QUANTUM PHYSICS - FEATURED CONTENT

Antimatter & AntiProton Decelerator

Antihydrogen Experiment Apparatus

The Large Hadron Collider

High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider

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ASTRONOMICAL OBJECTS

Artist's impression of WASP-121b

This is an artist’s impression of the gas giant exoplanet WASP-121b. The bloated planet is so close to its star that the tidal pull of the star stretches it into an egg shape................

Study finds unexpectedly primitive atmosphere around warm Neptune

The atmosphere of the distant warm Neptune HAT-P-26b, illustrated here in an artist’s impression, is unexpectedly primitive, composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. By combining observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and and the NASA Spitzer space telescopes, researchers determined that, unlike Neptune and Uranus, the exoplanet has relatively low metallicity, an indication of how rich the planet is in all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium................

Planet eclipse allows for detection of carbon dioxide (artist's impression)

This is an artist's impression of the Jupiter-size extrasolar planet, HD 189733b, being eclipsed by its parent star. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have measured carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the planet's atmosphere................

HST ACS/HRC wide view of Fomalhaut b planet in 2004 and 2006

The two objects visible in the image are the planet Fomalhaut b, captured 21 months apart, using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Being able to see that the planet has moved is a strong sign that it is in fact in orbit around the star Fomalhaut................

FEATURED SCIENCE-CAST

WHAT LIES INSIDE THE JUPITER

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MXPlank Picture Of The Day From The Space

Zooming in on the early Universe

This busy image is a treasure trove of wonders. Bright stars from the Milky Way sparkle in the foreground, the magnificent swirls of several spiral galaxies are visible across the frame, and a glowing assortment of objects at the centre make up a massive galaxy cluster. Such clusters are the biggest objects in the Universe that are held together by gravity, and can contain thousands of galaxies of all shapes and sizes. Typically, they have a mass of about one million billion times the mass of the Sun — unimaginably huge!

Their incredible mass makes clusters very useful natural tools to test theories in astronomy, such as Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This tells us that objects with mass warp the fabric of spacetime around them; the more massive the object, the greater the distortion. An enormous galaxy cluster like this one therefore has a huge influence on the spacetime around it, even distorting the light from more distant galaxies to change a galaxy’s apparent shape, creating multiple images, and amplifying the galaxy’s light — a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

This image was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide-Field Camera 3 as part of an observing programme called RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey). RELICS imaged 41 massive galaxy clusters with the aim of finding the brightest distant galaxies for the forthcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study.