Blocked holes can enhance rather than stop light going through

Conventional wisdom would say that blocking a hole would prevent light from going through it, but Princeton University engineers have discovered the opposite to be true. A research team has found that placing a metal cap ...

Broken glass yields clues to climate change

Clues to future climate may be found in the way that an ordinary drinking glass shatters. A study appearing this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that microscopic particles of dust, emitted into ...

Mysteries of space dust revealed

The first analysis of space dust collected by a special collector onboard NASA's Stardust mission and sent back to Earth for study in 2006 suggests the tiny specks open a door to studying the origins of the solar system and ...

Planets smashed into dust near supermassive black holes

(PhysOrg.com) -- Fat doughnut-shaped dust shrouds that obscure about half of supermassive black holes could be the result of high speed crashes between planets and asteroids, according to a new theory from an international ...

Even brown dwarfs may grow rocky planets

(Phys.org)—Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array have for the first time found that the outer region of a dusty disc encircling a brown dwarf contains millimetre-sized solid grains like those ...

Japan lab finds trace of gas in deep space asteroid pod

Japan's space agency said it had found a trace of gas Thursday in a capsule thought to contain asteroid dust that was brought back to Earth after a multi-billion-kilometre (mile) space journey.

How LISA pathfinder detected dozens of 'comet crumbs'

LISA Pathfinder, a mission led by ESA (the European Space Agency) that included NASA contributions, successfully demonstrated technologies needed to build a future space-based gravitational wave observatory, a tool for detecting ...

What dust may have to do with Earth's rapidly warming poles

(Phys.org)—As earth's climate warms, scientists have tried to understand why the poles are heating up two to three times faster than the rest of the planet. Airborne dust, it turns out, may play a key role.

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