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The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, keeps releasing random bursts of radiation on a daily basis and no one can figure out what is causing it. These bursts ranged from tens to hundreds of times brighter than the normal signals sent out by the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy, but they don't appear to follow a discernable pattern. The data from 2006 to 2008 show high levels of gamma-ray activity, followed by a rapid four-year-long drop, after which activity shot back up, starting in 2012. There could be any...

A new discovery could help scientists to understand “strange metals,” a class of materials that are related to high-temperature superconductors and share fundamental quantum attributes with black holes. Scientists understand quite well how temperature affects electrical conductance in most everyday metals like copper or silver. But in recent years, researchers have turned their attention to a class of materials that do not seem to follow the traditional electrical rules. Understanding these so-called “strange metals” could provide fundamental insights into the quantum world, and potentially help scientists understand strange phenomena like high-temperature superconductivity. Now, a research team co-led by a Brown...

The underlying theory is simple enough. "If you can get electrons to pair, they can superconduct," said Dean. According to the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory, an attractive force between electrons—no matter how weak—will cause those electrons to pair up and form a new kind of particle called a "Cooper pair." These behave like particles called bosons and, at low enough temperatures, can enter into a collective state and move through a material unimpeded by disorder—a feature any single electron just cannot achieve on its own. But there's been a problem. "Electrons do not want to pair," said Dean. Like repels like,...

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are intense bursts of radio emission lasting milliseconds and showcasing characteristic dispersion sweep of radio pulsars. The physical nature of these bursts is yet unknown, and astronomers consider a variety of explanations ranging from synchrotron maser emission from young magnetars in supernova remnants to cosmic string cusps. FRB 121102 is the first repeating fast radio burst detected and one of the most extensively studied FRB sources. It exhibits complex burst morphology, sub-burst downward frequency drifts, and also complex pulse phenomenology. FRB 121102 is also one of only two FRBs reported to be spatially associated with persistent...

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, working with Japanese researchers, made the observation on the Large Helical Device (LHD) in Japan, a twisty magnetic facility that the Japanese call a "heliotron." The results demonstrated for the first time a novel regime for confining heat in facilities known as stellarators, similar to the heliotron. The findings could advance the twisty design as a blueprint for future fusion power plants Researchers produced the higher confinement regime by injecting tiny grains of boron powder into the LHD plasma that fuels fusion reactions. The injection through a PPPL-installed dropper...

Scientists have found that antimatter particles fall down, not up, just like regular matter... Physicists at CERN have discovered that antimatter falls down. Sure, it sounds like an obvious thing, but scientists haven’t yet been able to confirm that it responds to gravity in exactly the same way as regular matter does. A new experiment provides the best answer so far. Antimatter is much like the matter that makes up everything around us, with one important difference: its particles have the opposite electric charge. And that simple difference has some major implications – whenever a particle and its antiparticle meet,...

For years, experts thought the biggest stars in the universe, red supergiants, died with a whimper. But in 2020, astronomers witnessed quite the opposite. One of these gleaming monsters -- 10 times more massive than the sun -- violently self-destructed after presenting the cosmos with a final, radiant beacon of starlight. ..Jacobson-Galán is the lead author of a paper published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal that documents the star's eruption as well as its last, 130-day hurrah.... ...The star's extreme illumination indicated it wasn't dormant, or quiescent, as previously observed red supergiants had been prior to their demise. This shiny...

An artist’s impression of a red supergiant star in the final year of its life emitting a tumultuous cloud of gas. This suggests at least some of these stars undergo significant internal changes before going supernova. Credit: W.M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko Astronomers Capture Red Supergiant’s Death Throes “For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode,” researcher says. For the first time ever, astronomers have imaged in real time the dramatic end to a red supergiant’s life — watching the massive star’s rapid self-destruction and final death throes before collapsing into a type II supernova. Led by researchers...

"Using two Hawaiʻi telescopes—the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS on Haleakalā, Maui and W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island—a team of researchers conducting the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE) transient survey observed the red supergiant during its last 130 days leading up to its deadly detonation."

Particles forming swirling, tornado-like structures. (Mukherjee et al, Nature, 2022 ============================================================================== Scientists have observed a stunning demonstration of classic physics giving way to quantum behavior, manipulating a fluid of ultra-cold sodium atoms into a distinct tornado-like formation. Particles behave differently on the quantum level, in part because at this point their interactions with each other hold more power over them than the energy from their movement. Then, of course, there's the mind-boggling fact that quantum particles don't exactly have a certain fixed location like you or I, which influences how they interact. By cooling particles down to as close to...

