Computer code gives scientists first full simulation of star’s final hours

October 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Using new computer simulations, scientists have suggested that dirty stars that are full of dust and gas make good solar system hosts. When a star forms, collapsing from a dense cloud into a luminous ball, it and the disk of dust and gas orbiting it reflect the composition of that original cloud and the elements within it.

September 18th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists has solved a longstanding mystery about a pair of stars called DI Herculis whose peculiar rotation had remained a mystery for three decades. The shift in the orbit of DI Herculis was a mystery till now.

September 3rd, 2009 LONDON - A new research has shown that the vast Andromeda galaxy appears to have expanded by cannibalizing on stars from other galaxies. According to a report by BBC News, when an international team of scientists mapped Andromeda, they discovered stars that they said were "remnants of dwarf galaxies".

August 27th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Hate holding the phone while waiting for a customer support executive to listen to your grievance? Well, researchers in Kuwait have claimed that adding just one more representative to a telephone call centre for employee technical support is enough to cut queuing time and costs. The findings could be applied to the general case for call centres across the globe.

August 11th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new supercomputer simulation designed to track the fate of the universe's first black holes has found that the mysterious cosmic objects couldn't efficiently gorge themselves on nearby gas, and thus had to keep themselves on a strict diet, starving in the process. "The first stars were much more massive than most stars we see today, upwards of 100 times the mass of our sun," said John Wise, a post-doctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and one of the study's authors.

July 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astrophysicists, using extremely detailed computer simulations, have determined that the earliest stars in the universe formed not only as individuals, but sometimes also as twins. The robust simulations of the early universe were created by astrophysicists Matthew Turk and Tom Abel of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, and Brian O'Shea of Michigan State University.

June 21st, 2009 SYDNEY - Scientists in Australia are getting closer to identify the mystery light that lit up the universe. The universe was covered in a thick fog of neutral hydrogen gas thirteen billion years ago.

June 21st, 2009 LONDON - Humans are not the only ones cribbing over weight issues, some planets too go through a "fat" stage that swells their waistlines temporarily. "Astronomers have found a lot of planets whose sizes cannot be explained by standard theory," says Laurent Ibgui of Princeton University.

May 17th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronauts John Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel installed new equipment Saturday on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope to help scientists study the origins of the universe. US space agency NASA said that the third of the current shuttle mission's five scheduled spacewalks was completed in six and a half hours.

May 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a new study, scientists have developed a model which has determined that changes in the sun are not causing global warming. The study was carried out by Carnegie Mellon University's Peter Adams, along with Jeff Pierce from Dalhousie University in Halifax, UK.

March 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international research team has found evidence that some stars in the center of the Milky Way galaxy have both carbon and oxygen in the dust that surrounds them, which sheds new light on the origin of the elements of life. "Scientists have long expected to find carbon-rich stars in our galaxy because we know that significant quantities of carbon must be created in many such stars, but carbon had not previously shown up in the clouds of gas around these stars," said Matthew Bobrowsky, an astrophysicist in the University of Maryland's department of physics.

March 7th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA late Friday sent the Kepler satellite into Earth's orbit with instructions to search for extraterrestrial life on Earth-type planets orbiting other stars. The launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida on board a Delta-II-rocket was reported on a live blog operated by the Kepler project on the internet.

February 21st, 2009 WASHINGTON - The search for extraterrestrial life will take another step in March, when NASA launches its Kepler satellite to systematically look for Earth-type planets orbiting other stars. The Kepler mission, named after the 17th century German astronomer, is to be launched March 5 and target 100,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy that scientists believe could have planets orbiting in a 'habitable' zone, NASA scientists said Thursday.

February 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The search for extraterrestrial life will take another step in March, when NASA launches its Kepler satellite to systematically look for Earth-type planets orbiting other stars. The Kepler mission, named after the 17th century German astronomer, is to be launched March 5 and target 100,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy that scientists believe could have planets orbiting in a 'habitable' zone, NASA scientists said Thursday.

February 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The search for extraterrestrial life will take another step in March, when NASA launches its Kepler satellite to systematically look for Earth-type planets orbiting other stars. The Kepler mission, named after the 17th century German astronomer, is to be launched March 5 and target 100,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy that scientists believe could have planets orbiting in a 'habitable' zone, NASA scientists said Thursday.