Astronomers have found evidence that the first exoplanet that was identified transiting its star could have migrated to a close orbit with its star from its original birthplace further away. Analysis by international team including University of Warwick of the first transiting exoplanet that was discovered has revealed six different chemicals in its atmosphere. It is the first time that so many molecules have been measured, and points to an atmosphere with more carbon present than oxygen This chemical fingerprint…

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is “seeing double.” Peering back 10 billion years into the universe’s past, Hubble astronomers found a pair of quasars that are so close to each other they look like a single object in ground-based telescopic photos, but not in Hubble’s crisp view. The researchers believe the quasars are very close to each other because they reside in the cores of two merging galaxies. The team went on to win the “daily double” by finding yet another…

Exploring comet thermal history… The world’s first ground-based observations of the bare nucleus of a comet nearing the end of its active life revealed that the nucleus has a diameter of 800 meters and is covered with large grains of phyllosilicate; on Earth large grains of phyllosilicate are commonly available as talcum powder. This discovery provides clues to piece together the history of how this comet evolved into its current burnt-out state. Comet nuclei are difficult to observe because when…

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is on the brink of discovering the extent of the mess it made on asteroid Bennu’s surface during last fall’s sample collection event. On Apr. 7, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will get one last close encounter with Bennu as it performs a final flyover to capture images of the asteroid’s surface. While performing the flyover, the spacecraft will observe Bennu from a distance of about 2.3 miles (3.7 km) – the closest it’s been since the Touch-and-Go Sample…

A user should feel realistic haptic feedback on a touchscreen embedded with electrovibration technology. Unfortunately, not even the most advanced touchscreen devices provide a realistic user experience – all images feel like glass. In the near future, a completely rethought design of the electrical signals causing the haptic sensation could close the gap between reality and fiction. In an experiment, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and Delft University of Technology laid the foundation for rethinking the…

An international research team has made progress towards improved materials for quantum sensor technology. Medicine, navigation and IT could benefit from this in the future. Boron nitride is a technologically interesting material because it is very compatible with other two-dimensional crystalline structures. It therefore opens up pathways to artificial heterostructures or electronic devices built on them with fundamentally new properties. About a year ago, a team from the Institute of Physics at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, succeeded in…

Prof. Dominik Stöckinger from the Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics at TU Dresden is involved in the large-scale muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab in the USA. Now the collaboration is on the verge of a sensational moment that could rewrite the history of particle physics and perhaps even provide clues to yet unknown particles in the universe. For many years, he and his wife Dr. Hyejung Stöckinger-Kim, also a scientist at the Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics, have…

Extending the Abbe theory into a nonlinear regime, researchers demonstrate a far-field, label-free, and scan-free super-resolution imaging technique based on nonlinear four-wave mixing. The diffraction limit, also known as Abbe diffraction limit in optics, poses a great challenge in many systems that involve wave dynamics, such as imaging, astronomy, and photolithography. For example, the best optical microscope only possesses resolution around 200 nm, but the physical size of the photolithography process with an excimer laser is around tens of nanometers….

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and collaborators have demonstrated an atom-based sensor that can determine the direction of an incoming radio signal, another key part for a potential atomic communications system that could be smaller and work better in noisy environments than conventional technology. NIST researchers previously demonstrated that the same atom-based sensors can receive commonly used communications signals. The capability to measure a signal’s “angle of arrival” helps ensure the accuracy of radar and…

Astronomers have detected X-rays from Uranus for the first time, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This result may help scientists learn more about this enigmatic ice giant planet in our solar system.   Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun and has two sets of rings around its equator. The planet, which has four times the diameter of Earth, rotates on its side, making it different from all other planets in the solar system. Since Voyager 2 was the…

Data is the currency of the future. But how can companies access the immense quantities of data generated by their machinery and use it to modernize production? Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA have developed a software called StationConnector that reads out the data and makes it available to any application. These Fraunhofer IPA computer scientists have started an independent company to launch the software on the market: a spin-off called Data Coffee. Data is…

At busy transport hubs where cars mix with cyclists, buses, and streetcars, it can be impossible for drivers to keep track of everything around them. A radar sensor system could solve this problem by issuing an early warning for drivers and self-driving vehicles when a pedestrian runs toward the road or the car. The system, developed by Fraunhofer researchers, will even be able to interpret and understand entire situations on a road with the aid of artificial intelligence. People react…

Magnetic insulators are fascinating materials in which the electron spin can form currents without the need for any electrical current. Such ‚spin currents‘ could be used to transmit information. Now a theory research team from the MPSD, Tianjin University (China), and Tohoku University (Japan) reports in Physical Review Letters that, when driven out of equilibrium by magnetic fields, a universal Doppler effect limits the maximal spin current in magnetic insulators. This finding is a surprising analogy to what happens in…

Elasto-thermoelectric transport technique reveals the interaction between structural and electronic properties of unconventional superconductors. Superconductors are materials where current can flow without resistance below a characteristic temperature. Since its discovery at the beginning of the 20th century, this phenomenon has been matter of intense studies due to its enormous potential for applications, limited so far by the necessity of a cryogenic environment. The main challenge is the realization of superconductivity at higher and higher temperature, which inevitably passes through the…

UVS images faint auroral rings that likely originate at edge of gas giant’s magnetosphere. The SwRI-led Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) orbiting Jupiter aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft has detected new faint aurora features, characterized by ring-like emissions, which expand rapidly over time. SwRI scientists determined that charged particles coming from the edge of Jupiter’s massive magnetosphere triggered these auroral emissions. “We think these newly discovered faint ultraviolet features originate millions of miles away from Jupiter, near the Jovian magnetosphere’s boundary with the…

Scientists at MIPT have found a possible explanation for the anomalously fast release of gas from nuclear fuel. Supercomputer simulations have uncovered an unexpected mechanism for accelerating the escape of gas bubbles from the uranium dioxide crystal matrix to the surface. The result points the way to eliminate the paradoxical discrepancy of several orders of magnitude between existing theoretical models and experimental results. The paper was published in the Journal of Nuclear Materials. The diffusion of gas bubbles during reactor…