Aerospace & Defence

  Internationally downward pressure on defence budgets has meant that the majority of military equipment contractors are looking for ways to provide fit for purpose products at competitive prices.  

Harmonic Drive UK will be exhibiting its range of high precision gears at this year’s Farnborough International Airshow. The company will be on Stand 4026 in Hall 4 from 16th to 22nd July to advise aerospace manufacturers on the best gearing system for their product. More than 40 years ago, the first Harmonic Drive gears were sent into space during the Apollo 15 mission.

As part of an effort to identify distant planets hospitable to life, NASA has established a crowdsourcing project in which volunteers search telescopic images for evidence of debris disks around stars, which are good indicators of exoplanets. Using the results of that project, researchers at MIT have now trained a machine-learning system to search for debris disks itself.

Microsemi has announced its radiation-tolerant AAHS298B eight-channel source driver for space applications, which has been successfully qualified and certified by the US Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) as Qualified Manufacturers List (QML) Class V and Q, with four Standard Microcircuits Drawings (SMDs) listed, is now in production. 

On the 11th of November, 2014, a global network of telescopes picked up signals from 300 million light years away that were created by a tidal disruption flare — an explosion of electromagnetic energy that occurs when a black hole rips apart a passing star. Since this discovery, astronomers have trained other telescopes on this very rare event to learn more about how black holes devour matter and regulate the growth of galaxies.

Scientists at Queen’s University Belfast have led an international team to the ground-breaking discovery that magnetic waves crashing through the Sun may be key to heating its atmosphere and propelling the solar wind. The Sun is the source of energy that sustains all life on Earth but much remains unknown about it. However, a group of researchers at Queen’s have now unlocked some mysteries in a research paper, which has been publ...

Data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and other telescopes have been used to create this stunning image showing a web of filaments in the Orion Nebula. These features appear red-hot and fiery in this dramatic picture, but in reality are so cold that astronomers must use telescopes like ALMA to observe them. This spectacular and unusual image shows part of the famous Orion Nebula, a star formation region lying abou...

  Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics governing the sometimes-strange behaviour of the tiny particles that make up our universe. Equations describing the quantum world are generally confined to the subatomic realm—the mathematics relevant at very small scales is not relevant at larger scales, and vice versa.

Neutron stars consist of the densest form of matter known: a neutron star the size of Los Angeles can weigh twice as much as our sun. Astrophysicists don't fully understand how matter behaves under these crushing densities, let alone what happens when two neutron stars smash into each other or when a massive star explodes, creating a neutron star. One tool scientists use to model these powerful phenomena is the "equation of state."

Long ago, about 400,000 years after the beginning of the universe —the Big Bang — the universe was dark. There were no stars or galaxies, and the universe was filled primarily with neutral hydrogen gas. Then, for the next 50 million-100 million years, gravity slowly pulled the densest regions of gas together until they collapsed in some places to form the first stars.