UA physicist Andrei Lebed has stirred the physics community with an intriguing idea yet to be tested experimentally: The world’s most iconic equation, Albert Einstein’s E=mc2, may be correct or not depending on where you are in space.
With the first explosions of atomic bombs, the world became witness to one of the most important and consequential principles in physics: Energy and mass, fundamentally speaking, are the same thing and can, in fact, be converted into each other.
This was first demonstrated by Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity and famously expressed in his iconic equation, E=mc2, where E stands for energy, m for mass and c for the speed of light (squared). (more…)
NASA’s UCLA-led Dawn mission shows protoplanet’s surprising surface
When UCLA’s Christopher T. Russell looks at the images of the protoplanet Vesta produced by NASA’s Dawn mission, he talks about beauty as much as he talks about science.
“Vesta looks like a little planet. It has a beautiful surface, much more varied and diverse than we expected,” said Russell, a professor in UCLA’s Department of Earth and Space Sciences and the Dawn mission’s principal investigator. “We knew Vesta’s surface had some variation in color, but we did not expect the diversity that we see or the clarity of the colors and textures, or their distinct boundaries. We didn’t find gold on Vesta, but it is still a gold mine.”
Dawn has been orbiting Vesta and collecting data on the protoplanet’s surface since July 2011. Vesta, which is in the doughnut-shaped asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is currently some 321 million miles from Earth. (more…)
Thanks to the presence of a natural “zoom lens” in space, University of Chicago scientists working with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have obtained a uniquely close-up look at the brightest gravitationally magnified galaxy yet discovered.(more…)
PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s twin spacecraft to study the moon from crust to core are nearing their New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day main-engine burns to place the duo in lunar orbit.
Named Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL), the spacecraft are scheduled to be placed in orbit beginning at 1:21 p.m. PST (4:21 p.m. EST) for GRAIL-A on Dec. 31, and 2:05 p.m. PST (5:05 p.m. EST) for GRAIL-B the next day. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Melting glaciers and ice caps on Canadian Arctic islands play a much greater role in sea level rise than scientists previously thought, according to a new study led by a University of Michigan researcher.
The 550,000-square-mile Canadian Arctic Archipelago contains some 30,000 islands. Between 2004 and 2009, the region lost the equivalent of three-quarters of the water in Lake Erie, the study found. Warmer-than-usual temperatures in those years caused a rapid increase in the melting of glacier ice and snow, said Alex Gardner, a research fellow in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences who led the project. The study is published online in Nature on April 20. (more…)
