New research led by NASA provides a closer look at a nearby star thought to resemble our young Sun. The work allows scientists to better understand what our Sun may have been like when it was young, and how it may have shaped the atmosphere of our planet and the development of life on Earth. Many people dream of meeting with a younger version of themselves to exchange advice, identify the origins of their defining traits, and share hopes for the…
New research published in Nature has revealed the solution to Jupiter’s ‘energy crisis’, which has puzzled astronomers for decades. Space scientists at the University of Leicester worked with colleagues from the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), Boston University, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) to reveal the mechanism behind Jupiter’s atmospheric heating. Now, using data from the Keck Observatory in Hawai’i, astronomers have created the most-detailed yet global map of the gas…
Superflares, extreme radiation bursts from stars, have been suspected of causing lasting damage to the atmospheres and thus habitability of exoplanets. A newly published study found evidence that they only pose a limited danger to planetary systems, since the radiation bursts do not explode in the direction of the exoplanets. Using optical observations from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), in collaboration with scientists in the US and Spain, studied large…
Quantum information could be behind the next technological revolution. By analogy with the bit in classical computing, the qubit is the basic element of quantum computing. However, demonstrating the existence of this information storage unit and using it remains complex, and hence limited. In a study published on 3 August 2021 in Physical Review X, an international research team consisting of CNRS researcher Fabio Pistolesi1 and two foreign researchers used theoretical calculations to show that it is possible to realize…
Droplet breakup shows how lower stomach contraction waves classify foods. In efforts to fight obesity and enhance drug absorption, scientists have extensively studied how gastric juices in the stomach break down ingested food and other substances. However, less is known about how the complex flow patterns and mechanical stresses produced in the stomach contribute to digestion. Researchers from France, Michigan, and Switzerland built a prototype of an artificial antrum, or lower stomach, to present a deeper understanding of how physical…
Shortly after it formed, the Moon was covered in a global ocean of molten rock (magma). As the magma ocean cooled and solidified, dense minerals sank to form the mantle layer, while less-dense minerals floated to form the surface crust. Later intense bombardment by massive asteroids and comets punched through the crust, blasting out pieces of mantle and scattering them across the lunar surface. Recently, a pair of NASA studies identified the most likely locations to find pieces of mantle on…
NASA mission will study the creation of the solar wind. On July 23, 2021, the Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission achieved an important milestone, passing its latest NASA review and entering the final mission design phase with a new launch-readiness target of October 2023. Southwest Research Institute is leading PUNCH, a NASA Small Explorer (SMEX) mission that will integrate understanding of the Sun’s corona, the outer atmosphere visible during total solar eclipses, with the “solar wind”…
Magnetic fields around black holes decay quickly, report researchers from the Flatiron Institute, Columbia University and Princeton University. This finding backs up the so-called ‘no-hair conjecture’ predicted by Einstein’s general relativity. Black holes aren’t what they eat. Einstein’s general relativity predicts that no matter what a black hole consumes, its external properties depend only on its mass, rotation and electric charge. All other details about its diet disappear. Astrophysicists whimsically call this the no-hair conjecture. (Black holes, they say, “have…
Research team develops new method to study astrophysical processes in the laboratory. In the depths of space, there are celestial bodies where extreme conditions prevail: Rapidly rotating neutron stars generate super-strong magnetic fields. And black holes, with their enormous gravitational pull, can cause huge, energetic jets of matter to shoot out into space. An international physics team with the participation of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has now proposed a new concept that could allow some of these extreme processes to…
Using data from the MUSE instrument, researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) succeeded in detecting extremely faint planetary nebulae in distant galaxies. The method used, a filter algorithm in image data processing, opens up new possibilities for cosmic distance measurement – and thus also for determining the Hubble constant. Planetary nebulae are known in the neighbourhood of the Sun as colourful objects that appear at the end of a star’s life as it evolves from the red…
Researchers at the University of Regensburg track the first step of the reaction of one single dye pigment with oxygen at unprecedented resolution. Why is it that the colours of a t-shirt fade over time in the sun? Why do you get a sunburn, and why do the leaves of a tree turn brown in the autumn? These questions all have one theme in common, the interplay between dye pigments and ambient oxygen. Every child learns about this chemical reaction…
A surprising discovery at TU Wien could help solve the riddle of high-temperature superconductivity: A famous “strange metal” turned out to be a superconductor. At low temperatures, certain materials lose their electrical resistance and conduct electricity without any loss – this phenomenon of superconductivity has been known since 1911, but it is still not fully understood. And that is a pity, because finding a material that would still have superconducting properties even at high temperatures would probably trigger a technological…
With two of the most powerful radio telescopes on Earth, an MPIfR-led team of researchers created the most sensitive maps of the radio emission of large parts of the Northern Galactic plane so far. The data were taken with the VLA (New Mexico) in two different configurations and the Effelsberg telescope. This is covering all angular scales down to 1.5 arc-seconds, the apparent size of a tennis ball on the ground seen from a flying plane. Contrary to previous surveys,…
The breakthrough could have wide-reaching implications in quantum information, cryptography, and energy harvesting, according to a new study. A team of scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory propose that modulated quantum metasurfaces can control all properties of photonic qubits, a breakthrough that could impact the fields of quantum information, communications, sensing and imaging, as well as energy and momentum harvesting. The results of their study were released yesterday in the journal Physical Review Letters, published by the American Physical Society….
Linear molecules can capture and bind free electrons through the permanent dipole moment interaction. Physicists from the University of Innsbruck have achieved laboratory confirmation of the existence of dipole-bound states. Such states can form an intermediate step in the creation of negatively charged molecules and explain the existence of negative ions in interstellar clouds in space. Interstellar clouds are the birthplaces of new stars, but they also play an important role in the origins of life in the Universe through…
Ten years of data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory combined with numerical models reveal the deep low musical notes of the Sun. These motions were measured by analyzing 10 years of observations from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Using computer models, the scientists have shown that the newly discovered oscillations are resonant modes and owe their existence to the Sun’s differential rotation. The oscillations will help establish novel ways to probe the Sun’s interior and obtain information about our star’s…
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