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Data from a spacecraft orbiting Earth has revealed ripple structures in the termination shock and heliopause: shifting regions of space that mark one of the boundaries between the space inside the Solar System, and...interstellar space. ...Sun affects the space around it...solar wind, a constant supersonic flow of ionized plasma. It blows out past the planets and the Kuiper Belt, eventually petering out in the great emptiness between the stars. The point at which this flow falls below the speed at which sound waves can travel through the diffuse interstallar medium is called the termination shock, and the point at which...

Three scientists jointly won this year's Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their work on quantum information science that has significant applications, for example in the field of encryption. Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger were cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for discovering the way that particles known as photons can be linked, or "entangled," with each other even when they are separated by large distances. "Quantum information science is a vibrant and rapidly developing field," said Eva Olsson, a member of the Nobel committee. "It has broad and potential implications in areas such...

1.) How did the Universe begin? What “type” of inflation occurred? What preceded and/or caused inflation? 2.) What explains neutrino mass? Are neutrinos Dirac or Majorana particles? Are there heavy, sterile neutrino species? 3.) Why is our Universe matter-dominated? More matter than antimatter permeates the Universe. 4.) What is dark matter? Its effects are understood, not its underlying cause. 5.) What is dark energy? Its properties indicate a constant, positive spatial energy density.

In 2020, Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, and his colleagues published a sensational result in Nature, featured on its cover. They claimed to have discovered a room-temperature superconductor: a material in which electric current flows frictionlessly without any need for special cooling systems. Although it was just a speck of carbon, sulfur, and hydrogen forged under extreme pressures, the hope was that someday the material would lead to variants that would enable lossless electricity grids and inexpensive magnets for MRI machines, maglev railways, atom smashers, and fusion reactors. On Monday Nature retracted the study, citing data...

The discovery is a step towards much more accessible superconductivity. It may be possible to develop superconductors that operate at room temperature with further knowledge of the relationship between spin liquids and superconductivity, which would transform our daily lives. Superconductors offer enormous technical and economic promise for applications such as high-speed hovertrains, MRI machines, efficient power lines, quantum computing, and other technologies. However, their usefulness is limited since superconductivity requires extremely low temperatures. It is highly challenging to integrate them with modern technology because of this demanding and costly requirement. The electrical resistance of a superconductor has a specific critical...

For even a modest number of electrons and cutting-edge computational approaches, the problem requires serious computing power. That's because when electrons interact, their fates can become quantum mechanically entangled: Even once they're far apart on different lattice sites, the two electrons can't be treated individually, so physicists must deal with all the electrons at once rather than one at a time. With more electrons, more entanglements crop up, making the computational challenge exponentially harder. One way of studying a quantum system is by using what's called a renormalization group. That's a mathematical apparatus physicists use to look at how the...

The object, named FRB 20201124A, was detected with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China and described in a new paper led by astronomer Heng Xu of Peking University in China. So far most evidence points to a magnetar – a neutron star with extraordinarily strong magnetic fields – as a source of FRB emissions like this. If FRB 20201124A is indeed from one of these wild cosmic beasts, it's looking like an unusual specimen. Polarization refers to the orientation of light waves in three-dimensional space. By examining how much that orientation has changed since the light departed...

Sun-like star co-orbiting with black hole Gaia BH1 is a Sun-like star co-orbiting with a black hole estimated at 10 times the Sun's mass. (ESO/L. Calcada) In 1916, Karl Schwarzchild theorized the existence of black holes as a resolution to Einstein's field equations for his Theory of General Relativity. By the mid-20th century, astronomers began detecting black holes for the first time using indirect methods, which consisted of observing their effects on surrounding objects and space. Since the 1980s, scientists have studied supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which reside at the center of most massive galaxies in the Universe. And by...

We know that colliding two particles in empty space can sometimes cause additional particles to emerge. There are even theories that a strong enough electromagnetic field could create matter and antimatter out of nothing itself. Big Think reports, in early 2022, a group of researchers created strong enough electric fields in their laboratory to level the unique properties of a material known as graphene. With these fields, the researchers were able to enable the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs from nothing at all. This proved that creating matter from nothing is indeed possible, a theory first proposed by Julian Schwinger,...

The Microscope satellite, a CNES mission with ESA cooperation to test the universality of freefall. The equivalence principle states that all objects should fall freely under gravity at the same rate, independent of their mass and composition, and is the founding principle of General Relativity, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity. This principle has been tested by experiments on the ground, confirming with an accuracy of 1013 that objects with different characteristics experience the same acceleration from Earth’s gravity. By taking the experiment into space, Microscope will extend the range of measurements to an accuracy of 1015, enabling scientists to...

