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27/01/2022

Thirty days after it was launched, the James Webb telescope has arrived at the position in space where it will observe the Universe.

The Lagrange Point 2, as it's known, is a million miles (1.5 million km) from Earth on its nightside.

Webb was finally nudged into an orbit around this location thanks to a short, five-minute thruster burn.

Controllers back on Earth will now spend the coming months tuning the telescope to get it ready for science.

Key tasks include switching on the observatory's four instruments, and also focusing its mirrors - in particular, its 6.5m-wide segmented primary reflector.

"There's a pretty intensive effort to take all of those 18 segments from their current state and get them to act as one big mirror, and also to get the secondary mirror into its optimised condition," explained Charlie Atkinson, the chief engineer on Webb at Northrop Grumman, the American aerospace company that co-led the telescope's development with the US space agency (Nasa).

27/01/2022

Webb, billed as the successor to the famous Hubble Space Telescope, was launched on 25 December by an Ariane-5 rocket from French Guiana.

Its overarching goals are to take pictures of the very first stars to shine in the Universe and to probe far-off planets to see if they might be habitable.

Europe's Ariane-5 gave the new observatory a near-perfect trajectory and velocity to get it out to L2. Even so, two course correction burns were necessary, with the third on Monday tipping Webb into its planned parking position.

24/01/2022

Coral reefs are among the ocean's most threatened ecosystems - vulnerable to pollution, rising sea temperatures and the change in chemistry caused by carbon-dioxide emissions dissolving in the water.

Prof Murray Roberts, a leading marine scientist from the University of Edinburgh said the discovery brought home how much we still have to learn about the ocean.

"We still associate corals with the shallowest tropical seas but here we find a huge previously unknown coral reef system.

"As shallow waters warm faster than the deeper waters we may find these deeper reef systems are refuges for corals in the future. We need to get out there to map these special places, understand their ecological role and make sure we protect them for the future."

There is currently "no evidence" this reef had been damaged by those pressures and, Dr Barbiere said, its unusual depth was one reason it remained in such a "very good state".

"Generally we find them at shallower depths," he told BBC News, because the algae that lives within the bodies of corals needs light.

24/01/2022

French underwater photographer Alexis Rosenfeld said it had been "magical to witness giant, beautiful rose corals stretching as far as the eye can see".

"It was like a work of art," he added.

22/01/2022

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