Scientists in Europe have found more yet evidence for water vapor plumes on Jupiter’s ocean moon Europa. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/europa-water-vapor-plumes-galileo…
Tag: Max Planck
New simulations indicate that Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon ejects water from its subsurface ocean into space
During a fly-by of Jupiter’s moon Europa twenty years ago, NASA’s space probe Galileo may have witnessed a plume of water. A group of scientists including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany have now found new evidence of this event. In computer simulations they strove to reproduce the data gathered by the onboard particle…
Successfully measuring infinitesimal change in mass of individual atoms for the first time
A new door to the quantum world has been opened: When an atom absorbs or releases energy via the quantum leap of an electron, it becomes heavier or lighter. This can be explained by Einstein’s theory of relativity (E = mc2). However, the effect is minuscule for a single atom. Nevertheless, the team of Klaus Blaum and Sergey Eliseev at the…
Long-lived pionic helium: Exotic matter experimentally verified for the first time
Exotic atoms in which electrons are replaced by other subatomic particles of the same charge allow deep insights into the quantum world. After eight years of ongoing research, a group led by Masaki Hori, senior physicist at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, has now succeeded in a challenging experiment: In a helium atom, they replaced an…
Study shows our sun is less active than similar stars
By cosmic standards the sun is extraordinarily monotonous. This is the result of a study presented by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in the upcoming issue of Science. For the first time, the scientists compared the sun with hundreds of other stars with similar rotation periods. Most displayed much stronger variations. This raises the question whether…
A unique (so far) gravitational wave signal
LIGO and Virgo detectors have now captured the first gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger where the black hole masses are unequal. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/a-gravitational-wave-signal-like-none-before…
Boosting polaritonic nonlinearity with a mechanism to create polaron-polaritons
A team of researchers from the Institute for Quantum Electronics, ETH Zürich, the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology has found a way to boost polaritonic nonlinearity. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review X, the group describes building a mechanism to create polaron-polaritons, which led to a boost in…
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…
A new theory of magnetar formation
Magnetars are neutron stars endowed with the strongest magnetic fields observed in the universe, but their origin remains controversial. In a study published in Science Advances, a team of scientists from CEA, Saclay, the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris developed a new and unprecedentedly detailed computer model that can explain the…
Researchers find gravitational wave candidates from binary black hole mergers in public LIGO/Virgo data
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute; AEI) in Hannover together with international colleagues have published their second Open Gravitational-wave Catalog (2-OGC). They used improved search methods to dig deeper into publicly available data from LIGO’s and Virgo’s first and second observation runs. Apart from confirming the ten known binary black hole mergers and one binary…