Laboratory Equipment

NASA Says Kepler’s Days are Numbered

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope is broken, potentially jeopardizing the search for other worlds where life could exist outside our solar system.

If engineers can’t find a fix, the failure could mean an end to the $600 million mission’s search, although the space agency wasn’t ready to call it quits. The telescope has discovered scores of planets but only two so far are the best candidates for habitable planets.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/nasa-says-keplers-days-are-numbered

Telescopes Help Study Atmospheres of Far-Off Worlds

Gone are the days of being able to count the number of known planets on your fingers. Today, there are more than 800 confirmed exoplanets – planets that orbit stars beyond our sun – and more than 2,700 other candidates. What are these exotic planets made of? Unfortunately, you cannot stack them in a jar like marbles and take a closer look. Instead, researchers are coming up with advanced techniques for probing the planets’ makeup.

One breakthrough to come in recent years is direct imaging of exoplanets. Ground-based telescopes have begun taking infrared pictures of the planets posing near their stars in family portraits. But to astronomers, a picture is worth even more than a thousand words if its light can be broken apart into a rainbow of different wavelengths.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/videos/2013/05/telescopes-help-study-atmospheres-far-worlds

Dead Stars are ‘Polluted’ with Planetary Debris

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them. This discovery suggests that rocky planet assembly is common in clusters, say researchers.

The stars, known as white dwarfs — small, dim remnants of stars once like the Sun — reside 150 light-years away in the Hyades star cluster, in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull). The cluster is relatively young, at only 625 million years old.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/dead-stars-are-polluted-planetary-debris

Wind, Not Water, Formed Mound on Mars

A roughly 3.5-mile high Martian mound that scientists suspect preserves evidence of a massive lake might actually have formed as a result of the Red Planet’s famously dusty atmosphere, an analysis of the mound’s features suggests. If correct, the research could dilute expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water, which would have important implications for understanding Mars’ past habitability.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/wind-not-water-formed-mound-mars

Researchers Learn How Saturn Stays Looking Young, Hot

As planets age they become darker and cooler. Saturn however is much brighter than expected for a planet of its age – a question that has puzzled scientists since the late sixties.

New research published in the journal Nature Geoscience has revealed how Saturn keeps itself looking young and hot. Researchers from the Univ. of Exeter and the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon found that layers of gas, generated by physical instability deep within the giant planet, prevent heat from escaping and have resulted in Saturn failing to cool down at the expected rate.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/researchers-learn-how-saturn-stays-looking-young-hot

Distant Planets Seem Ideal for Life

NASA’s planet-hunting telescope has discovered two planets that seem like ideal places for some sort of life to flourish. And they are just the right size and in just the right place. One is toasty, the other nippy.

The distant duo are the best candidates for habitable planets that astronomers have found so far, says William Borucki, the chief scientist for NASA’s Kepler telescope. And it’s got astronomers thinking that similar planets that are just about right for life — “Goldilocks planets” — might be common in the universe.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/04/distant-planets-seem-ideal-life

Saturn to go on Display in Groundbreaking Campaign

Univ. of Leicester planetary scientists have collaborated with an international team of researchers to organize the largest ever observational campaign of Saturn’s auroras.

The month-long project will see a host of space and ground-based telescopes focus on the ringed gas giant in order to expand our knowledge of the planet’s northern lights. A team of scientists from the university’s Department of Physics and Astronomy has collaborated with NASA and the European Space Observatory (ESO) on the project.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/04/saturn-go-display-groundbreaking-campaign

Rain Falls on Saturn from its Rings

NASA funded observations on the W. M. Keck Observatory, with analysis led by the Univ. of Leicester, tracked the “rain” of charged water particles into the atmosphere of Saturn and found the extent of the ring-rain is far greater, and falls across larger areas of the planet, than previously thought. The work reveals the rain influences the composition and temperature structure of parts of Saturn’s upper atmosphere. The paper appears in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/04/rain-falls-saturn-its-rings

Multiple Approaches Explain Mystery of Subduction Zone Earthquake

Compressive-sensing technique, a sampling theory in the field of applied mathematics and signal image processing, plays a significant role in the cooperative research on subduction zone earthquakes, which reveals the law of subduction zone earthquake rupture systematically for the first time.

Among the earthquakes above magnitude Mw 8.0 in the last 10 years, most are subduction zone earthquakes like the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake and 2011 Tohoku earthquake and brought human great catastrophe, which necessitates investigation into laws under this type of earthquake.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/04/multiple-approaches-explain-mystery-subduction-zone-earthquake

‘Retired’ Star Has Planets, Debris Disc

ESA’s Herschel space observatory has provided the first images of a dust belt – produced by colliding comets or asteroids – orbiting a subgiant star known to host a planetary system. The team of scientists who made the discovery publishes their results in the Oxford Univ. Press journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

After billions of years steadily burning hydrogen in their cores, stars like our Sun exhaust this central fuel reserve and start burning it in shells around the core. They swell to become subgiant stars, before later becoming red giants.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/04/%E2%80%98retired%E2%80%99-star-has-planets-debris-disc

Martian Atmosphere Still Dynamic

Mars has lost much of its original atmosphere, but what’s left remains quite active, recent findings from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity indicate. Rover team members reported diverse findings at the European Geosciences Union 2013 General Assembly, in Vienna.

Evidence has strengthened this month that Mars lost much of its original atmosphere by a process of gas escaping from the top of the atmosphere.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/04/martian-atmosphere-still-dynamic

Black Hole Wakes Up for a Snack

Astronomers have watched as a black hole woke up from a decades-long slumber to feed on a low-mass object – either a brown dwarf or a giant planet – that strayed too close. A similar feeding event, albeit on a gas cloud, will soon happen at the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy.

The discovery in galaxy NGC 4845, 47 million light-years away, was made by ESA’s Integral space observatory, with follow-up observations from ESA’s XMM-Newton, NASA’s Swift and Japan’s MAXI X-ray monitor on the International Space Station.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/videos/2013/04/black-hole-wakes-snack

Scientist of the Week: Gareth Morgan

Every Thursday, Laboratory Equipment features a Scientist of the Week, chosen from the science industry’s latest headlines. This week’s scientist is Gareth Morgan of the Smithsonian Institution. He and a team found that the face of Mars is dotted with a maze of channels, pointing to possible ancient megaflood episodes.

The original article can be found here: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/03/radar-shows-mars-covered-buried-channels

Gareth Morgan speaks about his work here: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/04/scientist-week-gareth-morgan

Have a question for Gareth Morgan? Let us know and we’ll pass it on!

Saturn’s Moons, Rings are from Birth of Solar System

A new analysis of data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft suggests that Saturn’s moons and rings are gently worn vintage goods from around the time of our solar system’s birth.

Though they are tinted on the surface from recent “pollution,” these bodies date back more than 4 billion years. They are from around the time that the planetary bodies in our neighborhood began to form out of the protoplanetary nebula, the cloud of material still orbiting the sun after its ignition as a star. The paper, led by Gianrico Filacchione, a Cassini participating scientist at Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics, Rome, has just been published online by the Astrophysical Journal.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/03/saturn%E2%80%99s-moons-rings-are-birth-solar-system