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 benefit of humanity.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/truly-reaching-for-the-stars-in-2016/
Jan 19, 2016... The Mars rovers. A spacecraft landing on a comet. Space tourism. Even the Star Wars reboot: Thanks to such thrilling events, interest in space may not have been this high since the Space Race. The decades since America’s moon landing have brought outer space closer than ever, thanks to the development of technologies that are transforming the field of astrophysics from one that is largely theoretical to one that is dynamic and happening in real time.
Dec 12, 2016...
This artist’s illustration depicts a sun-like star being “spaghettified” by a supermassive black hole, which has the mass of 100 million times that of Earth’s sun. A new study found that this death by black hole was the fate of the ultra-bright supernova ASASSN-15lh.Credit: ESA/Hubble, ESO, M. Kornmesser
An incredibly luminous outburst that astronomers had previously classified as possibly the brightest supernova ever actually might have been caused by the explosive death of a star torn apart by a giant black hole, a new study finds.
Jul 26, 2010... The lakes of southern Titan are shrinking.The level of Ontario Lacus, the largest lake in the southern hemisphere of this Saturnian moon, has fallen by some 15 feet over the last four years, causing its shore to recede by as much as 6 miles in some places. Other lakes nearby have similarly receded, according to radar measurements made by the Cassini spacecraft.However, if prolonged spells of 90-degree temperatures have you yearning for a refreshing icy dip, there are still plenty of bathing opportunities on Titan.Of course the lakes there are made of liquid methane — and the 90 degrees of temperature are on the Kelvin scale, near enough to absolute zero to challenge even the most cosmically adept polar bear. The atmosphere is nitrogen and methane.Titan is the only body in the solar system other than Earth that has been found to harbor liquid on its surface, leading many planetary scientists and aspiring astrobiologists to speculate that the same organic chemical processes that led to life on Earth are occurring in a frozen slush of hydrocarbons on Titan.The discovery that Titan’s lakes are evaporating, at least in the Southern Hemisphere, where summer just ended, suggests that there are active weather and geological cycles on Titan analogous to those on Earth. But on Titan the liquid driving those cycles is not water but methane, explained Oded Aharonson, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology. [Aharonson is now a professor in the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Environmental Sciences and Energy Research.]
Jul 24, 2017... A mosaic of the Valles Marineris hemisphere of Mars. This view is similar to what one would see from a spacecraft, according to NASA.The Trojan asteroids that follow Mars in its orbit might have come from the planet itself, blown off in an ancient impact rather than being late arrivals, a new study suggests. Several planets in Earth’s solar system have Trojan asteroids — bodies that run ahead of or behind the planet. Jupiter, for example, has thousands. Earth has at least one, discovered in 2010. Uranus, Neptune and Venus also have them. Trojan asteroids are so called because the first ones to be discovered were named for figures from the Trojan War, including Achilles and Agamemnon. NASA plans to launch a mission in 2021, called Lucy, to study six of Jupiter's Trojan asteroids.David Polishook, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and lead author on the new study, posits that the Trojans following Mars were blasted off the surface of the young planet at least a billion years ago, and settled into their current positions soon after that.Trojans orbit at Lagrange points, regions of gravitational stability numbered 1 through 5, where an object that is a small fraction of the mass of a planet and the sun, such as an asteroid, will maintain its position. Around Mars, for example, Lagrange point No. 1 (or L1) is on an imaginary line connecting Mars and the sun, while L2 is directly behind the planet if one extends that same line. Extend the line through the sun so that it touches the point in Mars’ orbit exactly opposite the planet to reach L3. L4 and L5 are at points 60 degrees ahead and behind Mars along its orbit. (If you draw lines between L4, L5, Mars and the sun, you get two equilateral triangles.) Mars’ Trojan asteroids are at L4 and L5. Mars has nine Trojan asteroids, the study notes. One, called 1999 UJ7, runs ahead of the planet at the L4 position. Three others, 5261 Eureka, 2001 DH47 and 2007 NS2, travel behind at L5. Astronomers had already studied the reflected light from Eureka and noted that the object was rich in the mineral olivine. The new study shows that 2001 DH47 and 2007 NS2 also are rich in olivine. Olivine is rare in asteroids, but it is common in larger bodies — and occurs on Mars in impact basins.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/scientists-find-signs-of-missing-god-particle/
Dec 14, 2011...
Weizmann Institute of Science astrophysicists have been prominent inthe experiments that have shown "promising signs" of the existence ofthe Higgs boson – the "God particle" – that provides a framework for allof the subatomic particles in nature and has been sought for decades.
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the CERN researchcenter in Switzerland said in an excited announcement on Tuesday that itfound some evidence in its experiments of the existence of theelementary particle.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/new-doubt-about-dark-matter/
Dec 20, 2014...
Clusters of galaxies like this one, MCS J0416.1-2403 located in the constellation of Eridanus, have long been theorized to be bound by cosmological dark matter. Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, HST Frontier Fields; Acknowledgement: Mathilde Jauzac (Durham University, UK and Astrophysics & Cosmology Research Unit, South Africa) and Jean-Paul Kneib (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
Tantalizing ‘signals’ from a handful of recent high-energy searches for dark matter are more likely the product of conventional astrophysics than the first tentative detections of the universe’s missing mass, say skeptical astrophysicists.
May 08, 2018...
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Roman Tkachenko)
Walk away from Facebook, nix the porch light and stroll outside to enjoy the sky tonight. The king of the planets stays very bright throughout this month and reaches “opposition” on Tuesday, which means the planet with the big red spot will be very bright in the southeast sky.
Opposition occurs when Jupiter and the sun are opposite one another from our earthly perspective. Essentially, we revel in a “full” Jupiter — just like a full moon — which can be seen throughout May at -2.5 magnitude (very bright) in the constellation Libra in the southeast after sundown.
Mar 01, 2014... Smaller, lighter, faster to build, easier to launch and one-tenth the cost of today’s big space telescopes: That is the idea behind a unique collaboration between Weizmann Institute scientists and researchers in California, Israeli, and American industry, and NASA. The proposed project, says Institute astrophysicist Prof. Eli Waxman, could lead to a new era of research based on a number of small, special-purpose telescopes that will expand the boundaries of astrophysical research. Among other things, they might enable us to understand how black holes grow, or solve such mysteries as the sources of high-energy cosmic radiation.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/science-tips-november-2014/
Nov 18, 2014... Satellite image of Olympus Mons on Mars, the largest volcano in the solar system at about three times the height of Mount Everest. Around 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, the release of volcanic gases, especially the greenhouse gas sulfur dioxide, may have warmed the surface of Mars episodically, melting the ice and thereby explaining the presence of geomorphological features indicative of the flow of water on the planet’s ancient surface.
May 15, 2020...
In the search for life beyond Earth, Israel Space Agency (ISA) is among four finalists chosen by NASA to develop concept studies in NASA's Discovery Program for new missions. The ISA's proposal is to launch an investigative mission to Neptune's largest moon, Triton.
Each of the four finalists, who were selected out of a group of 22, is set to receive $3 million in the coming year to develop their plans before two are selected for missions.
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