The Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) onboard Japan’s Hinode spacecraft has opened its doors and started snapping pictures. Shown below is a “first light” image taken Oct. 23rd. The light and dark blobs are solar granules, masses of hot gas that rise and fall like water boiling atop a hot stove.
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Cornell University researchers have managed to build OLEDs that function like solar panels while retaining all the qualities and functionality of an OLED, including being thin and flexible. The researchers used reverse engineering to turn light back into electricity in the OLED itself.
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The realization that potentially indium gallium nitride can absorb most of the visible light from the spectrum could reduce the cost of solar cells several order of magnitudes, while increasing the efficiency dramatically. Could be revolutionary..
(nice…my first digg!)
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Astronomers detected unusually high quantities of carbon, the basis of all terrestrial life, in an infant solar system around nearby star Beta Pictoris, 63 light-years away.
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Continue reading about Mysterious carbon excess found in infant solar system
There?s big news for solar power coming out of Florida. Florida Power & Light, one of the nation
?s largest utilities and the largest producer of wind power, announced at the Clinton Global Initiative Conference that it will spend $1.5 billion to build solar thermal energy in Florida, California, and other states.
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Using a complex array of perforations, the pavilion
?s surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, which?during specific times of the year?transform into the legible text of a poem. The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different shadow-poems according to the solar calendar.
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Continue reading about Complex array of perforations to play with light and shadow
The Oort Cloud is a spherical cloud of comets believed to lie roughly 50,000 AU, or nearly a light-year, from the Sunm which places the cloud at nearly a quarter of the distance to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun. The Kuiper belt and scattered disc, the other two known reservoirs of trans-Neptunian [...]
Continue reading about Massive New Object Discovered at Edge of the Solar System
“Sunlight is the standard for lighting. It’s what our eyes are adapted to, it’s absolutely free, and it is the light we are most comfortable with. A range of companies are now producing systems for capturing sunlight and transmitting it into the interior of a building with fiber optic cables…”
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The farthest reaches of our solar system remain the most mysterious areas around the sun. Solving the mysteries of the outer solar system could shed light on how the whole thing emerged ? as well as how life on Earth was born.
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Continue reading about Did you know this about our Outer Solar System?
fta: The dish, made by Stirling Energy Systems in Phoenix, is the world
?s most efficient solar generator. Instead of converting sunlight into electricity, it uses a concave array of mirrors to focus light on a central point, where heat causes compressed hydrogen to expand, driving a four-cylinder engine that turns a 25-kilowatt generator.
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Continue reading about 38 Foot Solar Dish Can Power Eight Homes