Wow, Star Stuff in the Lab!

You read right, scientists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, using the Linac Coherent Light Source - one of the most powerful X-Ray lasers on Earth have, as the article in Gizmodo writes:

• (have) made matter that you can only find in the heart of stars and giant planets.

In a recent experiment, scientists:

• fired the LCLS at a small cube of aluminum only 0.00039 inches on a side,  (creating)  a super-hot solid plasma burning at 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit.

Solid plasma Doesn't that just blow your mind! And 3.6 million degrees is hotter that the surface of the sun!  As the article points out, it only lasted one trillionth of a second and 3.6 million degrees is still far below the 14 million degrees at the center of our own sun.  But they are saying that this experiment alone goes a long way towards understanding how a star works.  

full article here plus link to SLAC

Super' scanner shows key detail

from BBC News

Shaun Saunders makes a great point here.....how many sci-fi movies does this technology relate too? Total Recall; Star Trek...........

and the list goes on.....


A new scanner has been unveiled which can produce 3D body images of unprecedented clarity while reducing radiation by as much as 80%.

New Panorama Reveals More Than a Thousand Black Holes

A new wide-field panorama reveals more than a thousand supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, some up to several billion times more massive than the sun. This survey, taken in a region of the Bootes constellation, involved 126 separate Chandra exposures of 5,000-seconds each, making it the largest contiguous field ever obtained by the observatory. At 9.3 square degrees, it is over 40 times larger than the full moon seen on the night sky, which is also shown in this graphic for scale. In this image, the red represents low-energy X-rays, green shows the medium range, and blue the higher energy X-rays

submitted by Shaun Saunders