Hannahhaifisch - HH

Four Planet System in Orbit, Directly Imaged | Planetary Landscapes Credit: Many Worlds

This evocative movie of four planets more massive than Jupiter orbiting the young star HR 8799 is a composite of sorts, including images taken over seven years at the W.M. Keck observatory in Hawaii.

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Terrain-set up - Lage Egal at Frontviews Temporary

Gert-Jan Akerboom

cube

Hexagons and rhombis spreading out

Hubble Views The Final Frontier For Dark Matter

“This phenomenon of gravitational lensing stretches galaxies into streaks and arcs, magnifying them, and creating multiple images. It also enables us to reconstruct the mass distribution of the cluster, revealing that it’s mostly due to dark matter.”

When you look out at the distant Universe, you can see all sorts of things: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, going as far back into the distant past as our telescopes can image. But where you have the greatest concentrations of mass, an extreme phenomenon emerges: that of gravitational lensing. Any foreground objects lying behind that mass will have their light stretched, magnified and distorted by the intervening matter. Recently, as part of the Hubble Frontier Fields program, the telescope followed-up on galaxy cluster Abell 370, and revealed the most spectacular gravitational lensing signal ever seen in a galaxy cluster. Most importantly, it provides some very strong evidence not only for dark matter’s existence, but for its presence distinct from any galaxies at all.

Come get the full story in images, videos, and no more than 200 words on this edition of Mostly Mute Monday!

Modular Origami Star by Maria Sinayskaya http://flic.kr/p/dJtry6

A method to engineer crystals with a large fraction of reactive facets

Versatile superstructures composed of nanoparticles have recently been prepared using various disassembly methods. However, little information is known on how the structural disassembly influences the catalytic performance of the materials. Scientia Professor Rose Amal, Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow Hamid Arandiyan and a group from the Particles and Catalysis Research Group from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) School of Chemical Engineering have had their research address this issue published in Nature Communications.

The research team led by Dr Jason Scott and Prof Sean Smith in collaboration with Curtin University and Beijing University of Technology has developed a method that allows them to engineer crystals with a large fraction of reactive facets. An ordered mesostructured La0.6Sr0.4MnO3 (LSMO) perovskite catalyst was disassembled using a unique fragmentation strategy, whereby the newly-exposed (001) reactive faces at each fracture were more reactive towards methane oxidation than the regular (i.e. before disassembly)

It is of significant interest to use methane as an alternative fuel to coal and oil due to its high hydrogen to carbon ratio which provides comparatively lower greenhouse gas emissions. Commercial catalysts for methane combustion contain precious metals (e.g. Pt and Pd) which are of high cost and poor thermal stability (caused by agglomeration of the metal deposits). Using perovskite-type catalysts to replace noble metal supported catalysts for methane oxidation has attracted recent attention due to their excellent thermal stability. In their recently published article, the research team describes a simple fragmentation method to synthesise a novel three-dimensional hexapod mesostructured LSMO perovskite.

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Geometric Animations / 170402