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An orbiting star begins to eclipse its partner, a rapidly rotating, superdense stellar remnant called a pulsar. Image courtesy of Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University/NASA *************************************************************************** Jan. 26 (UPI) -- NASA made a first-of-its-kind discovery with its Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, spotting the first gamma-ray eclipses from a special type of star system. The agency shared the news with Nature Astronomy on Thursday after scientists researched a decade of observations from the telescope that can detect the most astonishing celestial events from gamma bursts to black holes. Gamma-ray eclipses were observed from a special binary star system that is orbited by...

This latest experiment was performed near a telecommunications tower on the Säntis mountain in Switzerland that is frequently struck by lightning - roughly 100 times a year, although the tower itself is protected by a lightning rod. The results from the study found the lightning flowed almost in a straight line near the laser pulses, but the lightning strikes were more randomly distributed when the laser was off. While this study is not the first attempt to direct lightning paths it is the first to show it can be done. The scientists have attributed this to the high power laser...

A Colorado astrophysicist has claimed her field is steeped in white supremacy and sexism because 'hypermasculine' and 'violent' language is used to describe stars. Natalie Gosnell, an assistant professor at Colorado College, takes an unconventional approach to physics by comparing stars with humans to turn science into an art. In an interview with the college newspaper she claimed she has struggled to overcome a division between art and science that is rooted in 'systemic racism

Explanation: The hydrogen in your body, present in every molecule of water, came from the Big Bang. There are no other appreciable sources of hydrogen in the universe. The carbon in your body was made by nuclear fusion in the interior of stars, as was the oxygen. Much of the iron in your body was made during supernovas of stars that occurred long ago and far away. The gold in your jewelry was likely made from neutron stars during collisions that may have been visible as short-duration gamma-ray bursts or gravitational wave events. Elements like phosphorus and copper are present...

For decades physicists have tried to rectify the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which is great at describing the behavior of particles, interactions, and quantum processes on the micro scale, with gravity...the Standard Model, as it is currently constructed, fails to account for gravity at this extremely small scale. ...a number of mathematical models have been proposed that would unify these disparate phenomena, including something called string theory [and] a number of these models feature elements that can be tested in a lab setting. One is known as the Pauli exclusion principle. Pauli exclusion basically means that no two electrons...

There’s a great article in Bari Weiss’ The Free Press that has great bearing on why consensus in science is often a bad thing, and how the consensus is enforced. Called "The Reason There’s Been No Cure for Alzheimer’s," it was written by Joanne Silberner, a former NPR reporter. What I loved about the article was its insightful reporting about how the scientific process works in practice, rather than how it should in theory. Most people have little idea how academic science works, what the incentives are, how peer review works, how money gets distributed, and all the minutia that...

The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore Lab (LLL) in Northern California has recently gotten a lot of attention. It was just announced that they finally fused some hydrogen atoms and got more energy out than they put in — a net positive result. Drew Magary, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, throws a little cold water on the event by adding that the lasers causing the fusion reaction were powered by electricity generated at way less than perfect efficiency.hrowing more cold water, I was told by someone who worked on the facility in question that they already had a...

Ultrafast computer processing speeds are possible with optical chirality logic gates that operate about a million times faster than existing technologies. Processing devices based on polarized light run one million times faster than current technology. Logic gates are the basic building blocks of computer processors. Conventional logic gates are electronic, working by shuffling around electrons. However, researchers have been developing light-based optical logic gates to meet the data processing and transfer demands of next-generation computing. Aalto University scientists developed new optical chirality logic gates that operate about a million times faster than existing technologies, offering ultrafast processing speeds. Optical Chirality...

Since the 1970s, physicists have predicted that when pairs of heavy vector bosons Z or W are produced, typical restrictions at high energies would be violated, unless a Higgs boson was contributing to the production of these pairs. Over the past ten years, theoretical physics calculations showed that the occurrence of these Higgs boson contributions at high energies should be measurable using existing data collected by the LHC. As part of their recent study, the CMS collaboration analyzed some of the data collected between 2015 and 2018, as part of the second data collection run of the LHC. They specifically...

The practice of adding ‘leap seconds’ to official clocks to keep them in sync with Earth’s rotation will be put on hold from 2035, the world’s foremost metrology body has decided. The decision was made by representatives from governments worldwide at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) outside Paris on 18 November. It means that from 2035, or possibly earlier, astronomical time (known as UT1) will be allowed to diverge by more than one second from coordinated universal time (UTC), which is based on the steady tick of atomic clocks. Since 1972, whenever the two time systems have...

