Moon’s permanently shadowed regions are younger than previously estimated. A team including Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Raluca Rufu recently calculated that most of the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) are at most around 3.4 billion years old and can contain relatively young deposits of water ice. Water resources are considered key for sustainable exploration of the Moon and beyond, but these findings suggest that current estimates for cold-trapped ices are too high. The current tilt of the Moon’s spin axis…
LCLS-II ushers in a new era of science. With up to a million X-ray flashes per second, 8,000 times more than its predecessor, it transforms the ability of scientists to explore atomic-scale, ultrafast phenomena that are key to a broad range of applications, from quantum materials to clean energy technologies and medicine. The newly upgraded Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory successfully produced its first X-rays, and researchers…
… deepens mystery of Hubble constant tension. The rate at which the universe is expanding, known as the Hubble constant, is one of the fundamental parameters for understanding the evolution and ultimate fate of the cosmos. However, a persistent difference called the “Hubble Tension” is seen between the value of the constant measured with a wide range of independent distance indicators and its value predicted from the big bang afterglow. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provides new capabilities to scrutinize…
New research shows that the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy can have a direct impact on the chemical distribution of the host galaxy. This provides another piece of the puzzle for understanding how galaxies evolve. It is well known that active supermassive black holes can produce major changes their host galaxies by heating up and removing the interstellar gas in the galaxy. But the compact sizes of black holes, the long distances from Earth, and obscuration…
In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers from the Paul-Drude-Institut in Berlin, Germany, and the Instituto Balseiro in Bariloche, Argentina, demonstrated that the mixing of confined quantum fluids of light and GHz sound leads to the emergence of an elusive phonoriton quasi-particle – in part a quantum of light (photon), a quantum of sound (phonon) and a semiconductor exciton. This discovery opens a novel way to coherently convert information between optical and microwave domains, bringing potential benefits to…
A team of researchers, led by a University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa planetary scientist, discovered that high energy electrons in Earth’s plasma sheet are contributing to weathering processes on the Moon’s surface and, importantly, the electrons may have aided the formation of water on the lunar surface. The study was published today in Nature Astronomy. Understanding the concentrations and distributions of water on the Moon is critical to understanding its formation and evolution, and to providing water resources for…
Lab-based studies reveal how carbon atoms diffuse on the surface of interstellar ice grains to form complex organic compounds, crucial to reveal the chemical complexity in the universe. Uncovering the organic (carbon-based) chemistry in interstellar space is central to understanding the chemistry of the universe in addition to the origin of life on Earth and the possibilities for life elsewhere. The list of organic molecules detected in space and understanding how they could be interacting is steadily expanding due to…
Herbig-Haro (HH) objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars, formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from these newborn stars form shock waves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. This image of HH 211 from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals an outflow from a Class 0 protostar, an infantile analog of our Sun when it was no more than a few tens of thousands of years old and with a mass only 8% of…
Göttingen University researchers use mathematical model to identify new mechanism for control of phase separation. The very first life on earth is thought to have developed from “protocells” – liquid mixtures of many different types of molecules. Researchers from the University of Göttingen have now shown that in such mixtures, small imbalances in the number of molecules of different types can have an unexpected effect. A surprising interplay with the complex pattern of interactions strongly amplifies such imbalances – meaning…
A research team relies on measuring the number of galaxy members to determine the mass of galaxy clusters. “Cosmologists believe that only about 20% of the total matter is made of regular or ‘baryonic’ matter, which includes stars, galaxies, atoms, and life,” explains first author Dr. Mohamed Abdullah, a researcher at the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics-Egypt, Chiba University, Japan. “About 80% is made of dark matter, whose mysterious nature is not yet known but may consist of…
Tiny oil droplets and air bubbles supply the sticky summer staple with its signature chewiness. American beach town boardwalks often boast numerous storefronts advertising saltwater taffies. The candy calls to mind summer vacations, a rainbow assortment of colors and flavors, and a sweetness that sticks to the roof of your mouth. But when San To Chan received saltwater taffy to celebrate their thesis defense, their first question was not of the flavor but of the physics. When measuring how the…
A new investigation with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into K2-18 b, an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth, has revealed the presence of carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide. Webb’s discovery adds to recent studies suggesting that K2-18 b could be a Hycean exoplanet, one which has the potential to possess a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a water ocean-covered surface. The first insight into the atmospheric properties of this habitable-zone exoplanet came from observations with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope,…
Researchers in Germany and Japan have been able to increase the diffusion of magnetic whirls, so called skyrmions, by a factor of ten. In today’s world, our lives are unimaginable without computers. Up until now, these devices process information using primarily electrons as charge carriers, with the components themselves heating up significantly in the process. Active cooling is thus necessary, which comes with high energy costs. Spintronics aims to solve this problem: Instead of utilizing the electron flow for information…
A team of researchers, engineers and technicians has developed a ‘SMART box’ to power the world’s largest radio telescope. The Power and Signal Distribution (PaSD) SMART boxes (Small Modular Aggregation RFoF Trunk) are an essential component of the Square Kilometre Array Low frequency (SKA-Low) telescope, currently under construction at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, in Western Australia. The SMART boxes provide electrical power to the SKA-Low telescope’s 131,072 antennas and collect signals received from the sky to…
Using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which launched in 2004, scientists have discovered a black hole in a distant galaxy repeatedly nibbling on a Sun-like star. The object heralds a new era of Swift science made possible by a novel method for analyzing data from the satellite’s X-ray Telescope (XRT). “Swift’s hardware, software, and the skills of its international team have enabled it to adapt to new areas of astrophysics over its lifetime,” said Phil Evans, an astrophysicist at the University…
New physics-based self-learning machines could replace the current artificial neural networks and save energy. Artifical intelligence not only affords impressive performance, but also creates significant demand for energy. The more demanding the tasks for which it is trained, the more energy it consumes. Víctor López-Pastor and Florian Marquardt, two scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany, present a method by which artificial intelligence could be trained much more efficiently. Their approach relies on…
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