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…
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….
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…
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…
A new way to observe laser interactions could improve laser-based manufacture. Despite the enormous amount of research over the decades into lasers and their applications, there have been few ways to accurately, efficiently, and directly observe fine details of their interactions with materials. For the first time, researchers have found a way to acquire such data from a production laser using low-cost equipment that could vastly improve the accuracy of items cut or etched with lasers. Given the ubiquity of…
THz waves have a plethora of applications ranging from biomedical and medical examinations, imaging, environment monitoring, to wireless communications, because of the abundant spectral information, low photon energy, strong penetrability, and shorter wavelength. THz waves with technological advances not only determined by the high-efficiency sources and detectors but also decided by a variety of the high-quality THz components/functional devices. However, traditional THz devices should be thick enough to realize the desired wave-manipulating functions, hindering the development of THz integrated systems…
When so-called beauty quarks are produced during the collision of high-energy proton beams in the Large Hadron Collider – the particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva – they decay almost immediately on the spot. Researchers of the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment (LHCb) reconstruct the properties of the composite particles based on their decay products. According to the established laws of particle physics – the so-called Standard Model – it is expected that beauty quarks decay with the same probability…
Scientists estimate that dark matter and dark energy together are some 95% of the gravitational material in the universe while the remaining 5% is baryonic matter, which is the “normal” matter composing stars, planets, and living beings. However for decades almost one half of this matter has not been found either. Now, using a new technique, a team in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has participated, has shown that this “missing” baryonic matter is found filling the…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, who produced the first ever image of a black hole, has today revealed a new view of the massive object at the centre of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy: how it looks in polarised light. This is the first time astronomers have been able to measure polarisation, a signature of magnetic fields, this close to the edge of a black hole. The observations are key to explaining how the M87 galaxy, located 55 million…
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