Star Spaghettification Black Hole - This animation depicts a star experiencing spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a black hole during a ‘tidal disruption event’. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser Scientists hope to improve their understanding of the growth of supermassive black holes in massive galaxies by studying intermediate-mass black holes. After lurking undetected in a dwarf galaxy, an intermediate-mass black hole revealed itself to astronomers when it gobbled up an unlucky star that strayed too close. Known as a “tidal disruption event” or TDE, the violent shredding of the star produced a flare of radiation that briefly outshone the combined stellar...

1. A cat can be dead and alive Obviously, a cat is nothing like an individual photon in a controlled lab environment, it is much bigger and more complex. Any coherence that the trillions upon trillions of atoms that make up the cat might have with each other is extremely short-lived. This does not mean that quantum coherence is impossible in biological systems, just that it generally won't apply to big creatures such as cats or a human. 2. Simple analogies can explain entanglement Quantum particles are just mysteriously correlated in ways we can't describe with everyday logic or language...

The spiral galaxy NGC 1068, also known as the squid galaxy, is a bustling 'Disneyland' of neutrino production, researchers said. At the heart of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 1068, researchers found a thriving 'factory' of ghostly particles called neutrinos. A nearby spiral galaxy is pumping out ghostly neutrinos — mysterious particles that barely interact with the matter around them, scientists have found. The elusive particles are coming from a hotspot of neutrino production in the heart of the spiral galaxy Messier 77, which is anchored by a black hole. The region is rich in dense gas and electromagnetic fields,...

Scientists discover exotic quantum state at room temperature An illustration depicting a topological insulator in action. - Shafayat Hossain and M. Zahid Hasan of Princeton University For the first time, physicists have observed novel quantum effects in a topological insulator at room temperature. Researchers at Princeton found that a material known as a topological insulator, made from the elements bismuth and bromine, exhibit specialized quantum behaviors normally seen only under extreme experimental conditions of high pressures and temperatures near absolute zero. The finding opens up a new range of possibilities for the development of efficient quantum technologies, such as spin-based,...

The smiling Sun. (NASA Sun/Twitter) Sometimes an unexpected smile is all it takes to turn your day around. Well, that kind of cheery surprise doesn't get much bigger than this. Astronomers at NASA have spotted the Sun beaming a remarkable, joyous grin, in a sunny spectacle destined to put a smile on your dial. As shared on NASA's Sun Twitter account, this incredible image reveals the Sun looking positively radiant in more ways than one. Of course, the 'smile' we see here isn't actually a real smile. What we're looking at are coronal holes (the dark patches), where fast bursts...

An international team of astrophysicists has made a puzzling discovery while analyzing certain star clusters. The finding challenges Newton's laws of gravity, the researchers write in their publication. Instead, the observations are consistent with the predictions of an alternative theory of gravity. However, this is controversial among experts. The results have now been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In their work, the researchers investigated open star clusters. These are formed when thousands of stars are born within a short time in a huge gas cloud. As they "ignite," the galactic newcomers blow away the remnants...

A new conjecture in physics challenges the leading “theory of everything.”On June 25, Timm Wrase awoke in Vienna and groggily scrolled through an online repository of newly posted physics papers. One title startled him into full consciousness. The paper, by the prominent string theorist Cumrun Vafa of Harvard and his collaborators, conjectured a simple formula dictating which kinds of universes are allowed to exist and which are forbidden, according to string theory. The leading candidate for a “theory of everything” weaving the force of gravity together with quantum physics, string theory defines all matter and forces as vibrations of tiny...

A rendering of the entangled atoms within the interferometer. Credit: Steven Burrows, Thompson Group/JILA A team of researchers at JILA has for the first time successfully combined two of the “spookiest” features of quantum mechanics to make a better quantum sensor: entanglement between atoms and delocalization of atoms. JILA is a physical science research institute operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder. For the first time, scientists have successfully combined two of the “spookiest” features of quantum mechanics to make a better quantum sensor: entanglement between atoms and delocalization of atoms....

One of the earliest realizations in the history of quantum mechanics is that matter has a wave-like property. Other physicists soon confirmed ...electrons scattered off a thin foil before landing on a target. The way the electrons scattered was more characteristic of a wave than a particle. What, exactly, is a wave of matter? Schrödinger...developed his famous equation to describe the behavior of those waves... But Schrödinger's idea flew in the face of more experimental tests. For example, even though an electron acted like a wave midflight, when it reached a target, it landed as a single, compact particle, so...

When a massive star collapsed in the Cassiopeia constellation, it generated a supernova explosion with some of the fastest shockwaves in the Milky Way. These speedy shock waves are one of the reasons the Cassiopeia A (Cas A) supernova remnant was chosen to be our Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer’s (IXPE) first observed object. This composite image, made of data from IXPE, the Chandra Observatory, and the Hubble Telescope, shows Cas A. IXPE’s investigation of Cas A from Jan. 11 to Jan. 29, 2022, added crucial information about the behavior of exploded stars’ magnetic fields: scientists found that the magnetic fields...