Giant gas planet orbiting a dead star gives glimpse into the predicted aftermath of our sun’s demise. Astronomers have discovered the very first confirmed planetary system that resembles the expected fate of our solar system, when the Sun reaches the end of its life in about five billion years. The researchers detected the system using W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi; it consists of a Jupiter-like planet with a Jupiter-like orbit revolving around a white dwarf star located…
Holey metalens! Metasurfaces are nanoscale structures that interact with light. Today, most metasurfaces use monolith-like nanopillars to focus, shape and control light. The taller the nanopillar, the more time it takes for light to pass through the nanostructure, giving the metasurface more versatile control of each color of light. But very tall pillars tend to fall or cling together. What if, instead of building tall structures, you went the other way? In a recent paper, researchers at the Harvard John…
Jefferson Lab and Fermilab experiments present new results on nucleon structure. Two independent studies have illuminated unexpected substructures in the fundamental components of all matter. Preliminary results using a novel tagging method could explain the origin of the longstanding nuclear paradox known as the EMC effect. Meanwhile, authors will share next steps after the recent observation of asymmetrical antimatter in the proton. Both groups will discuss their experiments at DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and Fermilab during the 2021…
EPFL scientists have developed a topology-based method that forces microwave photons to travel along on way path, despite unprecedented levels of disorder and obstacles on their way. Topological insulators are materials whose structure forces photons and electrons to move only along the material’s boundary and only in one direction. These particles experience very little resistance and travel freely past obstacles such as impurities, fabrication defects, a change of signal’s trajectory within a circuit, or objects placed intentionally in the particles’…
An international research team led by Prof. LI Di and Dr. WANG Pei from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) caught an extreme episode of cosmic explosions from Fast Radio Burst (FRB) 121102, using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). A total of 1,652 independent bursts were detected within 47 days starting Aug. 29, 2019 (UT). It is the largest set of FRB events so far, more than the number reported in all other publications combined….
When designing a light source, one typically restricts their aim to certain correlation properties. For example, in a single-mode laser, correlations can be found across the entire wavefront. However, optical cavities that support only a single mode are usually relatively difficult to manufacture. A cavity that supports multiple modes is easier to fabricate, but in such a laser the correlations vanish, depending on the number of modes present. “Both of these source types have their uses and in the past…
Research team including Göttingen University observes charged particles 70 percent faster than uncharged. Solar prominences hover above the visible solar disk like giant clouds, held there by a supporting framework of magnetic forces, originating from layers deep within the Sun. The magnetic lines of force are moved by ever-present gas currents – and when the supporting framework moves, so does the prominence cloud. A research team from the University of Göttingen and the astrophysics institutes at Paris, Potsdam and Locarno…
First results from a precision measurement of the neutron skin in a calcium nucleus to be announced at 2021 Fall Meeting of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics. A new high-precision measurement of the neutron skin in doubly magic calcium-48 may help shed light on proton-neutron interactions inside nuclei. This is the first highly robust electroweak measurement of the neutron skin in a medium-weight nucleus. The results from this new measurement, made by the 48Ca Radius EXperiment (CREX) collaboration at…
Unlikely, new study shows… New calculations show that a black hole slurping down a star may not have generated enough energy to launch a neutrino. In October 2019, a high-energy neutrino slammed into Antarctica. The neutrino, which was remarkably hard to detect, peaked astronomers’ interest: what could generate such a powerful particle? Researchers traced the neutrino back to a supermassive black hole that had just ripped apart and swallowed a star. Known as a tidal disruption event (TDE), AT2019dsg occurred just…
When light interacts with matter it can substantially change the behavior of the material. Depending on the form of interaction between light and matter, some chemical reactions appear differently, substances turn magnetic or ferroelectric or begin to conduct electricity without any losses. In particularly thrilling cases, an actual light source may not even be necessary because the mere possibility for light to exist, i.e., its quantum equivalent, the photons, can change the behavior of matter. Theoretical scientists try to describe…
An international team of researchers has made the world’s most precise measurement of the neutron’s lifetime, which may help answer questions about the early universe. An international team of physicists led by researchers at Indiana University Bloomington has announced the world’s most precise measurement of the neutron’s lifetime. The results from the team, which encompasses scientists from over 10 national labs and universities in the United States and abroad, represent a more than two-fold improvement over previous measurements — with…
The fundamental forces of physics govern the matter comprising the Universe, yet exactly how these forces work together is still not fully understood. The existence of Hawking radiation — the particle emission from near black holes — indicates that general relativity and quantum mechanics must cooperate. But directly observing Hawking radiation from a black hole is nearly impossible due to the background noise of the Universe, so how can researchers study it to better understand how the forces interact and…
For the first time, researchers have been able capture images providing unprecedented details of how particles behave in a liquid suspension when the phenomenon known as shear thickening takes place. The work allows us to directly understand the processes behind shear thickening, which had previously only been understood based on inference and computational modeling. Shear thickening is a phenomenon that can occur when particles are suspended in a low-viscosity solution. If the concentration of particles is high enough, then when…
Curtin University researchers have helped to determine the age of the youngest rocks ever found on the Moon, as part of a global space mission that is working to refine the chronology of the entire Solar System. The new research, published in Science, determined the basaltic volcanic rocks, collected as part of China’s Chang’e-5 Moon landing in December 2020, were about two billion years old – or one billion years younger than those previously found on the Moon. The rock…
Simulations of supernova explosions of massive stars paired with neutron stars can explain puzzling results from gravitational wave observatories. A new study showing how the explosion of a stripped massive star in a supernova can lead to the formation of a heavy neutron star or a light black hole resolves one of the most challenging puzzles to emerge from the detection of neutron star mergers by the gravitational wave observatories LIGO and Virgo. The first detection of gravitational waves by…
New research by a City College of New York team has uncovered a novel way to combine two different states of matter. For one of the first times, topological photons—light—has been combined with lattice vibrations, also known as phonons, to manipulate their propagation in a robust and controllable way. The study utilized topological photonics, an emergent direction in photonics which leverages fundamental ideas of the mathematical field of topology about conserved quantities—topological invariants—that remain constant when altering parts of a…
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