It’s been a year of extremes for science and technology. From camera footage of the deepest living fish, swimming some 5 miles beneath the surface of the Pacific ocean, to the creation of the smoothest ever surface – a lead and silicon film.
Here are eight more extremes that New Scientist brought you in 2008.
In July, an international team of craftsmen unveiled an unusual pair of balls – believed to be the roundest objects in the world. “If you were to blow up our spheres to the size of the Earth, you would see a variation of only 3 to 5 metres in the roundness,” said optical engineer Achim Leistner. The silicon balls are designed to each contain a near-identical number of silicon atoms, and become a new way to define the kilogram.
The shortest ever pulse of light – just 80 attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second) long – was created in June. That’s short enough to act like a kind of superfast flashgun to study the movement of electrons around large atoms. But there’s still room for improvement – it’s theoretically possible to produce pulses of just a zeptosecond (trillionths of a billionth of a second).
Concerns about global warming are put in the shade by the discovery of a planet called WASP-12b, which is 1.5 times as massive as Jupiter and takes just over a day to circle its host star, orbiting at 1/40th the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The tight embrace heats WASP-12b to an estimated 2250 °C – about half as hot as the surface of the Sun – making it the hottest planet yet discovered, as well as the planet with the fastest orbit, say researchers.
Later in the year, archaeologists unearthed the earliest nuclear family – an adult couple and their two children, buried together 4600 years ago in Eulau, Germany. “The two kids have her mitochondrial DNA, and his Y chromosome – that’s a nuclear family,” said molecular anthropologist Brian Kemp of Washington State University. But the real-life Flintstones had it much worse than their cartoon counterparts. Their shared grave is one of a number in the area, apparently marking the site of an ancient massacre.
At the time of those murders, a Norway Spruce a few hundred miles to the north was just entering middle age. Today, it is believed by some to be the oldest living organism in the world, we reported in April. At 9,555 years old, it smashes the record set in 2002 by The Old Man, an ancient bristlecone pine in the white mountains of California.
An out of this world news story back in January reported on a true heavyweight – the biggest black hole in the universe. With a mass of 18 billion Suns, it’s six times as massive as the previous record holder, according to Mauri Valtonen of the Tuorla Observatory in Finland.
Not to be outdone by the Europeans, NASA discovered its own extreme black hole in April. With a mass just 3.8 times that of the Sun, the black hole in a binary system called XTE J1650-500 is the tiniest on record. “This black hole is really pushing the limits,” Nikolai Shaposhnikov of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center told New Scientist.
Finally, to end on a not-so-bright note, in December US astronomers discovered the dimmest bulbs in the Milky Way. The “failed stars” each shine with a million times less power than the Sun, making them half as bright as the previous record holder.