Hubble celebrates its 30th anniversary

For 30 years, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, launched April 24, 1990, has been snapping photos of distant stars, providing a time machine that has taken astronomers back to when the universe was less than a billion years old. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/hubble-30th-anniversary-video…

New handle for controlling electromagnetic properties could enable spintronic computing

Materials scientists at Duke University have shown the first clear example that a material’s transition into a magnet can control instabilities in its crystalline structure that cause it to change from a conductor to an insulator. …

New theory could change the design of future spintronic circuits

The flow of electric charge lies at the heart of electronic circuits. However, electrons also have spin, and flows of electron spin play a vital role in spintronic circuits. These could be essential for our future computing technologies. A current issue with traditional spintronic materials such as magnetic materials is that they are susceptible to electromagnetic fields, which could disrupt spin…

Something is lurking in the heart of Quasar 3C 279

One year ago, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration published the first image of a black hole in the nearby radio galaxy M 87. Now the collaboration has extracted new information from the EHT data on the distant quasar 3C 279: they observed the finest detail ever seen in a jet produced by a supermassive black hole. New analyses, led by…

Quantum-entangled light from a vibrating membrane

Entanglement, a powerful form of correlation among quantum systems, is an important resource for quantum computing. Researchers from the Quantum Optomechanics group at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, recently entangled two laser beams through bouncing them off the same mechanical resonator, a tensioned membrane. This provides a novel way of entangling disparate electromagnetic fields, from microwave radiation to optical…

Are Permanent Magnets the Solution For Delivering Fusion Energy?

According to research published in the journal Physical Review Letters, permanent magnets akin to those used on refrigerators could speed the development of fusion energy. Phys.Org reports: In principle, such magnets can greatly simplify the design and production of twisty fusion facilities called stellarators, according to scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the…

Neutron star with measured at 11 kilometers radius

An international research team led by members of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute; AEI) has obtained new measurements of how big neutron stars are. To do so, they combined a general first-principles description of the unknown behavior of neutron star matter with multi-messenger observations of the binary neutron star merger GW170817. Their results, which appeared in…

Team obtains the best measurement of neutron star size to date

An international research team led by members of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute; AEI) has obtained new measurements of how big neutron stars are. To do so, they combined a general first-principles description of the unknown behavior of neutron star matter with multi-messenger observations of the binary neutron star merger GW170817. Their results, which appeared in…

The force is strong in neutron stars

Physicists at MIT analyzed data from earlier experiments in particle accelerators, in order to probe the workings of the strong nuclear force that operates inside atoms. Their work sheds light on this force – one of the 4 fundamental forces of nature – and also illuminates the structure of a neutron star’s core. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/neutron-stars-strong-nuclear-force…

What is dark matter?

Dark matter doesn’t emit light. It can’t be directly observed with any of the existing tools of astronomers. Yet astrophysicists believe it and dark energy make up most of the mass of the cosmos. What dark matter is, and what it isn’t. here. Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/definition-what-is-dark-matter…