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02/21/2007

Astronomers Puzzled by Spectra of Transiting Planet Orbiting Nearby Star

Robert Tindol

A team of astronomers led by Carl Grillmair of the California Institute of Technology has discovered some puzzling things about a Jupiter-sized planet that passes in front of a nearby star in the constellation Vulpecula.

02/13/2007

LIGO and Virgo Join Forces In Search for Gravitational Waves

Robert Tindol

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo interferometric gravitational-wave detector of the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) near Pisa, Italy, have agreed to join in a collaborative search for gravitational waves from sources in and far beyond our galaxy. The collaboration will link the three LIGO detectors, which are in the United States, and LIGO's partner, GEO600 in Germany, with the Virgo detector to increase the likelihood of detecting the elusive phenomenon first predicted over 90 years ago by Albert Einstein in his general theory of relativity, and pinpointing the source of the signals.

01/24/2007

Caltech and UCLA Researchers Create Memory Circuit the Size of a Human White Blood Cell

Robert Tindol

Don't throw away your laptop yet, but there's a promising new high-tech invention being announced this week. Researchers have created a memory circuit the size of a white blood cell that has enough capacity to store the Declaration of Independence and have space left over. With 160 kilobits of capacity, it's the densest memory circuit ever fabricated.

01/09/2007

Protoplanetary Disk Found Encircling Mira B

Robert Tindol

A team of astronomers is reporting today at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society that material from the dying star Mira A is being captured into a disk around Mira B, its companion.

01/08/2007

Astronomers Discover a Quasar Trio

Robert Tindol

Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland are announcing today the discovery of the first known triplet of quasars. The discovery of the trio, about 10.5 billion light-years from Earth, is based in part on observations at the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

01/07/2007

New 3-D Map of Dark Matter Reveals Cosmic Scaffolding

Robert Tindol

An international team of astronomers has created a comprehensive three-dimensional map that offers a first look at the weblike large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the universe's mass, but that so far has eluded direct detection, or even a definitive explanation for its makeup.

12/20/2006

New Type of Black-Hole Explosion Has Astrophysicists Wondering About Its Origin

Robert Tindol

Scientists are announcing this week their detection of a June 14 gamma-ray burst that probably signals a hitherto undetected type of cosmic explosion. The hybrid gamma-ray burst probably created a new black hole, but the details of how the explosion occurred are unclear.

12/12/2006

Physicists Set New Record for Network Data Transfer

Robert Tindol

An international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology, CERN, and the University of Michigan and partners at the University of Florida and Vanderbilt, as well as participants from Brazil (Rio de Janeiro State University, UERJ, and the State Universities of São Paulo, USP and UNESP) and Korea (Kyungpook National University, KISTI) joined forces to set new records for sustained data transfer between storage systems during the SuperComputing 2006 (SC06) Bandwidth Challenge (BWC).

10/20/2006

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Awards $24 Million to Caltech for Three Projects

Robert Tindol

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded three grants totaling $24 million to the California Institute of Technology for projects in cosmology, experimental economics, and neurobiology.

10/17/2006

Engineers Devise New Method of Chemical Vapor Deposition for Smaller Nanostructures

Robert Tindol

Engineers at the California Institute of Technology have invented an ingenious new method for depositing tiny amounts of materials on surfaces. The researchers say that the technique, known as plasmon-assisted chemical vapor deposition, will add a powerful new tool to the existing battery of techniques used to construct microdevices.

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