Webb’s infrared camera peers through dust clouds, enabling discovery. Rice University astronomer Megan Reiter and colleagues took a “deep dive” into one of the first images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and were rewarded with the discovery of telltale signs from two dozen previously unseen young stars about 7,500 light years from Earth. The published research in the December issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society offers a glimpse of what astronomers will find with Webb’s…
FQXi-funded project in the Gran Sasso mountains hunts for evidence of violations of the ‘Pauli Exclusion Principle’. For decades physicists have been hunting for a quantum-gravity model that would unify quantum physics, the laws that govern the very small, and gravity. One major obstacle has been the difficulty in testing the predictions of candidate models experimentally. But some of the models predict an effect that can be probed in the lab: a very small violation of a fundamental quantum tenet…
Water has puzzled scientists for decades. For the last 30 years or so, they have theorized that when cooled down to a very low temperature like -100C, water might be able to separate into two liquid phases of different densities. Like oil and water, these phases don’t mix and may help explain some of water’s other strange behavior, like how it becomes less dense as it cools. It’s almost impossible to study this phenomenon in a lab, though, because water…
Latest generation smartphones feature often more than 4 microlenses. The reason for this is the desire to take snapshots of a quality that is comparable with those of much more expensive cameras. Such cameras often possess zoom lenses which allow for wide-angle as well as for telephoto images. Common smartphone allow such zooming electronically, by magnifying parts of an image using two fingers on your display. However, the maximum magnification of this electronic zoom function is limited by the coarse…
A team led by UdeM astronomers has found evidence that two exoplanets orbiting a red dwarf star are “water worlds,” planets where water makes up a large fraction of the volume. These worlds, located in a planetary system 218 light-years away in the constellation Lyra, are unlike any planets found in our solar system. The team, led by PhD student Caroline Piaulet of the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at the Université de Montréal, published a detailed study…
The nature and properties of materials depend strongly on dimension. Imagine how different life in a one-dimensional or two-dimensional world would be from the three dimensions we’re commonly accustomed to. With this in mind, it is perhaps not surprising that fractals – objects with fractional dimension – have garnered significant attention since their discovery. Despite their apparent strangeness, fractals arise in surprising places – from snowflakes and lightning strikes to natural coastlines. Researchers at the University of Cambridge, the Max…
Researchers aim to explore how matter gets its mass by confining quarks. A new way to study quarks, one of the building blocks of the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei, is proposed. This has never been done before and doing so would help answer many fundamental questions in physics. In particular, researchers could use the new approach to determine how matter gets its mass. The study of matter can seem a bit like opening a stack of…
Two seemingly different areas of physics are related in subtle ways: Quantum theory and thermodynamics. How chaos theory mediates between them has now been studied at TU Wien. A single particle has no temperature. It has a certain energy or a certain speed – but it is not possible to translate that into a temperature. Only when dealing with random velocity distributions of many particles, a well-defined temperature emerges. How can the laws of thermodynamics arise from the laws of…
Interactions between a spinning object and soundwaves could help develop high-precision tools, such as tweezers that control the motion and position of submillimeter objects by manipulating acoustic waves, a KAUST-led international team suggests. Acoustic metamaterials, which can be tailored to transmit, trap and amplify sound waves at specific frequencies, are expected to enable innovative technologies in fields ranging from precision sensing to surgical tools. Extensive research has produced a range of metamaterials, such as ultrasonic lenses that focus 60 kilohertz…
New theory on autonomous remodeling of structures. The concept of remodeling is familiar to most people: those who have ever played with Lego bricks know that many combinations and structures possible from the same components. Typically, an attached manual describes the arrangement of the individual blocks and the shape of the final structure. Initially assembling only a few pieces can thereby already determine the way all other parts have to be attached. “Our model describes the rearrangement of building blocks…
Understanding how water droplets spread and coalesce is essential for scenarios in everyday life, such as raindrops falling off cars, planes, and roofs, and for applications in energy generation, aerospace engineering, and microscale cell adhesion. However, these phenomena are difficult to model and challenging to observe experimentally. In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Cornell University and Clemson University designed and analyzed droplet experiments that were done on the International Space Station. Droplets usually appear as small spherical…
Computational modeling reveals the mechanism by which an undulating, flying snake can achieve lift and glide hundreds of feet. Robots have been designed to move in ways that mimic animal movements, such as walking and swimming. Scientists are now considering how to design robots that mimic the gliding motion exhibited by flying snakes. In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech explored the lift production mechanism of flying snakes, which undulate side-to-side…
How are galaxies born, and what holds them together? Astronomers assume that dark matter plays an essential role. However, as yet it has not been possible to prove directly that dark matter exists. A research team including Technical University of Munich (TUM) scientists has now measured for the first time the survival rate of antihelium nuclei from the depths of the galaxy – a necessary prerequisite for the indirect search for Dark Matter. Many things point to the existence of…
Investigators from the Institute of Industrial Science at The University of Tokyo added the influence of hydrodynamics, which includes the flow and compressibility properties of water, to computer simulations of suspended charged particles in an electric field. They found that this greatly improved the predictions of the final structures compared with conventional computational models. This work may help explain how hydrodynamic interactions impact the self-organization of particles suspended in a solution, including in biological systems like cells. Brownian dynamics (BD)…
… for ultra-low noise data transmission in satellite communications. To meet the world’s rapidly growing data consumption and increasing bandwidth requirements, satellite communications are shifting to higher frequencies. The W-band (75–110 GHz) is well suited for use in space, but technical components have been lacking so far. For this reason, Fraunhofer IAF has launched the BEACON project: Together with researchers from RPG-Radiometer Physics, a novel W-band receive front-end module is to be realized as part of the ESA ARTES program….
Aside from a tapestry of glittering stars, and the glow of the waxing and waning Moon, the nighttime sky looks inky black to the casual observer. But how dark is dark? To find out, astronomers decided to sort through 200,000 images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and made tens of thousands of measurements on these images to look for any residual background glow in the sky, in an ambitious project called SKYSURF. This would be any leftover light after subtracting the glow…
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