Free Republic

Supramolecular assemblies of six rubidium and one iron atom. Scanning tunneling microscopy revealed the clear signal of the one iron atom. (Ajayi et al., Nature, 2023) ***************************************************************************** Atoms may not have bones, but we still want to know how they are put together. These tiny particles are the basis on which all normal matter is built (including our bones), and understanding them helps us understand the larger Universe. We currently use high-energy X-ray light to help us understand atoms and molecules and how they're arranged, catching diffracted beams to reconstruct their configurations in crystal form. Now, scientists have used X-rays...

The Pinwheel Galaxy has a new bright spot. ... an animation showing a bright star explosion appearing in a spiral galaxy Long Island, New York-based astrophotographer Steven Bellavia produced this composite animation of the Pinwheel Galaxy using an image taken on April 21 and comparing it to another image taken on May 21, which clearly shows the supernova appearing. (Image credit: Steven Bellavia) Astronomers and amateurs alike are excited about a new star explosion visible in small telescopes. The new supernova popped into visibility on May 19 in the Pinwheel Galaxy, (also designated as Messier 101, or M101). The galaxy...

Red giant star Betelgeuse. (ALMA - ESO/NAOJ/NRAO, E/O'Gorman/P.Kervella) Since what has come to be known as the Great Dimming that took place in the latter half of 2019 and early 2020, the red giant star Betelgeuse just will not stop with the wackiness. The dying star's regular cycles of brightness fluctuation have changed, and now Betelgeuse has grown uncharacteristically bright. At the time of writing, it was sitting at 142 percent of its normal brightness. It's been fluctuating back and forth on a small scale but on a steady upward trend for months and hit a recent peak of 156...

Over the past few decades, scientists have made incredible progress in understanding and manipulating biological systems at increasingly small scales, from protein folding to genetic engineering. And yet, the extent to which quantum effects influence living systems remains barely understood...Quantum effects are phenomena that occur between atoms and molecules that can't be explained by classical physics...Instead, tiny objects behave according to a different set of laws known as quantum mechanics.

Illustration of a supernova remnant, ejecting a white dwarf at high speed. (Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty Images) When stars like our Sun die, they tend to go out with a whimper and not a bang – unless they happen to be part of a binary (two) star system that could give rise to a supernova explosion. Now, for the first time, astronomers have spotted the radio signature of just such an event in a galaxy more than 400 million light-years away. The finding, published today in Nature, holds tantalizing clues as to what the companion star must have been like....

Quantum machine - Inside the 30-meter tube. (ETH Zurich/Daniel Winkler) Albert Einstein wasn't entirely convinced about quantum mechanics, suggesting our understanding of it was incomplete. In particular, Einstein took issue with entanglement, the notion that a particle could be affected by another particle that wasn't close by. Experiments since have shown that quantum entanglement is indeed possible and that two entangled particles can be connected over a distance. Now a new experiment further confirms it, and in a way we haven't seen before. In the new experiment, scientists used a 30-meter-long tube cooled to close to absolute zero to run...

Artist impression of a black hole accretion. Astronomers led by the University of Southampton have discovered the largest cosmic explosion ever observed, known as AT2021lwx. Over ten times brighter than any known supernova and three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event, the explosion has been ongoing for more than three years. Researchers believe the explosion is due to a massive gas cloud, possibly thousands of times larger than the sun, being violently disrupted by a supermassive black hole. Credit John A. Paice www.johnapaice.com Astronomers have discovered the largest cosmic explosion ever observed, AT2021lwx, which is believed to have...

Researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have discovered multiple debris rings within a previously discovered ring around the young star Fomalhaut. Photo Courtesy of NASA May 9 (UPI) -- Researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope observed multiple debris rings surrounding a young star. The James Webb Telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument, which is designed to capture very long wavelengths of light, found three nested belts surrounding the Fomalhaut star, out to a distance of up to 14 billion miles, NASA said Monday. Observations by NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite first discovered Fomalhuat's dust ring, the first asteroid belt seen outside of...

ESA / Hubble & NASA Physicists believe most of the matter in the universe is made up of an invisible substance that we only know about by its indirect effects on the stars and galaxies we can see. We’re not crazy! Without this “dark matter”, the universe as we see it would make no sense. But the nature of dark matter is a longstanding puzzle. However, a new study by Alfred Amruth at the University of Hong Kong and colleagues, published in Nature Astronomy, uses the gravitational bending of light to bring us a step closer to understanding. Invisible but...

A trail of starlight thought to possibly indicate a runaway supermassive black hole may be something much more mundane: a spiral galaxy seen edge on, a new study finds. In February, astronomer Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University and colleagues reported spotting a line of stars near a compact galaxy in Hubble Space Telescope images. The researchers’ analysis suggested that three galaxies had interacted and merged, kicking a supermassive black hole out of its host galaxy (SN: 3/10/23). The black hole then traveled through a nearby gas cloud, the scenario goes, triggering the formation of stars in a line that...

