billion-year-old Sun.
South African Clone of Penn State Telescope Makes First Scientific Discovery
The Southern African Large Telescope
Research Paper Illuminates How Light Pushes Atoms
A pencil-like laser beam can be made by intersecting two infinitely wide light waves at a small angle. "You might think that an atom would absorb a photon randomly from only one of the beams," as depicted in the section labeled a), "but this paper shows that the atom recoils with a speed that is less than it would get from the momentum of either of the infinitely wide photons, with no sideways recoil," as depicted in b).
How Big is Big? Probing the Conditions of the Universe on the Largest Scales
Credit: Hogg, SDSS-II collaboration The SDSS telescope at Apache Point, NM has been used to create a map of regular galaxies (black points) and luminous red galaxies (red points) out to 40% of the distance to the edge of the visible universe. Light from the most distant red galaxies has taken 5.6 billion years to reach us, while the edge of the visible universe is 13.7 billion light years away. This map of the universe allowed astronomers to detect galactic structures more than a billion light years across.
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