New clues deciphering the shape of black holes Black holes are one the most fascinating objects in the Universe. At their surface, known as the ‘event horizon’, gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from them. Usually, black holes are quiet, silent creatures that swallow anything getting too close to them; however, when two black holes collide and merge together, they produce one of the most catastrophic events in Universe: in a fraction of a second, a…
An international team of researchers succeeded in recording photons in the ultraviolet range in real time. The team of Professor Jinyang Liang, a specialist in ultrafast imaging at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), in collaboration with an international team of researchers, has developed the fastest camera in the world capable of recording photons in the ultraviolet (UV) range in real time. This original research is featured on the front cover of the 10th issue of the journal…
2D materials – nanosheets with atomic thickness – have enormous potential for a wide variety of applications. For instance, combined with optical fibres, 2D materials can enable novel applications in the areas of sensors, non-linear optics, and quantum technologies. However, combining these two components has so far been very laborious. Typically, the atomically thin layers had to be produced separately before being transferred by hand onto the optical fibre. Together with Australian colleagues, Jena researchers have now succeeded for the…
Only in the course of several million years did Arrokoth, also known by its nickname Ultima Thule, acquire its bizarre, pancake-flat shape. The many millions of bodies populating the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune’s orbit are yet to reveal many of their secrets. In the 1980s, the space probes Pioneer 1 and 2 as well as Voyager 1 and 2 crossed this region – but without cameras on board. NASA’s spacecraft New Horizons sent the first images from the outermost edge…
An international research team with CAU participation observes hot dust rings around stars in a new wavelength range So close to stars that they can reach temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius: The phenomenon of hot dust rings – an accumulation of submicrometer-sized particles in the immediate vicinity of stars – was first discovered outside our solar system in 2006. However, due to their small size, the dust particles are difficult to observe and their origin is still unknown….
Sharpness of star-forming image matches expected resolution of Webb Space Telescope. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is still more than a year from launching, but the Gemini South telescope in Chile has provided astronomers a glimpse of what the orbiting observatory should deliver. Using a wide-field adaptive optics camera that corrects for distortion from Earth’s atmosphere, Rice University’s Patrick Hartigan and Andrea Isella and Dublin City University’s Turlough Downes used the 8.1-meter telescope to capture near-infrared images of the Carina…
Communications in space demand the most sensitive receivers possible for maximum reach, while also requiring high bit-rate operations. A novel concept for laser-beam based communications, using an almost noiseless optical preamplifier in the receiver, was recently demonstrated by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. In a new paper published in the scientific journal Nature: Light Science & Applications, a team of researchers describes a free-space optical transmission system relying on an optical amplifier that, in principle, does not add…
The NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope has tracked the fading light of a supernova in the spiral galaxy NGC 2525, located 70 million light years away. Supernovae like this one can be used as cosmic tape measures, allowing astronomers to calculate the distance to their galaxies. Hubble captured these images as part of one of its major investigations, measuring the expansion rate of the Universe, which can help answer fundamental questions about our Universe’s very nature. The supernova, formally known as…
Broadband light emission in the infrared has proven to be of paramount importance for a large range of applications that include food quality and product/process monitoring, recycling, environmental sensing and monitoring, multispectral imaging in automotive as well as safety and security. With the advent of IoT and the increasing demand in adding more functionalities to portable devices (such as smart watches, mobile phones etc.) the introduction of on-chip spectrometers for health monitoring, allergen detection food quality inspection, to name a…
A joint international research team from POSTECH of South Korea, Raytheon BBN Technologies, Harvard University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology in Spain, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan have together developed ultrasensitive sensors that can detect microwaves with the highest theoretically possible sensitivity. The research findings, published in the prominent international academic journal Nature on October 1, are drawing attention as an enabling technology for commercializing the next-generation…
Scientists typically prefer to work with ordered systems. However, a diverse team of physicists and biophysicists from the University of Groningen found that individual light-harvesting nanotubes with disordered molecular structures still transport light energy in the same way. By combining spectroscopy, molecular dynamics simulations and theoretical physics, they discovered how disorder at the molecular level is effectively averaged out at the microscopic scale. The results were published on 28 September in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The double-walled…
It is usually believed that ferroelectricity can appear in insulating or semiconducting materials rather than in metals, because conducting electrons of metals always screen out the internal static electric field arising from the dipole moments. In 1965, Anderson and Blount proposed the concept of ‘ferroelectric metal’, pointing out that the electric polarization may appear in certain martensitic transitions due to the inversion symmetry breaking [Anderson et al. Phys Rev Lett 1965, 14, 217-219]. However, after exploration of more than a…
Scientists often refer to the neutrino as the “ghost particle.” Neutrinos were one of the most abundant particles at the origin of the universe and remain so today. Fusion reactions in the sun produce vast armies of them, which pour down on the Earth every day. Trillions pass through our bodies every second, then fly through the Earth as though it were not there. “While first postulated almost a century ago and first detected 65 years ago, neutrinos remain shrouded in mystery because…
In the coming years and decades, various nations want to explore the moon, and plan to send astronauts there again for this purpose. But on our inhospitable satellite, space radiation poses a significant risk. The Apollo astronauts carried so-called dosimeters with them, which performed rudimentary measurements of the total radiation exposure during their entire expedition to the moon and back again. In the current issue (25 September) of the prestigious journal Science Advances, Chinese and German scientists report for the…
A new system, developed by Tohoku University researchers in Japan in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, takes 3D images that can detect defects in metallic structures. The approach was published in the journal Applied Physics Letters and could enhance safety in power plants and airplanes. Yoshikazu Ohara and colleagues at Tohoku University use non-destructive techniques to study structures, and wanted to find a way to produce 3D images of structural defects. They developed a new technology,…
CHEOPS keeps its promise: Observations with the space telescope reveal details of the exoplanet WASP-189b – one of the most extreme planets known. CHEOPS is a joint mission by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Switzerland, under the aegis of the University of Bern in collaboration with the University of Geneva. Eight months after the space telescope CHEOPS started its journey into space, the first scientific publication using data from CHEOPS has been issued. CHEOPS is the first ESA mission…
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