Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found that young stellar nurseries, called open star clusters, have very short lives. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys gleaned these new observations during a “Where’s Waldo” search for blue stars tossed out of their open cluster “nest” in the nearby galaxy known as NGC 1313. Only Hubble has [...]
Humanity could squander the potential benefits of nanotechnology due to a lack of clear information about its risks, say a taskforce of international scientists writing in the journal Nature. Their report, “The Safe Handling of Nanotechnology,” identifies five challenges that must be addressed if the technology is to ever reach its full potential. “The specter [...]
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of a “blizzard” of particles in a disk around a young star, shedding light on the process by which planets form from tiny dust grains. They were detected in a disk encircling the 12-million-year-old star AU Microscopii which is 32 light-years distant in the southern constellation of Microscopium. [...]
