Meet the Titans: Dust Disk Found Around Massive Star

A new discovery has the potential to answer the long-standing question of how massive stars are born -- and hints at the possibility that planets could form around the galaxy's biggest bodies.

"Astronomers have long been unclear about how the most massive stars form," said Stefan Kraus, a NASA Sagan Exoplanet Fellow and astronomer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "Because they tend to be at very large distances and surrounded by dusty envelopes, it's very hard to separate and closely observe them."

To get a better look, Kraus' team used the Very Large Telescope Interferometer of the European Southern Observatory in Chile to focus on IRAS 13481-6124, a star located at a distance of 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, and about 20 times more massive than our sun. "We were able to get a very sharp view into the innermost regions around this star by combining the light of separate telescopes," Kraus said, "basically mimicking the resolving power of a telescope with an incredible 85-meter [280-foot] mirror."

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FIVE PAPERS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

In 1905 an anonymous patent clerk in Bern rewrote the laws of physics in his spare time. Matthew Chalmers describes Einstein's miraculous year

Most physicists would be happy to make one discovery that is important enough to be taught to future generations of physics students. Only a very small number manage this in their lifetime, and even fewer make two appearances in the textbooks. But Einstein was different. In little more than eight months in 1905 he completed five papers that would change the world for ever. Spanning three quite distinct topics - relativity, the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion - Einstein overturned our view of space and time, showed that it is insufficient to describe light purely as a wave, and laid the foundations for the discovery of atoms.
Perhaps even more remarkably, Einstein's 1905 papers were based neither on hard experimental evidence nor sophisticated mathematics. Instead, he presented elegant arguments and conclusions based on physical intuition. "Einstein's work stands out not because it was difficult but because nobody at that time had been thinking the way he did," says Gerard 't Hooft of the University of Utrecht, who shared the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in quantum theory. "Dirac, Fermi, Feynman and others also made multiple contributions to physics, but Einstein made the world realize, for the first time, that pure thought can change our understanding of nature."

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ENERGY MASS EQUIVALENCE EXPLAINED

Albert Einstein is perhaps the most famous scientist of this century. One of his most well-known accomplishments is the formula E=mc².
Despite its familiarity, many people don't really understand what it means.
One of Einstein's great insights was to realize that matter and energy are really different forms of the same thing. Matter can be turned into energy, and energy into matter.

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Scientists Discover the First Carbon-Rich Planet—Which May Have Mountains of Diamonds .

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ARE QUASARS STAR- MAKING MACHINES ?

(The following article is from the Astrophysical Journal.)

A quasar is a black hole that draws in matter from the surrounding space. Its strong gravitational field imposes a huge kinetic energy on this matter, causing it to radiate across a wide range of wavelengths. According to new research, however, quasars do more than consume matter – they can also create stars. Indeed, David Elbaz, of the CEA in Saclay, France, and colleagues believe that quasars might in fact be capable of building entire galaxies.

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THE PHYSICS OF TIME TRAVEL. IS IT TRUE OR IS IT FABLE?

In H.G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine, our protagonist jumped into a special chair with blinking lights, spun a few dials, and found himself catapulted several hundred thousand years into the future, where England has long disappeared and is now inhabited by strange creatures called the Morlocks and Eloi. That may have made great fiction, but physicists have always scoffed at the idea of time travel, considering it to be the realm of cranks, mystics, and charlatans, and with good reason.

However, rather remarkable advances in quantum gravity are reviving the theory; it has now become fair game for theoretical physicists writing in the pages of Physical Review magazine. One stubborn problem with time travel

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