A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
Astronomers measured the age of 70,000 stars across the Milky Way and put the results into a galactic map
It confirms what was already suspected about our galaxy's growth: it started in the middle and grew outward. This can be seen in the abundance of old stars near the centre of the disc. Presented at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Florida, it is the largest such map ever assembled. "We're characterising in really unprecedented detail how the galaxy is formed, via this snapshot of stellar ages across the disc," lead researcher Melissa Ness told. The tendrils of the map extend out from the Earth, beyond the centre of the galaxy in one direction, and out to the very far reaches of the disc in the other. "And we not only have these ages in the plane of the disc, but also moving up above the galactic plane," added Dr Ness, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.To calculate the age of each star, she and her colleagues used data from two telescopes. Firstly, the Apogee project - part of the ground-bas...