Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, have evidence of oceans beneath their ice crusts. A NASA experiment suggests that if these oceans support life, signatures of that life in the form of organic molecules (e.g. amino acids, nucleic acids, etc.) could survive just under the surface ice despite the harsh radiation on these worlds. If robotic landers are sent to these moons to look for life signs, they would not have to dig very deep…
First observation of the nuclear two-photon decay in bare atomic nuclei. For the first time, an international research team, led by GSI/FAIR in Darmstadt, the Institut de recherche sur les lois fondamentales de l’Univers (IRFU) in Saclay, France, and the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg (MPIK) has succeeded in observing a two-photon decay on a so-called bare atomic nucleus from which the entire electron shell has been removed. The measurements on germanium-72 nuclei were carried out as…
Engineers and scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), led by Oliver Krause, developed crucial optical elements for the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) of the Roman Space Telescope and delivered them to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the USA. The fully assembled and tested CGI recently arrived at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre (GSFC), where it will be integrated into the telescope. The CGI will test an innovative camera design that enables direct imaging and spectroscopy of…
An international team led by researchers from AEI Hannover, MPIfR Bonn and NRAO/USA has discovered ten rapidly rotating neutron stars in the globular cluster Terzan 5. Many of them are in unusual and rare binaries, including a potential candidate for a record-breaking double neutron star, a pulsar in an extremely elliptical orbit, and several “spider” systems in which the neutron stars are evaporating their companions. These finds in data from the MeerKAT radio telescope array increase the number of known…
A research team from the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) at the University of Bremen has investigated the risk of fire on spacecraft in a recent study. The results show that fires on planned exploration missions, such as a flight to Mars, could spread significantly faster than e.g. on the International Space Station (ISS). This is due to the planned adjustment to a lower ambient pressure on spacecraft. “A fire on board a spacecraft is one of…
New experimental results show particles called muons can be corralled into beams suitable for high-energy collisions, paving the way for new physics. Particle accelerators are best known for colliding matter to probe its make-up, but they are also used for measuring the chemical structure of drugs, treating cancers, and manufacturing silicon microchips. Current accelerators use protons, electrons and ions, but more powerful accelerators using muons – heavier cousins of electrons – have the potential to revolutionise the field. Muon accelerators…
Stuttgart researchers are making electrons visible in slow motion. Physicists at the University of Stuttgart under the leadership of Prof. Sebastian Loth are developing quantum microscopy which enables them for the first time to record the movement of electrons at the atomic level with both extremely high spatial and temporal resolution. Their method has the potential to enable scientists to develop materials in a much more targeted way than before. The researchers have published their findings in the renowned journal…
Scientists propose a new way of implementing a neural network with an optical system which could make machine learning more sustainable in the future. The researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light have published their new method in Nature Physics, demonstrating a method much simpler than previous approaches. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are becoming increasingly widespread with applications ranging from computer vision to text generation, as demonstrated by ChatGPT. However, these complex tasks require increasingly…
Researchers at Mainz University and the University of California, Berkeley, achieve a breakthrough in zero-field nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, paving the way towards benchmarking quantum chemistry calculations. What is the structure of a particular molecule? And how do molecules interact with each other? Researchers interested in those questions frequently use nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to find answers. In NMR, a powerful external magnetic field is employed to align the spins of atomic nuclei, which are then induced to rotate…
… a missing link in massive black hole formation. Omega Centauri is a spectacular collection of about ten million stars, visible as a smudge in the night sky from Southern latitudes. Through a small telescope, it looks no different from other so-called globular clusters: a spherical collection of stars, so dense towards the centre that it becomes impossible to distinguish individual stars. But now a new study, led by Maximilian Häberle (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy), confirms what astronomers had…
… in measurements of matter under extreme conditions. Researchers at European XFEL have developed an innovative method to study warm dense matter with unprecedented accuracy. This kind of matter, that exists between condensed matter and plasma physics, can be found, for example, in astrophysical objects or is created during inertial confinement fusion. For the contributing scientists at the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS), this advancement is a great aid to their mission of lifting the analysis of warm dense…
Millisecond pulsars are rotating neutron stars that emit regular electromagnetic signals, similar to lighthouses. The pulsar PSR J0437-4715 is the closest to Earth and thus the brightest. Researchers with the participation of TU Darmstadt have now gained new insights into the neutron star’s radius and its consequences for the equation of state of dense matter. The results are published in a series of papers in the renowned journal “The Astrophysical Journal Letters”. PSR J0437 is a pulsar, a rotating neutron…
UVEX: NASA’s new UV space telescope with ISTA fingerprint to launch in 2030. The next NASA space telescope to survey the ultraviolet sky has the fingerprint of an astronomer from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). Assistant Professor Ylva Götberg is part of a large international collaboration that will study how galaxies and stars evolve, and create a community resource dataset of the entire sky. Götberg discusses the science behind the new telescope and the growing field of…
Physicists in Konstanz (Germany) have discovered a way to imprint a previously unseen geometrical form of chirality onto electrons. The electrons are shaped into chiral coils of mass and charge. Have you ever placed the palm of your left hand on the back of your right hand, in such a way that all fingers point in the same direction? If you have, then you probably know that your left thumb will not touch its right counterpart. Neither rotations nor translations…
Superconductivity is a fascinating phenomenon, which allows a material to sustain an electrical current without any loss. This collective quantum behavior of matter only appears in certain conductors at temperatures far below ambient. A number of modern studies have investigated this behavior in so-called non-equilibrium states, that is in situations in which the material is pushed away from thermal equilibrium. In these conditions, it appears that at least some of the features of superconductivity can be recreated even at ambient…
In a study published online in Nature, a research team led by Prof. PAN Jianwei, Prof. CHEN Yuao, and Prof. YAO Xingcan from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has, for the first time, observed the antiferromagnetic phase transition within a large-scale quantum simulator of the fermionic Hubbard model (FHM). This study highlights the advantages of quantum simulation. It marks an important first step towards obtaining the low-temperature phase diagram of…
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