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An instrument onboard Cassini recorded a flurry of tiny particles pelting the spacecraft as it crossed Saturn's dusty ring plane.

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Posts: 359 | Registered: Jun 2001  |  IP: Logged | 

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"He sent a note saying 'I have solved the black hole information paradox and I want to talk about it'," says Curt Cutler, a physicist at the Albert Einstein Institute in Golm, Germany, who is chairing the conference's scientific committee. "I haven't seen a preprint [of the paper]. To be quite honest, I went on Hawking's reputation."

Though Hawking has not yet revealed the detailed maths behind his finding, sketchy details have emerged from a seminar Hawking gave at Cambridge. According to Cambridge colleague Gary Gibbons, an expert on the physics of black holes who was at the seminar, Hawking's black holes, unlike classic black holes, do not have a well-defined event horizon that hides everything within them from the outside world.

In essence, his new black holes now never quite become the kind that gobble up everything. Instead, they keep emitting radiation for a long time, and eventually open up to reveal the information within. "It's possible that what he presented in the seminar is a solution," says Gibbons. "But I think you have to say the jury is still out."

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Gotta like the fact he can get time at the podium with a simple email like that.

Dagonee

Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003  |  IP: Logged | 

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Make sure that nothing is installed upside-freaking-down, that there is a consistent unit of measurement used by both the station and the ship, and other tricky stuff like this.

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Awww, that's just crazy talk. No way would something like that happen in real life.

Posts: 2919 | Registered: Aug 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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Awww, that's just crazy talk. No way would something like that happen in real life.

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Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000  |  IP: Logged | 

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The Cassini flyby of Titan sent back the most detailed surface images, but the 1000 kilometer cloud formation near the south pole has scientists stumped.

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Posts: 9538 | Registered: Aug 2003  |  IP: Logged | 

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First Light: Faint object may be youngest star detected

Ron Cowen

Peeking into the dusty core of a dark cloud seemingly devoid of stars, astronomers have found a faintly glowing body that could be the earliest glimmerings ever recorded from a newborn star. If the object, spied by the infrared eye of the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, is indeed a fledgling star, it's the least massive star ever observed. It weighs in at less than one-thousandth the mass of the sun.

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Astronomers aren't certain how to classify the object, which resides 6,000 light-years from Earth in a dense core of gas and dust. The body may someday accumulate enough gas and dust to become a bona fide star. Another possibility is that the supply of material will run out before the object can achieve starhood, and it will become a brown dwarf instead, says Neal J. Evans of the University of Texas at Austin. It's also possible that the object is neither star nor brown dwarf, but something more exotic, he adds.

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New observations with ground-based near-infrared telescopes have ruled out that scenario, says Evans. Team member Tracy L. Huard of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and his colleagues found a fan-shaped glow coinciding with the puzzling object. That glow is too feeble to have come from the more distant core and "strongly suggests the source is embedded in the L1014 core," Huard reported at the Spitzer conference.

The faint signal seen by Spitzer implies a "very slow and gentle" accumulation of material in L1014 that may indicate "a new way of forming stars," Evans says. The Spitzer team has found other candidates for young stars in several supposedly starless cores.

Star modeler Alan P. Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (D.C.) says the low mass and luminosity inferred from the Spitzer observations are "quite consistent" with current ideas about the birth of stars. Says Boss: "Spitzer has found a good example of the earliest phase of star formation seen to date."

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