Scientists working on the COUPP experiment at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory today (February 14) announced a new development in the quest to observe dark matter. The Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics experiment tightened constraints on the “spin-dependent” properties of WIMPS, weakly interacting massive particles that are candidates for dark matter.

IMAGINE being able to peek inside a black hole and even perform experiments there. It may not be as far-fetched as it sounds, thanks to a team which claims to have simulated a black hole’s event horizon in the lab.

IT’S an ambitious task, recreating the universe in a bucket. But if it is successful, the experiment could help solve the twin puzzles of why we’re made of matter rather than antimatter and where the huge magnetic fields that span galaxies come from.

European scientists have developed the most accurate method yet for predicting the doses of radiation that astronauts will receive aboard the orbiting European laboratory module, Columbus, attached to the ISS this week.

With the Columbus mission well under way, the space station programme has assigned crews for the next flight opportunities. Belgian ESA astronaut Frank De Winne joins Expedition 19 and will spend six months on the ISS in 2009. In May 2009, he will fly together with Russian cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Robert Thirsk on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS.

Taking advantage of the presence of light echoes, a team of astronomers have used an ESO telescope to measure, at the 1% precision level, the distance of a Cepheid - a class of variable stars that constitutes one of the first steps in the cosmic distance ladder.

Scientists hope that a new supercomputer being built by Syracuse University's Department of Physics may help them identify the sound of a celestial black hole. The supercomputer, dubbed SUGAR (SU Gravitational and Relativity Cluster), will soon receive massive amounts of data from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that was collected over a two-year period at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

Columbus, ESA’s advanced science laboratory in space, has just been launched into orbit and is now on its way to dock with the International Space Station (ISS).

Like a fork piercing a fried egg, a giant finger of hydrogen gas is poking through our Milky Way Galaxy from outside, astronomers using CSIRO radio telescopes at Parkes and Narrabri have found.

The planet Mercury's magnetic field appears to be strong enough to fend off the harsh solar wind from most of its surface, according to data gathered in part by a University of Michigan instrument onboard NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft.

Astronomers have used ESO’s Very Large Telescope to measure the distribution and motions of thousands of galaxies in the distant Universe. This opens fascinating perspectives to better understand what drives the acceleration of the cosmic expansion and sheds new light on the mysterious dark energy that is thought to permeate the Universe.

First results from a new NASA-funded scientific instrument at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii are helping scientists overturn long-standing assumptions about powerful explosions called novae and have produced the first unified model for a nearby nova called RS Ophiuchi.