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Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the presence of electrically-charged molecules in space shaped like soccer balls, shedding light on the mysterious contents of the interstellar medium (ISM) - the gas and dust that fills interstellar space. The molecules … are a form of carbon called "Buckminsterfullerene," also known as "Buckyballs," which consists of 60 carbon atoms (C60) arranged in a hollow sphere. C60 has been found in some rare cases on Earth in rocks and minerals, and can also turn up in high-temperature combustion soot. C60 has been seen in space before. However, this is the first...

Beams with highly structured angular momentum are said to have orbital angular momentum (OAM), and are called vortex beams. They appear as a helix surrounding a common center, and when they strike a flat surface, they appear as doughnut-shaped. In this new effort, the researchers were working with OAM beams when they found the light behaving in a way that had never been seen before. The experiments involved firing two lasers at a cloud of argon gas—doing so forced the beams to overlap, and they joined and were emitted as a single beam from the other side of the argon...

Researchers drew attention three years ago when they reported that a two-dimensional perovskite—a material with a specific crystal structure—composed of cesium, lead and bromine emitted a strong green light. Crystals that produce light on the green spectrum are desirable because green light, while valuable in itself, can also be relatively easily converted to other forms that emit blue or red light, making it especially important for optical applications ranging from light-emitting devices to sensitive diagnostic tools. But there was no agreement about how the crystal, CsPB2Br5, produced the green photoluminescence. Now, however, researchers from the United States, Mexico and China,...

The galaxy clusters Abell 0399 and Abell 0401 are some of the most massive objects in the universe. In a new study, researchers have discovered a 10-million-light-year-long bridge of radio waves (shown in blue in this composite image) linking them, and it’s doing crazy things to electrons. On the big roadmap of the universe, bustling clusters of galaxies are connected by long highways of plasma weaving around the wilderness of empty space. These interspace roadways are known as filaments, and they can stretch for hundreds of millions of light-years, populated only by dust, gas and busy electrons driving very close...

…[A] team of scientists working with a Harvard graduate student is for the first time applying deep learning — a powerful new version of the machine learning form of AI — to forecast sudden disruptions that can halt fusion reactions and damage the doughnut-shaped tokamaks that house the reactions. Unlike traditional software, which carries out prescribed instructions, deep learning learns from its mistakes. Accomplishing this seeming magic are neural networks, layers of interconnected nodes — mathematical algorithms — that are “parameterized,” or weighted by the program to shape the desired output. For any given input the nodes seek to produce...

Quantum mechanics’ core assumption is that on the smallest scales, atomic properties are quantized...For example, an electron can be in a lowest-energy state, but if you add a little more energy, it doesn’t slowly transition into the new higher-energy state. Rather, it unpredictably snaps into the new state. If you’re not looking at it, the atom can take on intermediate states—but these aren’t midway points. The atom would be in both states at the same time, and then once you observed it, it would immediately snap into one state or the other. The team’s artificial atom is an experimental apparatus...

After the first-ever image of a black hole confirmed theories posited by Einstein, it's the late scientist Stephen Hawking's turn to have parts of his life's work vindicated. In a paper published in Nature, scientists say that have verified the scientist's namesake theory, Hawking Radiation, which hypothesized that black holes emit radiation from their surfaces due to a mix of different factors regarding quantum physics and gravity. To verify the theory, scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology turned to what sounds like mad science: creating their own black hole.

For decades, physicists, engineers and mathematicians have failed to explain a remarkable phenomenon in fluid mechanics: the natural tendency of turbulence in fluids to move from disordered chaos to perfectly parallel patterns of oblique turbulent bands. This transition from a state of chaotic turbulence to a highly structured pattern was observed by many scientists, but never understood. For decades, physicists, engineers and mathematicians have failed to explain a remarkable phenomenon in fluid mechanics: the natural tendency of turbulence in fluids to move from disordered chaos to perfectly parallel patterns of oblique turbulent bands. This transition from a state of chaotic...

Some six months after the Great War of 1914-18 ended, Arthur Eddington travelled at the head of a team on a scientific expedition to the island of Principe off the coast of Equatorial Guinea in West Africa. He headed one of the two teams of astronomers assigned by a Joint Permanent Eclipse Committee of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society of Britain to observe and record photographically the full solar eclipse scheduled to take place on May 29, 1919. At the time under Portuguese rule, Principe was selected as one of the two sites – the other was...

Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel-winning physicist who brought order to the universe by helping discover and classify subatomic particles, has died. He was 89. Gell-Mann died on Friday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His death was confirmed by the Santa Fe Institute, where he held the title of distinguished fellow, and the California Institute of Technology, where he taught for decades. The cause was not disclosed. Gell-Mann transformed physics by devising a method for sorting subatomic particles into simple groups of eight, based on electric charge, spin and other characteristics. He called his method the “eightfold way” after...

