About Us
Founded in 1944, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science develops philanthropic support for the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and advances its mission of science for the future of humanity.
Jan 22, 2019...
An image of Saturn taken by NASA's shuttle Cassini. (photo credit: NASA)
The rings of Saturn are very young, according to data obtained from NASA’s shuttle Cassini, which finished its mission in 2017. The last act of the spacecraft was titled “Grand Finale,” in which it circled the planet’s rings and atmosphere before bursting into flames.
Scientists examined final data from the spacecraft and concluded that Saturn’s rings are only 10-100 million years old – quite young compared to the history of our 4.5 billion-year-old solar system. In a revealing twist, that means that during the Jurassic and Triassic Period, when the earliest dinosaurs roamed the Earth – our night sky looked vastly different than it does today, without Saturn’s rings.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/after-the-collapse/
Mar 23, 2009...
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—March 23, 2009—In the first observation if its kind, scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and San Diego State University were able to watch what happens when a star the size of 50 suns explodes. As they continued to track the spectacular event, they found that most of the star's mass collapsed in on itself, resulting in a large black hole.
While exploding stars — supernovae — have been viewed with everything from the naked eye to high-tech research satellites, no one had directly observed what happens when a really huge star blows up. Dr. Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute's Faculty of Physics and Prof. Douglas Leonard of San Diego State University recently located and calculated the mass of a gigantic star on the verge of exploding, following through with observations of the blast and its aftermath. Their findings have lent support to the reigning theory that stars ranging from tens to hundreds of times the mass of our sun all end up as black holes.
Jul 17, 2018...
An image of planet Jupiter made available by NASA, April 3, 2017 /AP
Ten moons have been discovered orbiting Jupiter – 9 “normal” outer ones and an “oddball” – scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington reported on Tuesday.
Including the previously unknown moons, Jupiter now has 79 known moons orbiting the giant planet, more than any other planet in our Solar System. Saturn has the second highest number of known moons: 61.
Jan 27, 2020...
Similar to the gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn, their smaller cousins, Uranus and Neptune, have long been known to harbor swirling clouds and violent winds churning up their atmospheres. Massive bands of jet streams encircling the entire planet have been observed in each case.
But given that Uranus’ atmosphere is believed to be thick enough to swallow Earth entirely, it was not known just how far the weather perturbations reach into the planet’s interior.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/colder-and-colder/
Sep 19, 2017...
The ions in the center of the cluster are cooled to the lowest temperatures, and can then be further accelerated in the ion beam trap
When investigating atoms, scientists face a challenge: at room temperature, individual atoms in a gas have kinetic energy, and fly around at high velocities. Temperature is, in essence, the relative movement between atoms; thus, the goal of getting the atoms to have small relative velocities involves freezing them to extremely cold temperatures. Now, a group at the Weizmann Institute of Science has developed a new universal method for cooling ions.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/the-watery-birth-of-stars/
Feb 01, 1997...
Logically, stars should not exist. They are born when clouds of interstellar gas collapse inwardly under their own weight, growing denser and hotter until nuclear fusion causes them to emit energy in the form of light. However, since heat forces matter to expand, this hot contracting gas could be expected to immediately move outward again, preventing star formation from ever reaching completion.
To resolve this paradox, scientists have postulated the existence of a water-based "cooling system" that regulates the temperature of interstellar clouds, enabling the contraction to continue. Now a Weizmann Institute study reported in Physical Review Letters provides experimental evidence that the billions of stars that populate our firmament indeed had a watery birth.
Feb 14, 2017...
This graphic shows galaxy NGC 7610 (top right), where the supernova SN2013fs exploded. The event was detected by the Palomar Transient Factory sky survey (bottom right) a mere 3 hours after explosion. The detection was so rapid that researchers could image the circumstellar material (middle left) that surrounded the exploded star. (Ofer Yaron)
It was a type II supernova, the kind that occurs when a massive star evolves into a red supergiant, like the star Betelgeuse. In their waning days, these huge, (relatively) cool bodies start to unravel, expelling huge amounts of their mass until they are surrounded by shells of dense gas called circumstellar material, or CSM.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/at-cern-god-particle-research-at-crossroads/
Jun 29, 2014...
Inside CERN's ATLAS Cavern, located 92 m. below ground. Photo Credit: Calcalist
GENEVA — In a way, the worst thing that could have happened for physicists at CERN, the world's largest particle physics research center, was discovering the holy grail of physics — the so-called God particle, also known as Higgs boson.
Because after finding it in July 2012 — and confirming it six months later, after almost 50 years of searching — what else is left? The anti-climax was inevitable.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/nasa-mission-discovers-jupiter-s-inner-secrets/
Mar 08, 2018...
This computer-generated image shows the structure of the cyclonic pattern observed over Jupiter’s south pole. Like in the North, Jupiter’s south pole also contains a central cyclone, but it is surrounded by five cyclones with diameters ranging from 3,500 to 4,300 miles (5,600 to 7,000 kilometers) in diameter.
NASA spacecraft Juno has collected new data on its mission to Jupiter revealing some of the swirling inner mysteries of the giant gas-planet.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/mars-is-recreated-in-israeli-desert/
Feb 20, 2018...
Israeli analog astronauts take part in the D-Mars project at the Desert Mars Analog Ramon Station in the Negev Desert near Mitzpe Ramon, Israel, on Feb. 18, 2018. A four-day-long Mars habitat experiment by six Israeli scientists ended on Sunday in the country's Negev desert. (Xinhua/Gil Cohen Magen)
The mission was conducted in Israel’s Negev desert in the south of the country near the Ramon crater, which is similar to Mars in terms of the land structure, geology, aridity, appearance and isolation.
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