Final curtain for Europe's deep-space telescope

The deep-space telescope Herschel took its final bow on Monday, climaxing a successful four-year mission to observe the birth of stars and galaxies, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

Simple wavelength detector could speed data communications

(Phys.org) —Researchers at SLAC and Stanford have created a new device, smaller than a grain of rice, that could streamline optical data communications. It can directly identify the wavelength of light that hits it, and ...

NGC 602: Taken under the 'wing' of the small magellanic cloud

(Phys.org) —The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbors. Even though it is a small, or so-called dwarf galaxy, the SMC is so bright that it is visible to the unaided eye from the ...

Sweeping the dust from a cosmic lobster

(Phys.org)—A new image from ESO's VISTA telescope captures a celestial landscape of glowing clouds of gas and tendrils of dust surrounding hot young stars. This infrared view reveals the stellar nursery known as NGC 6357 ...

Cassini Instrument Learns New Tricks

(Phys.org)—For seven years, a mini-fridge-sized instrument aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft reliably investigated weather patterns swirling around Saturn; the hydrocarbon composition of the surface of Saturn's moon Titan; ...

Hidden black hole: Spiral galaxy NGC 3627

(Phys.org)—The spiral galaxy NGC 3627 is located about 30 million light years from Earth. This composite image includes X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope ...

Cygnus OB2: Probing a nearby stellar cradle

(Phys.org)—The Milky Way and other galaxies in the universe harbor many young star clusters and associations that each contain hundreds to thousands of hot, massive, young stars known as O and B stars. The star cluster ...

Shaking up biomolecules with light

(Phys.org)—In living organisms, biomolecules such as proteins are constantly in complex motion, bending and flexing in different ways at different points. Each molecule has its own vibrational dynamics which affects its ...

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