news 2017

This is a major breakthrough in more than one respect. The scientists of the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration (which includes the CNRS) have for the first time observed the gravitational waves emitted by the merger of two neutron stars, rather than of two black holes as in previous cases. In another first, the light emitted from the source of gravitational waves was observed in the following hours, days and weeks, by 70 other groundand space-based observatories.

This discovery of neutron stars colliding is just the beginning. We want to one day look back to the beginning of time - just after the Big Bang, which we can't do with light. Scientists from ANU and around the world have detected for the first time ripples in space and time, known as gravitational waves, from the collision of two very dense stars, called neutron stars, about 130 million light years away.

Scientists have for the first time directly observed gravitational waves, in addition to light, emitted from the spectacular collision of two neutron stars. The detection marks the first time that a cosmic event has been viewed in both gravitational waves and light. The gravitational wave signal, named GW170817, was detected at 1:41pm UK time on 17 August by two identical detectors in Washington and Louisiana and a third detector in Pisa, Italy.

In a galaxy far away, two dead stars begin a final spiral into a massive collision. The resulting explosion unleashes a huge burst of energy, sending ripples across the very fabric of space. In the nuclear cauldron of the collision, atoms are ripped apart to form entirely new elements and scattered outward across the Universe.

University of Bath astrophysicists have been closely involved in the first ever combined detection of both light and gravitational waves from the merging of two neutron stars, a cataclysmic cosmic event. The findings, involving an international team of thousands using a global collection of gravitational wave detectors and groundand space-based astronomical telescopes, heralds a new era in modern astrophysics and help us understand the most powerful and violent events in the Universe.

The discovery of a gravitational wave caused by the merger of two neutron stars, reported today by a collaboration of scientists from around the world, opens a new era in astronomy. It marks the first time that scientists have been able to observe a cosmic event with both light waves - the basis of traditional astronomy - and gravitational waves, the ripples in space-time predicted a century ago by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Research news For the first time ever, scientists have measured electromagnetic and gravitational signals generated by the collision of neutron stars. In a special research project led by the Technical University of Munich (TUM), physicists with the Collaborative Research Center 1258 "Neutrinos and Dark Matter" team recorded the aftermath of the powerful event.

Marking the beginning of a new era in astrophysics, scientists have detected gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation, or light, from the same event for the first time. This historic discovery reveals the merger of two neutron stars, the dense cores of dead stars, and resolves the debate about how the heaviest elements such as platinum and gold were created in the Universe.

The same electrostatic charge that can make hair stand on end and attach balloons to clothing could be an efficient way to drive atomically thin electronic memory devices of the future, according to a new study led by researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Known for their exceptional porosity that enables the trapping or transport of molecules, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) take the form of a powder, which makes them difficult to format.

Miron Livny, a UW-Madison computer science professor, is pictured near an enclosed bank of distributed computing equipment in the Computer Sciences and Statistics Building. Photo: Jeff Miller Today's announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to researchers Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish of the California Institute of Technology, bears University of Wisconsin System connections.

No one can travel inside the earth to study what happens there. So scientists must do their best to replicate real-world conditions inside the lab. "We are interested in large-scale geophysical processes, like how plate tectonics initiates and how plates move underneath one another in subduction zones," said David Goldsby , an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Proteins and drugs are often attached to lipids to promote crystallization or ensure delivery to targeted tissues within the body, but only the smallest proteins and molecules fit within these fat structures. A new study reveals a lipid structure that can support much larger proteins and molecules than before, potentially increasing the variety of drugs that can be attached to these fat molecules.

Research news The Technical University of Munich (TUM) was successful in all subsidy lines in the first two rounds of the German Excellence Initiative, held in 2006 and 2012. Now TUM has set its sights for the third time on the highly endowed support program for leading German universities: TUM is participating in five initiatives for research clusters which were judged successful by an international expert panel in the pre-selection round and which are now being called on to submit complete applications.

In November of 2014, in a first, unexpected move for the field of particle physics, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment - one of the main detectors in the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider - released to the public an immense amount of data, through a website called the CERN Open Data Portal.

The fledgling scientific discipline of gravitational wave astronomy has made an important step forward with the detection of a gravitational wave signal using a network involving the European Virgo detector. In a new paper accepted today by the journal Physical Review Letters, scientists outline details of the first-ever gravitational wave signal received by the Virgo detector in Italy, alongside the LIGO detectors in the USA.

ANN ARBOR-University of Michigan researchers have developed a laser-based method that could be used to detect chemicals such as explosives and dangerous gases quickly and accurately. Eventually, this method could be used in systems placed in airports, for the environmental monitoring of pollutants or even in battlefields, said author Steven Cundiff, physics professor in the College of Literature.

An international team of astronomers have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to estimate whether there might be water on the seven earth-sized planets orbiting the nearby dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, and the results suggest that the outer planets of the system might still harbour substantial amounts of water.

Scientists in the LIGO and Virgo collaborations have achieved the first ever three-detector observation of the gravitational waves emitted by the merger of two black holes.

Researchers at the Universities of Vienna and Göttingen have succeeded in developing a method for predicting molecular infrared spectra based on artificial intelligence. These chemical "fingerprints" could only be simulated by common prediction techniques for small molecules in high quality. With the help of the new technology, which is based on neuronal networks similar to the human brain and is therefore capable of learning, the team led by Philipp Marquetand from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Vienna was able to carry out simulations that were previously not possible.