Liquid helium, the coldest element on Earth, is needed to keep the magnets in MRI machines running. Without it, doctors would lose a critical medical tool.
A team of German astronomers, led by Professor Klaus Werner of the University of Tübingen, have discovered a strange new type of star covered in the by-product of helium burning. It is possible that the stars might have been formed by a rare stellar merger event.The fascinating results are published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Jupiter, Saturn and numerous giant exoplanets discovered to date consist mostly of hydrogen and helium. In 1977, planetary scientists predicted the existence of helium rain layer inside such planets. However, achieving the experimental conditions necessary to validate this hypothesis hasn’t been possible — until now.
An international team of astronomers has detected helium — the second-most abundant element in the Universe after hydrogen — in the atmosphere of WASP-107b, a super-Neptune exoplanet approximately 200 light-years away in the Virgo constellation. This is the first time this inert gas has been detected in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet.
A team of scientists has discovered that a law controlling the bizarre behavior of black holes out in space — is also true for cold helium atoms that can be studied in laboratories.