By 2013, the European Planck space telescope's detailed measurements of cosmic radiation seemed to have yielded the final answer: 13.8 billion years old. All that was left to do was to verify that number using independent observations of bright stars in other galaxies. Then came an unexpected turn of events. A few teams, including one led by Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, set out to make those observations. Instead of confirming Planck's measurements, they started getting a distinctly different result. At first, the common assumption was that Riess and the other galaxy-watchers had...

A Neutrino Beam Beaconby Paul Gilsteron May 17, 2019 If you want to look for possible artifacts of advanced civilizations, as do those practicing what is now being called Dysonian SETI, then it pays to listen to the father of the field. My friend Al Jackson has done so and offers a Dyson quote to lead off his new paper: “So the first rule of my game is: think of the biggest possible artificial activities with limits set only by the laws of physics and look for those.” Dyson wrote that in a 1966 paper that repays study today (citation...

For the first time, researchers have performed a version of the famous double-slit experiment with antimatter particles.The double-slit experiment demonstrates one of the fundamental tenets of quantum physics: that pointlike particles are also waves. In the standard version of the experiment, particles travel through a pair of slits in a solid barrier. On a screen on the other side, an interference pattern typical of waves appears. Crests and troughs emerging from each slit reinforce each other or cancel each other out as they overlap, creating alternating bands of high and low particle density on the screen.This kind of experiment has...

For something so commonplace, glass is actually an incredible mystery; an enigma of physics that has defied understanding since humans first encountered it millennia ago. The reason is this: glass is no ordinary solid. But nor is it a liquid. It lies somewhere in between, a strange hybrid known as an amorphous solid – something that's firm to the touch, yet down at the atomic level, it actually behaves rather more like liquid.

Acceleration as a function of radius in NGC 4455, one of the studied galaxies As fascinating as it is mysterious, dark matter is one of the greatest enigmas of astrophysics and cosmologyIt is thought to account for 90 percent of the matter in the universe, but its existence has been demonstrated only indirectly, and has recently been called into question New research conducted by SISSA removes the recent doubts on the presence of dark matter within galaxies, disproving the empirical relations in support of alternative theories. The study, published in the Astrophysical Journal, also offers new insights into understanding the...

A FORMER NASA scientist has claimed time travel is possible because the “speed of light is changing”. ============================================================== Louise Riofrio is involved in a project that will put an atomic clock into the International Space Station to “verify” her theory. She reached the conclusion that the speed of light is changing while working at NASA. The scientist analysed lasers that bounced off reflectors left by astronauts on the moon, which appeared to show the moon was moving too fast. But – when she compared it to various experiments on Earth using fossils, observations of ancient eclipses and computer simulations –...

Explaining a discrepancy between what was happening 13 billion years ago and now may require new physics. It's become clear that something in the cosmos just doesn't add up. The universe is getting bigger every second. In fact, it's expanding at a much faster rate than it should. For some time now there's been a mismatch in observations of the early universe done with the European Space Agency's Planck Telescope and what astronomers see when they measure the more nearby, modern parts of space with NASA's Hubble Telescope. (Keep in mind that looking at distant parts of the universe with...

One of Stephen Hawking's most famous theories about dark matter — that this mysterious and invisible substance is made up of primordial black holes — recently suffered a huge blow. That conclusion comes from a massive telescope that captured an image of an entire galaxy in one shot. The findings don't completely rule out Stephen Hawking's famous notion. But they suggest that primordial black holes would have to be truly tiny to explain dark matter. Dark matter mystery Dark matter is the name given by physicists to explain a particularly mysterious phenomenon: Everything in the universe moves, orbits and rotates...

The laws of physics are such that one photon just passes by another with zero interaction. But in a new experiment inside the world's most powerful atom smasher, researchers got a glimpse of the impossible: photons bumping into each other. The answer lies in one of the most inscrutable and yet delicious aspects of modern physics, and it goes by the funky name of quantum electrodynamics. In this picture of the subatomic world, the photon isn't necessarily a photon. Well, at least, it's not always a photon. Particles like electrons and photons and all the other -ons continually flip back...

It takes 1 trillion times the age of the universe for a xenon-124 sample to shrink by half For the first time, researchers have directly observed an exotic type of radioactive decay called two-neutrino double electron capture.The decay, seen in xenon-124 atoms, happens so sparingly that it would take 18 sextillion years (18 followed by 21 zeros) for a sample of xenon-124 to shrink by half, making the decay extremely difficult to detect. The long-anticipated observation of two-neutrino double electron capture, reported in the April 25 Nature, lays the groundwork for researchers to glimpse a yet unseen, even rarer version...