NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope continues to surprise astronomers, this time by identifying the parent star of a distant planet through the observational technique of gravitational microlensing. By elucidating detailed information about the star associated with an exoplanet, astronomers should now be able to unearth the properties of the planet itself and so improve our understanding of planet formation and evolution.
Read the full story in the latest issue of Spotlight from David Bradley and Intute.
Also in this month’s Spotlight – Cornell physicist J.C. Séamus Davis and colleagues at Tokyo University and AIST Labs, Tsukuba, Japan, have been watching superconductors ever so closely, atom by atom in fact. Now, his shocking observations could turn up the heat on this area of research as he has found that high-temperature superconductors may be much more like low-temperature superconductors than scientists previously thought. The discovery has implications for making new superconducting materials. Read on…
And…
The radioactive decay of the rust-coloured mineral monazite can help scientists synchronise their geological clocks thanks to work carried out at New York’s Vanderbilt University. Microscopic crystals of the material act as tiny clocks allowing a date to be stamped on rich ore deposits in rock formations altered by high-temperature fluids. More…