Einstein starts your car

When people hear about relativity, they usually think about spaceships traveling at speed of light, and the strange properties of spacetime such as time dilation or length contraction. These effects actually also occur right in your car. This has nothing to do with the yet to appear Doc Brown’s DeLorean, but the physics behind how your car is working is pretty interesting.
Everything happens in the car’s lead-acid battery: about 80 percent of its voltage comes from relativity, according to a paper in Physical review Letters, January 7. The relativistic effects are coming from fast-moving electrons in the lead atom. When it comes to atoms, the heavier the nucleus, the faster the inner electrons move around it. For an element as heavy as lead, the speed of the orbiting electrons has to approach that of light for them to counter the attraction of their large nuclei.
Pekka Pyykkö of the University of Helsinki in Finland, Rajeev Ahuja of Uppsala University in Sweden and their colleagues modelled chemical reactions and found that relativistic effects account for somewhere between 1.7-1.8 volts of a standard 2.11-volt lead-acid cell.
The lead-acid battery is 150 years old, and though scientists expected relativistic effects, the team was the first to derive a theoretical model from fundamental physics principles, and to show that these effects are actually dominant.
In other words, without relativity, these batteries would have never worked out, and you would probably be riding a bike.

~KIROAN~

First Earth-sized exoplanet discovered

The discovery of Kepler-10b, the first rocky extrasolar planet, was confirmed yesterday by NASA’s Kepler mission. Only 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest exoplanet ever discovered.
Because its size is comparable to that of Earth, this is a first step to discovering how common such planets are, and if some of them could sustain life. This is not the case of Kepler-10b: the planet orbits too close to its star, about 1/20th as far from it as Mercury, the innermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun. The planet orbits once every 0.84 days (about 20 hours), and its mass is about 4.6 times that of Earth; it is 560 light-years away and about eight billion years old.
Kepler’s 1-meter-diameter telescope, launched in 2009, searches for exoplanets by staring at the same 150,000 stars in the Cygnus constellation. It is looking for periodic dips in brightness caused by the passage of a planet in front of its star, in order to find Earth-sized planets in habitable orbits.
Kepler-10 was the first star identified that could potentially harbor a small transiting planet, early after the satellite’s launching. Precise measurements of the planet’s radius and mass were then made by the W.M. Keck Observatory 10-meter telescope in Hawaii.
Finding similar planets in habitable orbits will take a couple of more years of observations for sunlike stars, but the announcement of another habitable world never seemed so close.

~KIROAN~

Lights of alien worlds--Ashley Corbion .

Since the search for extraterrestrial intelligence started, scientists have been “listening” to stars, looking for artificial radio emissions from other planets. While we keep searching for such signals, there may as well be other ways to detect alien civilizations. Light itself may in the future become an efficient way to find another inhabited and civilized world.
Researchers at SETI are using radio signals in order to detect other possible civilizations elsewhere in the Galaxy for various reasons, the main one being our own civilization: we are emitting considerable amounts of electromagnetic radiation as a byproduct of communications, and many radio frequencies penetrate the atmosphere quite easily.
However, you might argue that this doesn’t mean any other civilization would do the same, especially considering that technology changes quickly, and that our own emissions are constantly decreasing. Also, any signal would have to be pretty strong to be detectable.
Abraham Loeb of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Edwin Turner of Princeton University have now suggested a new way for detecting alien civilization, and it is pretty simple: we should look for their city lights. So if it is that simple, why aren’t we already doing it? The only limitation is technology: to glimpse the light of alien cities, researchers would have to be able to distinguish it from the glare of their parent star. According to the two scientists, the slight change in light from an exoplanet as it moves around its star should be detectable. Indeed, an inhabited exoplanet with city lighting would emit more light than one without artificial lighting during a dark phase (when orbiting its star the planet would go through phases similar to those of our Moon).
With our current technology, the team estimates that we should be able to detect a Tokyo-sized metropolis on Pluto. Obviously, it’s very unlikely that there is any alien civilization out there or anywhere in the Kuiper Belt (the region in which Pluto is orbiting the Sun). However, by the time the first Earth-like exoplanets are found, our technology will have improved and should be able to detect the artificial lights of potential nearby Earth twins.
Although this technique also relies on the assumption that any alien civilization would use Earth-like technologies, it seems rather difficult to avoid artificial lighting, unlike radio signals. And that’s why I personally hope to see such research being done in the near future.
Reference
Abraham Loeb, Edwin L. Turner. Detection Technique for Artificially-Illuminated Objects in the Outer Solar System and Beyond: arXiv:1110.6181v1

~KIROAN~