Chemical Elements in a Distant Gas Cloud This artist’s impression shows a distant gas cloud that contains different chemical elements, illustrated here with schematic representations of various atoms. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have detected three distant gas clouds whose chemical composition matches what we expect from the explosions of the first stars that appeared in the Universe. These early stars can be studied indirectly by analyzing the chemical elements they dispersed into the surrounding environment after they died in supernova explosions. The three distant gas clouds detected in this study are rich in carbon, oxygen, and magnesium, but...

Flashing fast radio bursts...Animation of the randomness of fast radio bursts. (NRAO Outreach/Vimeo) Like gravitational waves (GWs) and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the most powerful and mysterious astronomical phenomena today. These transient events consist of bursts that put out more energy in a millisecond than the Sun does in three days. While most bursts last mere milliseconds, there have been rare cases where FRBs were found repeating. While astronomers are still unsure what causes them and opinions vary, dedicated observatories and international collaborations have dramatically increased the number of events available for study. A...

The beam of light coming from the telescope is then shown in deep blue entering the instrument through the pick-off mirror located at the top of the instrument and acting like a periscope. Then, a series of mirrors redirect the light toward the bottom of the instruments where a set of 4 spectroscopic modules are located. Once there, the beam of light is divided by optical elements called dichroics in 4 beams corresponding to different parts of the mid-infrared region. Each beam enters its own integral field unit; these components split and reformat the light from the whole field of...

...X-ray binaries (XRBs) are composed of a normal star or a white dwarf transferring mass onto a compact neutron star or a black hole. Based on the mass of the companion star, astronomers divide them into low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) and high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs).Discovered on October 9, 2004, by the International Gamma-Ray Astronomy Laboratory (INTEGRAL), IGR J17407−2808 (or J17407 for short) is an LMXB at a distance of some 12,400 light years away from the Earth. Although J17407 exhibited several peculiarly quick and strong flares in the past, it remained a poorly studied source...NuSTAR observations conducted by Ducci's team...

Scientists at ETH Zurich have made progress in creating heavier Schrödinger cats, which can be alive (top) and dead (bottom) at the same time. Credit: Yiwen Chu / ETH Zurich Researchers at ETH Zurich have created the heaviest Schrödinger cat to date by putting a crystal in a superposition of two oscillation states. Their results could lead to more robust quantum bits and help to explain why quantum superpositions are not observed in everyday life. Researchers at ETH Zurich have created the heaviest Schrödinger cat to date. For this, they combined an oscillating crystal with a superconducting circuit. They hope...

A nearly 60-year-old mathematical problem has finally been solved. The story began last fall when David Smith, a retired print technician from Yorkshire, England, came upon a shape with a tantalizing property. The life-long tiling enthusiast discovered a 13-sided shape — dubbed the hat — that is able to fill the infinite plane without overlaps or gaps in a pattern that not only never repeats but also never can be made to repeat. This elusive shape is known to mathematicians as an aperiodic monotile or an einstein, a clever pun that takes its name from the German words ein and...

Researchers at NOIRLab have released a version of the first image ever captured of a black hole that has been sharpened by using artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of NOIRLab/Press Release April 13 (UPI) -- Researchers at the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab have applied AI technology to the first image ever captured of a black hole to present a clearer image of how gas spirals into supermassive black holes. When gas approaches a black hole, it swirls quickly and superheats because of friction, which in turn releases radiation that can be detected by radio telescopes. The team published a paper in...

An amateur mathematician in the United Kingdom may have solved a 60-year-old problem in geometry, garnering the attention of researchers. CNN reported David Smith, a retired printing technician, has discovered a shape known as an “einstein,” which can be tiled over a surface without the pattern repeating. The outlet noted mathematicians first began working on this problem in the 1960s. Smith and three coauthors, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss, published a paper explaining Smith’s finding. Smith, who says he is “always looking for an interesting shape,” wrote a blog post to serve as a “scrapbook” of...

Gaia Black Holes The location of the first two black holes discovered by ESA’s Gaia mission in the Milky Way. This map of our galaxy was also made by the Gaia mission. Gaia Black Hole 1 is located just 1560 light-years away from us in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus and Gaia Black Hole 2 is 3800 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. In galactic terms, these black holes reside in our cosmic backyard. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO ESA’s Gaia mission has helped discover a new kind of black hole. The new family already has two members,...

In a distant galaxy, a supermassive black hole spewing radiation at near light speed has shifted its angle by a whopping 90 degrees to point directly toward Earth — a sharp turn that's puzzling physicists. Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are the hungry black holes at the cores of many other galaxies, and they accrete matter and spew powerful jets of high-energy particles known as relativistic jets. AGN are classified according to what part of the AGN is pointed toward Earth. The researchers also observed two lobes — areas where an AGN's jets interact with surrounding gas — where some jets...