ScienceDaily: Space & Time News

Evidence for dark matter in the inner Milky Way Posted: 09 Feb 2015 08:30 AM PST A new study is providing evidence for the presence of dark matter in the innermost part of the Milky Way, including in our own cosmic neighborhood and the Earth's location. The study demonstrates that large amounts of dark matter exist around us, and also between us and the Galactic center. The result constitutes a fundamental step forward in the quest for the nature of dark matter.

Stellar partnership doomed to end in catastrophe Posted: 09 Feb 2015 08:30 AM PST Astronomers have identified two surprisingly massive stars at the heart of the planetary nebula Henize 2-428. As they orbit each other the two stars are expected to slowly get closer and closer, and when they merge, about 700 million years from now, they will contain enough material to ignite a vast supernova explosion.

The Sun’s activity in the 18th century was similar to that now Posted: 09 Feb 2015 06:49 AM PST Counting sunspots over time helps in knowing the activity of our star but the two indices used by scientists disagree on dates prior to 1885. Now an international team of researchers has tried to standardize the historical results and has discovered that, contrary to what one may think, the solar activity of our times is very similar to that of other times, such as the Enlightenment. Scientists have been counting sunspots since 1610 with small telescopes. Thus it has been verified that the Sun’s activity increases every eleven years, according to the interval in the growth of the number of darker and colder spots in comparison with the rest of its surface. The more spots that appear, the more luminous the surrounding areas are, and our star shines brighter.

In the quantum world, the future affects the past: Hindsight and foresight together more accurately 'predict' a quantum system’s state Posted: 09 Feb 2015 05:30 AM PST In the quantum world, the future predicts the past. Playing a guessing game with a superconducting circuit called a qubit, a physicist has discovered a way to narrow the odds of correctly guessing the state of a two-state system. By combining information about the qubit's evolution after a target time with information about its evolution up to that time, the lab was able to narrow the odds from 50-50 to 90-10.

Twinkle on fast-track mission to unveil exoplanet atmospheres Posted: 06 Feb 2015 04:12 AM PST A team of scientists and engineers have announced plans for a small satellite, named ‘Twinkle’, that will give radical new insights into the chemistry, formation and evolution of planets orbiting other stars. The mission will be launched within four years.

Human insights inspire solutions for household robots Posted: 05 Feb 2015 11:12 AM PST People typically consider doing the laundry to be a boring chore. But laundry is far from boring for artificial intelligence researchers. To AI experts, programming a robot to do the laundry represents a challenging planning problem because current sensing and manipulation technology is not good enough to identify precisely the number of clothing pieces that are in a pile and the number that are picked up with each grasp. People can easily cope with this type of uncertainty and come up with a simple plan. But roboticists for decades have struggled to design an autonomous system able to do what we do so casually--clean our clothes.