News tagged with gravitational forces

Cassini spots tiny moon, begins to tilt orbit

(Phys.org) -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its closest approach to Saturn's tiny moon Methone as part of a trajectory that will take it on a close flyby of another of Saturn's moons, Titan. The Titan flyby ...

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created May 22, 2012 | popularity 4 / 5 (2) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Black hole caught red-handed in a stellar homicide

(Phys.org) -- Astronomers have gathered the most direct evidence yet of a supermassive black hole shredding a star that wandered too close.

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created May 07, 2012 | popularity 4 / 5 (5) | comments 2

Serious blow to dark matter theories? New study finds mysterious lack of dark matter in Sun's neighborhood

(Phys.org) -- The most accurate study so far of the motions of stars in the Milky Way has found no evidence for dark matter in a large volume around the Sun. According to widely accepted theories, the solar ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Apr 18, 2012 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (45) | comments 164 | with audio podcast

Runaway planets zoom at a fraction of light speed

Seven years ago, astronomers boggled when they found the first runaway star flying out of our Galaxy at a speed of 1.5 million miles per hour. The discovery intrigued theorists, who wondered: If a star can ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Mar 22, 2012 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (18) | comments 22 | with audio podcast

Glittering jewels of Messier 9

(PhysOrg.com) -- The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced the most detailed image so far of Messier 9, a globular star cluster located close to the center of the galaxy. This ball of stars is too faint ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Mar 16, 2012 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (8) | comments 3 | with audio podcast

Cosmology in a Petri dish

Scientists have found that micron-size particles which are trapped at fluid interfaces exhibit a collective dynamic that is subject to seemingly unrelated governing laws. These laws show a smooth transitioning ...

Physics / General Physics

created Jan 26, 2012 | popularity 4 / 5 (7) | comments 4

A galaxy cluster gets sloshed

(PhysOrg.com) -- Like wine in a glass, vast clouds of hot gas are sloshing back and forth in Abell 2052, a galaxy cluster located about 480 million light years from Earth. X-ray data (blue) from NASA's Chandra ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 14, 2011 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (4) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Swift finds a gamma-ray burst with a dual personality (w/ video)

(PhysOrg.com) -- A peculiar cosmic explosion first detected by NASA's Swift observatory on Christmas Day 2010 was caused either by a novel type of supernova located billions of light-years away or an unusual ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Nov 30, 2011 | popularity 4.1 / 5 (8) | comments 3 | with audio podcast

New planet discovered in Trinary star system

Until recently, astronomers were highly skeptical of whether or not planets should be possible in multiple star systems. It was expected that the constantly varying gravitational force would eventually tug ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jul 14, 2011 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (24) | comments 4 | with audio podcast

James Webb space telescope ISIM on 'spin cycle'

Prior to taking a new telescope into space, engineers must put the spacecraft and its instruments through a "spin cycle" test for durability to ensure they'll still work after experiencing the forces of a ...

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created May 30, 2011 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (3) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Robots, astronauts and asteroids

(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA has its sights set on asteroid exploration, which is just as tricky as it sounds. An asteroid has little gravitational force, which rules out walking on one. Anchoring to the surface ...

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created May 24, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0

SLoWPoKES

The Sloan Low-mass Wide Pairs of Kinematically Equivalent Stars (SLoWPoKES) catalog was recently announced, containing 1,342 common proper motion pairs (i.e. binaries) – which are all low mass stars in the ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created May 16, 2011 | popularity 4.2 / 5 (5) | comments 2

Bacteria can grow under extreme gravity: study

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that bacteria is capable of growing under gravity more than 400,000 times that of Earth and gives evidence that the th ...

Biology / Cell & Microbiology

created Apr 26, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (22) | comments 43 | with audio podcast report

Russian cosmologist suggests life could exist inside a black hole

(PhysOrg.com) -- Going out on a limb, Russian cosmologist Vyacheslav Dokuchaev, of the Institute for Nuclear Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, has speculated in a paper published in arXiv, that d ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Apr 13, 2011 | popularity 3.5 / 5 (13) | comments 9 report

Satellite measures gravity's effect on climate change

After nearly two years in space, the European satellite GOCE has collected the raw data needed to map variations in Earth's gravity field, the European Space Agency has said.

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Mar 09, 2011 | popularity 3.3 / 5 (3) | comments 0