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There’s a galaxy out there without apparent stars but largely chock full of dark matter. What’s that you say? A galaxy without stars? Isn’t that an impossibility? Not necessarily, according to the astronomers who found it and are trying to explain why it appears starless. “What we do know is that it’s an incredibly gas-rich galaxy,” said Green Bank Observatory’s Karen O’Neil, an astronomer studying this primordial galactic object. “It’s not demonstrating star formation like we’d expect, probably because its gas is too diffuse.” […]
The surface of Mars is hostile and unforgiving. But put a few meters of regolith between you and the Martian sky, and the place becomes a little more habitable. Cave entrances from collapsed lava tubes could be some of the most interesting places to explore on Mars, since not only would they provide shelter for future human explorers, but they could also be a great place to find biosignatures of microbial life on Mars. […]
Perhaps the greatest and most frustrating mystery in cosmology is the Hubble tension problem. Put simply, all the observational evidence we have points to a universe that began in a hot, dense state, and then expanded at an ever-increasing rate to become the universe we see today. Every measurement of that expansion agrees with this, but where they don’t agree is on what that rate exactly is. […]
In the search for potentially life-supporting exoplanets, liquid water is the key indicator. Life on Earth requires liquid water, and scientists strongly believe the same is true elsewhere. But from a great distance, it’s difficult to tell what worlds have oceans of water. Some of them can have lava oceans instead, and getting the two confused is a barrier to understanding exoplanets, water, and habitability more clearly. […]
Planning large astronomical missions is a long process. In some cases, such as the now functional James Webb Space Telescope, it can literally take decades. Part of that learning process is understanding what the mission will be designed to look for. Coming up with a list of what it should look for is a process, and on larger missions, teams of scientists work together to determine what they think will be best for the mission. […]
Understanding the nature of quantum objects’ behaviors is the premise for a reasonable description of the quantum world. Depending on whether the interference can be produced or not, the quantum object is endowed with dual features of a wave and a particle, i.e., the so-called wave-particle duality (WPD), which are generally observed in the so-called mutually exclusive experimental arrangements in the sense of Bohr’s complementarity principle. […]
A team at HZB has developed a new measurement method that, for the first time, accurately detects tiny temperature differences in the range of 100 microKelvin in the thermal Hall effect. Previously, these temperature differences could not be measured quantitatively due to thermal noise. […]
Metalenses have been used to image microscopic features of tissue and resolve details smaller than a wavelength of light. Now they are going bigger. […]
In quantum computing, the question as to what physical system and which degrees of freedom within that system may be used to encode quantum bits of information—qubits, in short—is at the heart of many research projects carried out in physics and engineering laboratories. […]
Apple TV+’s alternate space race, “For All Mankind,” imagines what would have have happened if USSR cosmonauts, and not NASA’s astronauts, had been the first to land on the moon. Rather than the waning of interest in space that followed the moon landings in our reality, over the four seasons of the show to date, the race has continued towards lunar and then Martian settlement. […]
Feeding astronauts on a long mission to Mars goes well beyond ensuring they have enough nutrients and calories to survive their multi-year journey. […]
Japan’s “Moon Sniper” spacecraft will attempt a historic touchdown on the lunar surface this weekend using pinpoint technology the country hopes will lead to success where many have failed. […]
Japan, whose unmanned “sniper” probe will attempt a lunar landing on Saturday, is one of many countries and private companies launching new missions to the moon. […]
A study by physicists and neuroscientists from the University of Chicago, Harvard and Yale describes how connectivity among neurons comes about through general principles of networking and self-organization, rather than the biological features of an individual organism. […]
A new study led by scientists from Spain and Germany has found a fundamental asymmetry showing that heating is consistently faster than cooling, challenging conventional expectations and introducing the concept of “thermal kinematics” to explain this phenomenon. The findings are published in Nature Physics. […]
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