Physics & Mathematics

During a January flight of Space Shuttle Columbia, astronauts will test a new commercial fire-fighting system that puts out blazes with a fine water mist — instead of using harmful chemicals or large quantities of water that damage property. “The fire-fighting industry is in search of a new tool that doesn’t use dangerous chemicals or douse fires with huge quantities of water that cause extensive property damage,” said Mark Nall, director of the Space Product Development Program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. “By flying this commercial experiment on the STS-107 Columbia mission, NASA is helping industry design a cost-effective, environmentally friendly system for putting out fires.”

Candian astronomers say that detecting microscopic meteors from other solar systems could provide clues about the formation of planets like Earth. Dust streams from our sun’s stellar neighbours consist of tiny grains of pulverized rock ejected from a disk of dust and debris that commonly surrounds young stars, says Joseph Weingartner, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. According to Professor Norman Murray, associate director of CITA and co-author of the study, “if we can detect these grains and trace them back to the star system that they came from, we’d have very good evidence of planet formation going on in that system.” Weingartner presented the study Jan. 6 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Wash.

The world’s best planet-hunting machine, the Keck High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer, will be getting even better this year with an advanced imaging array that will improve efforts to detect extra-solar planets, examine distant quasars, measure extragalactic stars and do other research requiring very precise wavelength measurements of thousands of color channels with one exposure. HIRES, a visible-wavelength spectrometer responsible for 20 percent of the science on the Keck I telescope, will be getting an advanced new detector that will increase photon detection rates at ultraviolet wavelengths by a factor of 8 (at 3200 ?), expand single-exposure wavelength coverage, provide finer sampling of spectral features, and allow faster readout rates to provide higher-quality science in less time.

A Dartmouth researcher is building a case for a “dark energy”-dominated universe. Dark energy, the mysterious energy with unusual anti-gravitational properties, has been the subject of great debate among cosmologists. Brian Chaboyer, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth, with his collaborator Lawrence Krauss, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, have reported their finding in the January 3, 2003, issue of Science. Combining their calculations of the ages of the oldest stars with measurements of the expansion rate and geometry of the universe lead them to conclude that dark energy dominates the energy density of the universe.