Categories

‘Everything I got came out of the CHP’: Gordon Graham on career, culture and leadership

Gordon Graham recounts how a chance encounter launched his career and fueled decades of work in risk management and organizational improvement on CHP’s podcast

Go to Source

Limiting space junk’s threat by predicting its mess in the Earth-moon neighborhood

Debris from moonbound spacecraft has left craters on the lunar surface since the U.S. Apollo missions. But the moon is not used to being surrounded by debris. With an expected resurgence in lunar missions in the coming years, such as the U.S. Artemis II test flight, Purdue University engineer Carolin Frueh is researching how to track the likely increase in spacecraft debris and minimize its impact in the area between the moon and Earth, called the cislunar region. In the next decade, at least 30 missions could be launching to the cislunar region.

Go to Source

New framework suggests dark energy could be evolving—and may be linked to the Hubble tension

A team of cosmologists in China has introduced a mathematical framework that investigates two of the deepest mysteries in cosmology at the same time. Publishing their research in The Astrophysical Journal, Yun Chen and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences suggest their work could pave the way for vital corrections to the current ΛCDM model—alongside a long-awaited resolution to the Hubble tension.

Go to Source

Galactic warming: The ‘car engine-like’ effect heating our Milky Way

Our Milky Way’s halo of hot gas is warmer to the “south” than the “north” because of an internal combustion engine-like effect that is compressing the gas like a piston, a new study has found. Computer simulations reveal that the Large Magellanic Cloud—a satellite galaxy below, or on the south side, of our own—attracts the Milky Way, causing gas in the southern half of the halo to compress and heat up.

Go to Source

Dual-rail superconducting qubits generate high-fidelity logical entanglement, study finds

Quantum computers, systems that process information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, could outperform classical computers on some advanced tasks. These systems rely on qubits, the fundamental units of quantum information, that become linked via an effect known as quantum entanglement and share a unified quantum state.

Go to Source

Moon race: How China is challenging the US

Walking on the moon by 2030, building a lunar base, and then perhaps on to Mars: after 30 years of honing its expertise, China is challenging the United States’ supremacy in spaceflight.

Go to Source

Distant galaxy fades 20-fold in just two decades, challenging how supermassive black holes evolve

An international team led by a researcher at the Chiba Institute of Technology has discovered an extremely rare phenomenon: a galaxy about 10 billion light-years away whose brightness dropped to one-twentieth of its original level in just 20 years. By combining multiwavelength observations with archival data spanning several decades, the researchers concluded that the fading was caused by a rapid decrease in the gas flowing into the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center. The discovery shows that the activity of supermassive black holes can change dramatically on timescales short enough to be observed within a human lifetime.

Go to Source

Webb and Hubble share the most comprehensive view of Saturn to date

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope have teamed up to capture new views of Saturn, revealing the planet in strikingly different ways. Observing in complementary wavelengths of light, the two space observatories provide scientists with a richer, more layered understanding of the gas giant’s atmosphere.

Go to Source

‘Cool’ detectors cut neutrino mass upper limit by an order of magnitude

Their mass is extremely low, but how light are neutrinos really? A collaboration comprising German and international research groups has optimized its experiments to determine the mass of these “ghost particles.” In doing so, they succeeded in further adjusting downward the upper limit on the neutrino mass scale that had previously been determined in similar experiments. The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Go to Source

Topological solitons power a chip-scale frequency comb source

Caltech scientists have developed a new way to produce optical frequency combs—important tools in devices that keep time and measure distances very precisely—at the chip scale, an advance that should make it easier to incorporate such combs in optical devices and more practical to use them outside the laboratory.

Go to Source

‘What policing is about’: Conn. PD shares encouraging note from young girl

Hartford Police Officer Christopher Vanwey witnessed a girl missing out on hockey merchandise thrown by a mascot and gifting her a toy and a soccer ball

Go to Source

XRISM clocks hot wind of galaxy M82 at 2 million mph

For the first time, astronomers have directly measured the speed of superheated gas billowing from a cauldron of stellar activity at the heart of M82, a nearby galaxy undergoing an extraordinary burst of star formation. The material is moving more than 2 million miles (over 3 million kilometers) per hour and appears to be the primary force driving a cooler, well-studied, galaxy-scale wind.

Go to Source

Making quantum vibrations nonlinear to enable phonon-phonon interactions

Phonons are the quantum units of mechanical vibration. They describe how motion propagates through a solid at the smallest possible scales, in much the same way that electrons describe electric currents. Because phonons can be exceptionally stable and sensitive, they are used in quantum science and technology.

Go to Source

Finding order in disorder: New mechanism amplifies transverse electron transport

For decades, it has been widely believed that electrons move most efficiently in materials that are clean and highly ordered. Much like water flowing more easily through a smooth pipe, conventional wisdom has held that electrical transport improves as a material’s internal structure becomes more perfectly arranged. However, a recent study shows that the opposite can also be true. A research team at POSTECH in South Korea has discovered that engineered disorder can actually enhance electron transport.

Go to Source

Developing optical vortex phase masks for the detection of habitable worlds

A team of NASA researchers is developing new types of optical masks that could help enable the many orders of magnitude of starlight suppression needed for future space observatories to pick out very faint habitable exoplanets from the far brighter glare of their stellar hosts.

Go to Source