Using the strongest materials known to man, scientists are building the most powerful electromagnet in the world — one that won’t blow up a split second after it’s turned on.

The entire magnet will be a combination of coil sets weighing nearly 18,000 pounds and powered by jolts from a massive 1,200-megajoules motor generator. Once activated, the new magnet should be about two million times more powerful than the average refrigerator magnet.

“The new magnet at the High Field Lab is a fantastic leap forwards in terms of our capability as a scientific community to explore materials under extreme conditions,” said Ian Fisher, a scientist at Stanford University. “In several cases one needs to go to these sorts of extremes to fundamentally understand materials” used in high-temperature superconductors and other applications, said Fisher.

The electromagnet consists of two parts. The outer section, or outsert, will be a cylinder, 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) in diameter and 1.5 meters tall, and solid except for a small hole, less than 8 inches wide, bored through the middle.

Inside that hole rests the insert, nine coils made of copper and strengthened with silver wire as thin as 100 atoms across. Together, the copper and silver create the strongest material known to man, according to Greg Boebinger, Director of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Florida, where the magnet is being built. Eventually the magnet will be placed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The pressures generated inside the insert will be equivalent to 200 sticks of dynamite going off together, or about 30 times the pressure at the bottom of the ocean. Very few things can survive those kinds of forces for long — including the new magnet. The scientists expect each $20,000 insert to survive about 100 pulses. The $8 million outsert should last about 10,000 pulses. Each time the magnet pulses it bends the copper and silver wires, creating tiny cracks in the metal. The cracks in the copper run into the silver wires, which stops the cracks from spreading. [Discovery]

Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing the first discovery by T. Mothé-Diniz (Brazil) and D. Nesvorný (USA) of asteroids with a spectrum similar to that of ordinary chondrites, the meteoritic material that most resembles the composition of our Sun. Most of the meteorites that we collect on Earth come from the main belt of asteroids located between Mars and Jupiter.

They were ejected from their asteroidal “parent body” after a collision, were injected into a new orbit, and they finally felt onto the Earth. Meteorites are a major tool for knowing the history of the solar system because their composition is a record of past geologic processes that occurred while they were still incorporated in the parent asteroid. One fundamental difficulty is that we do not know exactly where the majority of meteorite specimens come from within the asteroidal main belt. For many years, astronomers failed to discover the parent body of the most common meteorites, the ordinary chondrites that represent 75% of all the collected meteorites.

To find the source asteroid of a meteorite, astronomers must compare the spectra of the meteorite specimen to those of asteroids. This is a difficult task because meteorites and their parent bodies underwent different processes after the meteorite was ejected. In particular, asteroidal surfaces are known to be altered by a process called “space weathering”, which is probably caused by micrometeorite and solar wind action that progressively transforms the spectra of asteroidal surfaces. Hence, the spectral properties of asteroids become different from those of their associated meteorites, making the identification of asteroidal parent body more difficult.

Collisions are the main process to affect asteroids. As a consequence of a strong impact, an asteroid can be broken up, its fragments following the same orbit as the primary asteroid. These fragments constitute what astronomers call “asteroid families”. Until recently, most of the known asteroid families have been very old (they were formed 100 million to billions of years ago). Indeed, younger families are more difficult to detect because asteroids are closer to each other. In 2006, four new, extremely young asteroid families were identified, with an age ranging from 50000 to 600000 years. These fragments should be less affected than older families by space weathering after the initial breakup. Mothé-Diniz and Nesvorný then observed these asteroids, using the GEMINI telescopes (one located in Hawaii, the other in Chile), and obtained visible spectra. [READ]

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