Aktualitäten 2019

By Birgit Baustädter Did you know that the first Austrian satellite to go into space was built in TU Graz's labs? TUGSAT-1 has been observing stars for more than six years - and it's not the only object made in Graz that is hurtling through space. "The night after the launch I was lying awake in bed and I thought to myself: amazing! This is something that I held in my hands and now it's flying through space," recalls Otto Koudelka, sitting at a glass conference table at the Inffeldgasse site in Graz.

Is it possible to borrow energy from an empty space? And if yes, do we have to give it back? Energy values smaller than zero are allowed - at least within certain limits. Energy is a quantity that must always be positive - at least that's what our intuition tells us. If every single particle is removed from a certain volume until there is nothing left that could possibly carry energy, then a limit has been reached.

By Birgit Baustädter Torsten Mayer-Gürr surveys the Earth. He may work in an office in Steyrergasse in Graz, but his measuring device flies more than 400 kilometres overhead. Over 400 kilometres above us in the heavens, Tom and Jerry chased each other for years. One of them always out in front, the other in hot pursuit at a varying distance.

Researchers from European countries discuss life in the Universe at the University of Vienna Astrobiology is a young, rapidly developing branch of science that seeks to address the question of whether life exists, or has existed, elsewhere in the Universe. It is by nature an interdisciplinary science that explores the origins of life, the conditions, and processes that support or challenge life, the influence of different environmental conditions on preservation and detection of biosignatures of past and present life.

The theories of quantum mechanics and gravity are notorious for being incompatible, despite the efforts of scores of physicists over the past fifty years. However, recently an international team of researchers led by physicists from the University of Vienna, the Austrian Academy of Sciences as well as the University of Queensland (AUS) and the Stevens Institute of Technology (USA) have combined the key elements of the two theories describing the flow of time and discovered that temporal order between events can exhibit genuine quantum features.

Researchers show young stars rapidly destroy Earth-like Nitrogen dominated atmospheres The discoveries of thousands of planets orbiting stars outside our solar system has made questions about the potential for life to form on these planets fundamentally important in modern science. Fundamentally important for the habitability of a planet is whether or not it can hold onto an atmosphere, which requires that the atmosphere is not completely lost early in the lifetime of the planet.