This animation shows an artist’s rendition of the cloudy structure revealed by a study of data from NASA’s Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer satellite. Credit: Wolfgang Steffen, UNAM ======================================================================== Upending textbook explanations, astrophysicists from the University of Miami, Yale University, and the European Space Agency suggest that primordial black holes account for all dark matter in the universe. Proposing an alternative model for how the universe came to be, a team of astrophysicists suggests that all black holes—from those as tiny as a pinhead to those covering billions of miles—were created instantly after the Big Bang and account for all dark...

(LOFAR/LOL Survey) The image above may look like a fairly normal picture of the night sky, but what you're looking at is a lot more special than just glittering stars. Each of those white dots is an active supermassive black hole. And each of those black holes is devouring material at the heart of a galaxy millions of light-years away – that's how they could be pinpointed at all. Totaling 25,000 such dots, astronomers created the most detailed map to date of black holes at low radio frequencies in early 2021, an achievement that took years and a Europe-sized radio...

The researchers created the tiny transistor by simultaneously applying a force and low voltage which heated a carbon nanotube made up of few layers until outer tube shells separate, leaving just a single-layer nanotube. The heat and strain then changed the "chilarity" of the nanotube, meaning the pattern in which the carbon atoms joined together to form the single-atomic layer of the nanotube wall was rearranged. The result of the new structure connecting the carbon atoms was that the nanotube was transformed into a transistor. Professor Golberg's team members from the National University of Science and Technology in Moscow created...

Illustration of the double pulsar PSR J0737−3039A/B. (Michael Kramer/MPIfRA) Two pulsars locked in close binary orbit have once again validated predictions made by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Over 16 years, an international team of astronomers has observed the pulsar pair, named PSR J0737−3039A/B, finding that the relativistic effects can be measured in the timing of their pulses – just as predicted and expected. This is the first time these effects have been observed. "We studied a system of compact stars that is an unrivalled laboratory to test gravity theories in the presence of very strong gravitational fields," says astronomer...

While all atomic nuclei except hydrogen are composed of protons and neutrons, physicists have been searching for a particle consisting of two, three, or four neutrons for over half a century. Experiments by a team of physicists of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) at the accelerator laboratory...now indicate that a particle comprising four bound neutrons may well exist. Should such particle exist, parts of the theory of the strong interaction would need to be rethought. In 2016, a group in Japan attempted to produce tetra-neutrons from helium-4 by bombarding it with a beam of radioactive helium-8 particles. This reaction...

In perhaps his most famous quip of all time, celebrated physicist Richard Feynman once remarked, when speaking about new discoveries, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” When you do science yourself, engaging in the process of research and inquiry, there are many ways you can become your own worst enemy. If you’re the one proposing a new idea, you must avoid falling into the trap of becoming enamored with it; if you do, you run the risk of choosing to emphasize only the results that support it, while discounting...

China plans to roll out a fleet of hypersonic 10-passenger aircraft capable of flying anywhere in the world within the space of an hour thanks to 12,000mph speeds A hypersonic aircraft is being built by China to fly 10 people anywhere on the planet within an hour. Images of the futuristic prototype show it with a pair of delta wings which unlike the Concorde, is built with upward pointing tips. Thanks to an advanced aerodynamic design, China's hypersonic plane with soar through the sky at a staggering five times the speed of sound....

Astronomers may have, for the first time, detected a sunlike star erupting with a giant outburst 10 times larger than anything similar ever seen from our sun, a new study finds. The new results may shed light on the effects such powerful outbursts may have had on the early Earth when life was born, and could have on modern Earth and our societies, researchers said. Our sun often unleashes flares that can each pack as much energy as millions of hydrogen bombs exploding at the same time. Solar flares are often accompanied by giant bright tendrils of solar plasma known...

As part of the VLA nascent disk and multiplicity survey (VANDAM for short), the researchers mapped the radio waves leaking out of a dense cocoon of dust about 600 light-years away that contained a whole nursery of young stars. The VANDAM survey allowed for a census of stars younger than half a million years old called Class 0 stars – mere babies in star terms – and stars a little older between 500,000 years and 1 million years, called Class 1. Combined with data on the shapes of the surrounding cloud of dust, the scientists found 45 lonely stars, 19...

https://thedebrief.org/darpa-funded-researchers-accidentally-create-the-worlds-first-warp-bubble/?fbclid=IwAR0Fk1AB54CDA-ctHDN4hMrIcI6C8Bw-UIAxOk-BFEsnlnNPFzmHEZkvJiM Warp drive pioneer and former NASA warp drive specialist Dr. Harold G “Sonny” White has reported the successful manifestation of an actual, real-world “Warp Bubble.” And, according to White, this first of its kind breakthrough by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team sets a new starting point for those trying to manufacture a full-sized, warp-capable spacecraft.