A new technique developed in part by University of Hawaiʻi astronomer Nader Haghighipour has allowed scientists to quickly detect a transiting planet with two suns. Termed circumbinary planets, these objects orbit around a pair of stars. For years, these planets were merely the subject of science fiction, like Tatooine in Star Wars. However, thanks to NASA’s successful planet-hunting Kepler and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) missions, a team of astronomers, including Haghighipour, have found 14 such bodies so far. Kepler…
University of Rochester researchers for the first time package a way of amplifying interferometric signals using inverse weak value amplification —without increase in extraneous input or “noise”—on an integrated photonic chip. By merging two or more sources of light, interferometers create interference patterns that can provide remarkably detailed information about everything they illuminate, from a tiny flaw on a mirror, to the dispersion of pollutants in the atmosphere, to gravitational patterns in far reaches of the Universe. “If you want…
New insights into element synthesis in the universe. How are chemical elements produced in our Universe? Where do heavy elements like gold and uranium come from? Using computer simulations, a research team from the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, together with colleagues from Belgium and Japan, shows that the synthesis of heavy elements is typical for certain black holes with orbiting matter accumulations, so-called accretion disks. The predicted abundance of the formed elements provides insight into which heavy elements…
Forming planets are one possible explanation for the rings and gaps observed in disks of gas and dust around young stars. But this theory has trouble explaining why it is rare to find planets associated with rings. New supercomputer simulations show that after creating a ring, a planet can move away and leave the ring behind. Not only does this bolster the planet theory for ring formation, the simulations show that a migrating planet can produce a variety of patterns…
How gentle nuclear reactions with fragile nuclei could help us better understand the universe and fight cancer. It’s strange to think that there are nuclear reactions that physicists classify as gentle. After all, the particle accelerators that let scientists study these reactions are nicknamed “atom smashers,” not “atom coddlers.” But gentle nuclear reactions represent more than a strange-sounding curiosity. These reactions let researchers stress-test certain scientific models that account for how the universe’s fundamental rules work, said Kaitlin Cook of the Facility for…
By implementing artificial intelligence techniques similar to those used in autonomous cars, a team from the UNIGE and the UniBE, in partnership with the company Disaitek, has discovered a new method for detecting exoplanets. The majority of exoplanets discovered to date have been discovered using the transit method. This technique is based on a mini eclipse caused when a planet passes in front of its star. The decrease in luminosity observed makes it possible to deduce the existence of a…
New approach expands the application of powerful, ultrafast laser pulses. Quick bursts of laser light, lasting less than a trillionth of a second, are used in a range of applications today. These ultrashort laser pulses have allowed scientists to observe chemical reactions in real-time, image delicate biological samples, build precise nanostructures, and send long-distance, high-bitrate optical communications. But any application of ultrashort laser pulses in the visible spectrum must overcome a fundamental difficulty — red light travels faster than blue…
The Snowman Nebula is an emission nebula that resides in the constellation Puppis in the southern sky, about 6,000 light-years away from Earth. Emission nebulae are diffuse clouds of gas that have become so charged by the energy of nearby massive stars that they glow with their own light. The radiation from these massive stars strips electrons from the nebula’s hydrogen atoms in a process called ionization. As the energized electrons revert from their higher-energy state to a lower-energy state,…
A group of scientists working at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), Pune have for the first time unravelled the eclipse mechanisms for the millisecond pulsars in compact binary systems using the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT). Eclipses in millisecond pulsars have been known since the 1980’s, but the exact cause of these eclipses have not been understood till now. Devojyoti Kansabanik a Ph.D. student at NCRA is the lead author of the paper describing this work, which…
Dr. Jan Vogelsang, a physicist at the University of Oldenburg, has been accepted into the renowned Emmy Noether Programme (ENP) run by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Vogelsang can now establish his own junior research group, for which the DFG is providing up to 2.5 million euros in funding. In his project “Attosecond Charge Carrier Dynamics at Nanoscale Interfaces”, Vogelsang is making processes visible that are far too small and too fast for the human eye to detect. “Offering our…
Scientists for the first time demonstrated Young’s experiment for photons in the reciprocal space. Spin patterns corresponding to the persistent spin helix and the Stern-Gerlach experiment are realized in an optically anisotropic liquid crystal microcavity. By applying electric voltage across the microcavity, the liquid crystal molecules inside could be rotated in such a way that the light passing through the cavity was forced to change its internal state into right- and left-handed circular polarized components. Young’s experiment from almost 220…
An international research team with participation from Mainz and Darmstadt measures neutron form factors with previously unattained precision. All known atomic nuclei and therefore almost all visible matter consists of protons and neutrons, yet many of the properties of these omnipresent natural building blocks remain unknown. As an uncharged particle, the neutron in particular resists many types of measurement and 90 years after its discovery there are still many unanswered questions regarding its size and lifetime, among other things. The…
Experiments drive electrons to multi-GeV energies in an all-optical laser-driven accelerator. Charged particle accelerators have been a central tool of basic physics research for almost a hundred years, perhaps most famously as “atom smashers” for understanding the elementary constituents of the universe. As accelerators have progressed to ever higher energies to probe ever smaller constituents, they have grown to enormous size: the Large Hadron Collider is a remarkable 27 kilometers in circumference. Recently, however, researchers at the University of Maryland…
Discoveries reveal an escape route for high-energy electrons that can lead to thermal quenches. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Los Alamos National Laboratory have uncovered a key process behind a major challenge called thermal quenches, the rapid heat loss in hot plasmas that can occur in doughnut-shaped tokamak fusion devices. Such quenches are sudden drops of electron heat in the plasma that fuels fusion reactions, drops that can create damaging disruptions inside…
A temporal change in the titania surface chemical state during the UV light irradiation is not observable through conventional methods such as regular FTIR or Raman spectroscopy. Therefore, a team led by Professor Hiromasa Nishikiori of Shinshu University’s RISM observed this reaction through time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy. The team noted the monoanion transformation to the dianion (deprotonated species) of fluorescein “in the excited states” where the proton transfers from the fluorescein dye to the titania surface during the UV irradiation, which…
Theory and experiments developed at Michigan State use ‘mirror nuclei’ to probe fundamental physics of atoms and neutron stars. About 20 years ago, Michigan State University’s B. Alex Brown had an idea to reveal insights about a fundamental but enigmatic force at work in some of the most extreme environments in the universe. These environments include an atom’s nucleus and celestial bodies known as neutron stars, both of which are among the densest objects known to humanity. For comparison, matching…
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