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A rare ‘triple-double’ radio galaxy discovered using MeerKAT

Astronomers have discovered an exceptionally rare radio galaxy that has three distinct pairs of radio lobes. This system falls into a subpopulation of radio galaxies known as “triple-double” radio galaxies (TDRGs). Located nearly 7.5 billion light-years away, this unique system, cataloged as J022248−060934, is only the seventh known example of its kind. A paper outlining this discovery was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on February 25.

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Apollo’s impatient old-timers are rooting for NASA’s return to the moon with Artemis II launch

The people who toiled night and day to put astronauts on the moon during Apollo are thrilled that NASA is finally going back. They just wish these Artemis moonshots had happened sooner while more of Apollo’s workforce was still alive.

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Ripples in spacetime and the universe’s most controversial number

Douglas Adams told us the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. If only cosmology were so straightforward. Astronomers have been arguing for years about a number every bit as fundamental, and they still can’t agree on it.

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Apollo vs. Artemis: What to know about NASA’s return to the moon

NASA’s Apollo moonshots are a tough act to follow, even after all this time.

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In world first, antimatter taken on test drive at CERN

CERN scientists on Tuesday pulled off the unprecedented feat of transporting antiprotons by road, successfully test-driving the world’s first antimatter delivery system, with an eye to one day supplying research labs across Europe.

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ZTF discovers a new mass-transferring brown dwarf binary system

Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and elsewhere report the discovery of a binary system consisting of two brown dwarfs undergoing stable mass transfer. The detection of the system, designated ZTF J1239+8347, was made with the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and is detailed in a paper published March 18 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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The time capsule in the salt flat

There is a place in northern Chile, 3,500 meters above sea level in the Andean Altiplano, where almost nothing survives. The Salar de Pajonales is a salt flat of savage extremes temperatures swinging from −23°C to 26°C, solar radiation among the highest measured anywhere on Earth, annual rainfall that barely registers, and winds that rip across the surface at over 100 kilometers per hour. And yet, life is there.

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TESS discovers an Earth-sized planet orbiting nearby M-dwarf star

Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered an extrasolar planet orbiting TOI-4616—a nearby M-dwarf star. The newfound alien world, which received designation TOI-4616 b, is slightly larger than Earth. The finding was reported in a research paper published March 11 on the arXiv pre-print server.

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Novel protocol reconstructs quantum states in large-scale experiments up to 96 qubits

Quantum computers, systems that process information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, could outperform classical computers on some computationally demanding tasks. Despite their potential, as the size of quantum computers increases, reliably describing and measuring the states driving their functioning becomes increasingly difficult.

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The moon that tipped a planet

Neptune is the solar system’s most distant planet, a cold, blue ice giant sitting nearly 30 times further from the sun than Earth. At that remote distance, temperatures plunge to nearly minus 200 degrees Celsius and a single year lasts 165 Earth years. Yet despite its isolation, Neptune is a world whipped by the fastest winds in the solar system and home to one of its most bizarre moons.

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A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky—for everyone on Earth

More than 10,000 Starlink satellites currently orbit Earth. We see them crawling across dark skies, no matter how remote our location, and streaking through images from research telescopes.

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A universal scheme can verify any quantum state

Quantum technologies, devices that can process, store, or detect information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, could outperform classical devices in some tasks or scenarios. Despite their potential, verifying that these devices work correctly and truly realize desired quantum states can be challenging, particularly when they cannot be fully examined or inspected.

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The JWST finds more overmassive black holes. This time in dwarf galaxies

One of the things astronomers find when they look around at galaxies is a correlation between a galaxy’s mass and the mass of its supermassive black hole. Contrary to popular belief, these SMBH don’t anchor their galaxies; they make up only a small portion of a galaxy’s mass. In local galaxies, the ratio of SMBH mass to galaxy mass is about 0.1%–0.5%.

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Black hole mergers test the limits of general relativity

General relativity stands as one of the bedrock theories in modern physics. Its strange view of relative time and space has been confirmed by countless experimental and observational tests, from rotational frame dragging to the radiation of gravitational waves. But there is reason to believe that it is not the final say on the nature of space and time.

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Quadratic gravity theory reshapes quantum view of Big Bang

Waterloo scientists have developed a new way to understand how the universe began, and it could change what we know about the Big Bang and the earliest moments of cosmic history. Their work suggests that the universe’s rapid early expansion could have arisen naturally from a deeper, more complete theory of quantum gravity. The paper, “Ultraviolet completion of the Big Bang in quadratic gravity,” appears in Physical Review Letters.

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