Nanobubbles are extremely small (i.e., nanoscopic) gaseous cavities that some physicists observed in aqueous solutions, typically after specific substances were dissolved in them. While some studies reported the observation of these incredibly tiny bubbles, some scientists have argued that they are merely solid or oily residues formed during experiments. Researchers at Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados Unidad Monterrey and Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas Unidad Monterrey in Mexico have recently carried out an experiment aimed at further investigating the nature of these elusive and mysterious objects, specifically when xenon and krypton were dissolved in water. Their study, featured...

Over the past several weeks, NASA's ultra-powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has allowed humankind some unprecedented glimpses into the farthest reaches of our universe. And unsurprisingly, some of these dazzling new observations have raised more questions than they've answered.For a long time, for instance, scientists believed the universe's earliest, oldest galaxies to be small, slightly chaotic, and misshapen systems. But according to the Washington Post, JWST-captured imagery has revealed those galaxies to be shockingly massive, not to mention balanced and well-formed — a finding that challenges, and will likely rewrite, long-held understandings about the origins of our universe. "The...

“In some pockets of space, far beyond the limits of our observations,” wrote cosmologist Dan Hooper at the University of Chicago in an email to The Daily Galaxy, referring to the theory of eternal inflation and the inflationary multiverse: “the laws of physics could be very different from those we find in our local universe. Different forms of matter could exist, which experience different kinds of forces. In this sense, what we call ‘the laws of physics’, instead of being a universal fact of nature, could be an environmental fact, which varies from place to place, or from time to...

To everyone who sees them, the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images of the cosmos are beautifully awe-inspiring. But to most professional astronomers and cosmologists, they are also extremely surprising—not at all what was predicted by theory. In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper’s title begins with the candid exclamation: “Panic!”Why do the JWST’s images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what...

Astronomers have long sought the launch sites for some of the highest-energy protons in our galaxy. Now a study using 12 years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope confirms that one supernova remnant is just such a place. Explore how astronomers located a supernova remnant that fires up protons to energies 10 times greater than the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth. VIDEO AT LINK................... Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Fermi has shown that the shock waves of exploded stars boost particles to speeds comparable to that of light. Called cosmic rays, these particles mostly take the...

spiral galaxies and distant galaxies are visible against the black void of space A small portion of deep space observed by JWST. NASA/STScI/CEERS/TACC/S. Finkelstein/M. Bagley/Z. Levay Astronomers armed with early data obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are hunting galaxies that existed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Rohan Naidu, an astrophysicist based at Harvard's and Smithsonian's jointly operated Center for Astrophysics, and his colleagues have been particularly good at uncovering these cosmic relics. Just a few days after the JWST's first images were beamed across the planet in July, Naidu and his collaborators...

The motion of single atoms through liquid has been caught on camera for the first time. Using a sandwich of materials so thin they're effectively two-dimensional, scientists trapped and observed platinum atoms 'swimming' along a surface under different pressures. The results will help us better understand how the presence of liquid alters the behavior of a solid with which it is in contact – which, in turn, has implications that could in the development of new substances and materials. "Given the widespread industrial and scientific importance of such behavior it is truly surprising how much we still have to learn...

The researchers discovered that a new theoretical framework to unify Hermitian and non-Hermitian physics is established by the duality between non-Hermiticity and curved spaces. A physics puzzle is resolved through a new duality. According to traditional thinking, distorting a flat space by bending it or stretching it is necessary to create a curved space. A group of scientists at Purdue University has developed a new technique for making curved spaces that also provides the answer to a physics mystery. The team has developed a method using non-Hermiticity, which occurs in all systems coupled to environments, to build a hyperbolic surface...

Two players leverage quantum rules to achieve a seemingly telepathic connection It only looks like telepathy, but a quantum game harpoons our usual sense of reality. ==================================================================== The Moon isn’t necessarily there if you don’t look at it. So says quantum mechanics, which states that what exists depends on what you measure. Proving reality is like that usually involves the comparison of arcane probabilities, but physicists in China have made the point in a clearer way. They performed a matching game in which two players leverage quantum effects to win every time—which they can’t if measurements merely reveal reality as...

By shining a laser pulse sequence inspired by the Fibonacci numbers at atoms inside a quantum computer, physicists have created a remarkable, never-before-seen phase of matter. The phase has the benefits of two time dimensions despite there still being only one singular flow of time... This mind-bending property offers a sought-after benefit: Information stored in the phase is far more protected against errors than with alternative setups currently used in quantum computers. As a result, the information can exist without getting garbled for much longer, an important milestone for making quantum computing viable, says study lead author Philipp Dumitrescu. The...