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Solar plane lands in New York City

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...
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Astronomers say universe expanding faster than predicted

The universe is expanding faster than previously believed, a surprising discovery that could test part of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, a pillar of cosmology that has withstood challenges for a century.  The discovery that the universe is expanding 5 percent to 9 percent faster than predicted, announced in joint news releases by NASA and the European Space Agency, also stirs hypotheses about what fills the 95 percent of the cosmos that emits no light and no radiation, scientists said on Thursday.  "Maybe the universe is tricking us," said Alex Filippenko, a University of California, Berkeley astronomer and co-author of an upcoming paper about the discovery. The universe's rate of expansion does not match predictions based on measurements of the remnant radiation left over from the Big Bang explosion that gave rise to the known universe 13.8 billion years ago.  One possibility for the discrepancy is that the universe has unknown subatomic particles, ...
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Astronomers have published new images of a bright jet of material

The observations confirm the existence of a second jet, blasting in the opposite direction.  The study uses this galaxy, Pictor A, to test ideas about what makes jets like these emit very bright X-rays.  It appears in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.  To make their observations, the team combined 15 years of X-ray data, from Nasa's Chandra space telescope, with images taken in radio wavelengths by theAustralia Telescope Compact Array.  Chandra has been in orbit since 1999 - and interest in Pictor A was sparked right back at the beginning of its mission, according to Martin Hardcastle from the University of Hertfordshire, UK. "The early images from Chandra showed there was this very bright jet," Prof Hardcastle, the study's lead author, told.  "At that stage we didn't really understand it, because the data were good enough to make an image of the jet, but not to do this kind of detailed analysis."  The new images have five o...
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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...
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