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...
Hubble has probed a clutch of monster stars about 170,000 light-years away on the edge of our Milky Way Galaxy
Some two dozen behemoths were identified, all with masses in excess of a hundred times that of the Sun. Four were known previously, including the remarkable colossus catalogued as R136a1, which is 250 times as massive as our home star. But the new survey finds many more of the super-objects in a tight patch of sky within the Large Magellanic Cloud. "In just a tiny bit of this satellite galaxy, we see perhaps a couple of dozen stars with more than a 100 solar masses, of which nine are in a tight core just a few light-years across," explained Prof Paul Crowther from Sheffield University, UK. "But that two dozen number - that's probably more than are in the entire Milky Way Galaxy for this type of star," he told. The observations are to be published shortly in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. They build on earlier work reported in 2010 that first described R136a1 - the most massive and most luminous star identified to date. ...