Cosmic fireworks, invisible to our eyes, fill the night sky. We can get a glimpse of this elusive light show thanks to the Large Area Telescope (LAT) aboard NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which observes the sky in gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light. This animation shows the gamma-ray sky’s frenzied activity during a year of observations from February 2022 to February 2023. The pulsing circles represent just a subset of more than 1,500 light curves – records of how…
When we think of crystals, we think of ice, kitchen salt, quartz, and so on – hard solids whose shapes show a regular pattern. Research performed in the group of UvA-IoP physicist Noushine Shahidzadeh shows that crystals can be quite different: they can be soft and deformable shapes without the familiar facets. The paper where these results were reported was featured as an Editor’s Highlight by the journal Nature Communications. Floppy crystals Crystals are generically hard solids, and are usually…
What they can mean for climate science, geology, and driverless cars? Atomic clocks guarantee unrivalled precision when it comes to tracking time. They help us keep our digital and analogue clocks running on time by measuring the atomic resonance in cesium atoms exposed to microwave radiation. A new generation of optical atomic clocks is now set to increase their precision by a factor of up to 100,000 by measuring higher frequencies in the near IR and visible light range. Fraunhofer…
Physicists at the Universities of Jena and Central Florida investigate light with negative temperatures. In the issue of the renowned journal Science published today (10.3.23), the team led by Prof. Dr Ulf Peschel reports on measurements on a sequence of pulses that travel thousands of kilometres through glass fibres that are only a few microns thin. The researchers were surprised by the results. “We have found that the light pulses organize themselves after about a hundred kilometres and then behave more…
Findings provide evidence for ‘deconfinement’ and insight into seething temperature of the hottest matter on Earth. Scientists using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to study some of the hottest matter ever created in a laboratory have published their first data showing how three distinct variations of particles called upsilons sequentially “melt,” or dissociate, in the hot goo. The results, just published in Physical Review Letters, come from RHIC’s STAR detector, one of two large particle tracking experiments at this U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)…
Physicists led by Prof Raphael Wittkowski and Prof Uwe Thiele from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Münster has developed a new model for the dynamics of systems consisting of many self-propelled particles. The study of active particles is one of the fastest-growing areas of physics. With „active particles“ physicists refer to objects which move by themselves as a result of internal self-propulsion. These include living things such as bacteria and fish swimming, birds flying or humans…
Students test new space technologies under space conditions. If all goes as planned, a rocket will be launched from Cape Canaveral to the International Space Station at 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 15, 2023. A ferrofluid experiment of the student small satellite group (KSat) of the University of Stuttgart will be on board. This experiment will be conducted in space for around four weeks. The aim of the experiment is to find out how to replace mechanical parts such as switches with…
Black holes become active and grow by consuming gas captured from other galaxies. This is the finding of a new study from University of Copenhagen researchers, and shows a clear connection between the evolution of supermassive black holes and galactic interaction. In the outer regions of the Milky Way, our blue planet rotates in its orbit around the Sun, the massive center of our Solar System. 26,000 light-years away, a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* is at the…
New high-speed super-resolution imaging technique resolves a longstanding contradiction between spatial resolution and imaging speed. As an indispensable tool for observing the microcosmos, optical microscopy has boosted the development of various fields, including biology, medicine, physics, and materials. However, optical diffraction imposes a spatial resolution restriction on optical microscopy, which hampers exploration of finer structures. To overcome the resolution limitation, various super-resolution microscopy techniques based on diverse principles have been proposed. Yet these techniques commonly acquire super-resolution at the expense…
… back to the interstellar medium. Observations of water in the disk forming around protostar V883 Ori have unlocked clues about the formation of comets and planetesimals in our own Solar System. Scientists studying a nearby protostar have detected the presence of water in its circumstellar disk. The new observations made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) mark the first detection of water being inherited into a protoplanetary disk without significant changes to its composition. These results further suggest…
European team of autonomous robots explores lava cave in Lanzarote. As potential locations for future base camps, the lava caves on the moon are of great interest. But how can they be reached and explored? This has been investigated by a European consortium coordinated by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in the project CoRob-X funded by the European Commission. In a final analog mission on Lanzarote, the project partners have now succeeded in proving the feasibility of…
Researchers at ETH Zurich and TII Abu Dhabi, with the support of quantum optics theorists from Innsbruck, Austria, have succeeded in simultaneously cooling the motion of a tiny glass sphere in two dimensions to the quantum ground-state. This represents a crucial step towards a 3D ground-state cooling of a massive object and opens up new opportunities for the design of ultra-sensitive sensors. Glass nanoparticles trapped by lasers in extreme vacuum are considered a promising platform for exploring the limits of…
Experiment demonstrates solar system’s fragility. A terrestrial planet hovering between Mars and Jupiter would be able to push Earth out of the solar system and wipe out life on this planet, according to a UC Riverside experiment. UCR astrophysicist Stephen Kane explained that his experiment was meant to address two notable gaps in planetary science. The first is the gap in our solar system between the size of terrestrial and giant gas planets. The largest terrestrial planet is Earth, and…
… only observed in black holes. X-ray binaries are systems formed by a compact object, a neutron star or a black hole, and a star of a similar size to the Sun. The compact object swallows matter from the companion star through a disk that emits large amounts of light, especially in X-rays. This process in which the compact object attracts matter, known as accretion, usually occurs in violent eruptions during which the system becomes up to a thousand times…
Ice-cold electron beams simulated in research at the University of Strathclyde could pave the way to reducing X-ray free-electron lasers (X-FELs) to a fraction of their current size. X-FELs convert the kinetic energy of an electron beam into powerful photon pulses, down to hard X-ray wavelengths, and are often called ‘engines of discovery.’ X-FELs are used to create extreme matter conditions for hot-dense matter research, to study properties of materials for next-generation microchips, to resolve the structure of complex biomolecules…
Quantum effects can play an important role in chemical reactions. Physicists led by Roland Wester of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, have now for the first time observed a quantum mechanical tunneling reaction in experiments. The observation can also be described exactly in theory. With the study published in Nature, the scientists provide an important reference for this fundamental effect in chemistry. It is the slowest reaction with charged particles ever observed. Tunneling reactions in chemistry are very difficult to…
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