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Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), Aalto University in Finland, and ETH Zurich have demonstrated a prototype device that uses quantum effects and machine learning to measure magnetic fields more accurately than its classical analogues. Such measurements are needed to seek mineral deposits, discover distant astronomical objects, diagnose brain disorders, and create better radars.

“When you study nature, whether you investigate the human brain or a supernova explosion, you always deal with some sort of electromagnetic signals,” explains Andrey Lebedev, a co-author of the paper describing the new device in npj Quantum Information. “So measuring magnetic fields is necessary across diverse areas of science and technology, and one would want to do this as accurately as possible.”

Scientists have previously suspected supermassive black holes can merge together, and have seen signs of these cosmic collisions on a smaller scale. Now new research backs up the hypothesis – and shows evidence that it could be happening all across the Universe.

Astronomers studying detailed radio maps of jet sources – powerful beams of ionised matter thrown out by black holes – have found a surprisingly high number of scenarios that matched patterns consistent with binary black holes (two black holes orbiting each other).

Jet stream radio map. (M. Krause/University of Hertfordshire)

Continue reading “We Now Have Evidence That Supermassive Black Holes Could Be Spectacularly Colliding Across The Universe” »

Something we found in a particle accelerator could explain massive stars’ supernovae.

MANILA, Philippines — A mobile and SMS application developed by IT professionals Revbrain G. Martin, Marie Jeddah Legaspi, and Julius Czar Torreda to help fishermen receive real-time weather, sunrise and sunset, wind speed, and cloud coverage to plan their fishing activity, and an emergency checklist kit app was developed by students Jeorge Loui P. Delfin, Bluen Ginez, Samuel Jose, Rainier Garcia Narboneta, and Eugenio Emmanuel A. Araullo for disaster preparedness won the NASA Space Apps Challenge on October 19–21 at De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines, in partnership with the Embassy of the United States of America and PLDT.

Other projects and solutions developed are games using images from the Hubble Space Telescope, augmented reality mobile app to tell a story of the changes in the Arctic and Antarctic ice, artificial intelligence app helping scientists confirm the habitability of exoplanets, and story-based game using NASA Earth imagery.

They joined together with teams of coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, technologists, thinkers, designers, entrepreneurs, and everyone around the globe working together in a 48-hour sprint to develop solutions to some of the most pressing challenges on Earth and in space, using NASA resources and data.

Continue reading “Fishing and emergency kit apps developed by Filipino innovators during the NASA Space Apps Challenge in the Philippines” »

Many of the objects NASA and other scientific bodies choose to study in space are incredibly old, but that’s not the case with Kes 75. Located a mere 19,000 light years from Earth, Kes 75 is a ultra-dense chunk of a star that went supernova, and now scientists are calling it the youngest known pulsar in the Milky Way galaxy.

In a new post on its website, NASA explains how the pulsar was detected and shows off a pretty stunning image of what it looks like from our vantage point.

The pulsar is roughly 500-years-old and was spotted with the help of NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Astronomers have managed to locate the youngest pulsar in the Milky Way, NASA announced yesterday. Dubbed PSR J1846-0258, the pulsar was spotted inside one of our galaxy’s supernova remnants — found 19,000 light-years away from our planet, in the Aquila constellation (The Eagle).

This exciting discovery — first detailed in a study published earlier this year in The Astrophysical Journal — could shed more light into supernova explosions and the new beginnings that arise from the death of a stellar giant.

Continue reading “Milky Way’s Youngest Pulsar Found 19,000 Light-Years From Earth” »

The engines of the most famous vessel in the “Star Trek” universe, the USS Enterprise, are powered by the annihilation of matter and antimatter, a process that produces energy in the form of gamma rays. More than half the gamma-ray sources cataloged by the Fermi mission come from a different type of engine — supermassive black holes in the cores of distant galaxies.

Most large galaxies harbor monster black holes millions to billions of times more massive than the Sun. When matter falls toward a supermassive black hole, the center of the host galaxy emits far more light than normal and may flare up unpredictably. Astronomers say such galaxies possess active galactic nuclei, or AGN for short.

Fermi sees the universe in gamma rays, the most energetic form of light. In its first four years, Fermi found more than 1,500 gamma-ray AGN, and it continues to find more.

Continue reading “Fermi Constellations” »

A RUDN physicist demonstrated how to describe the shape of any symmetrical wormhole—a black hole that theoretically can be a kind of a portal between any two points in space and time—based on its wave spectrum. The research would help understand the physics of wormholes and better identify their physical characteristics. The article was published in the Physics Letters B journal.

Modern concepts of the universe provide for the existence of wormholes—unusual curvatures in space and time. Physicists imagine a wormhole as a black hole through which one can see a distant point of the universe in four dimensions. Astrophysicists are still unable to determine the shape and sizes of black holes precisely, let alone theoretical wormholes. A RUDN physicist has now demonstrated that the shape of a wormhole can be calculated based on observable physical characteristics.

In practice, physicists can observe only indirect properties of wormholes, such as red shift—a downward shift in the frequency of gravitational waves in the course of moving away from an object. Roman Konoplya, a research assistant from the RUDN Institute of Gravitation and Cosmology, the author of the work, used quantum mechanical and geometrical assumptions and showed that the shape and mass of a wormhole can be calculated based on the red shift value and the range of gravitational waves in high frequencies.

Our universe is permeated with a vast, unseen force that seems to oppose gravity. Physicists call this force dark energy, and it is thought to be constantly pushing our universe outward.

But in June, a group of physicists published a paper in the preprint journal arXiv implying that dark energy changes over time. This means that the universe will not expand forever but might eventually collapse into the size it was before the Big Bang.

Almost immediately, however, physicists found problems with the theory: Several independent groups subsequently published papers that suggested revisions to the conjecture. Now, a paper published on Oct. 2 in the journal Physical Review D suggests that, as it stands, the original conjecture can’t be true because it can’t explain the existence of the Higgs boson — which we know exists, thanks to the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle collider on the border between France and Switzerland. [Beyond Higgs: 5 Elusive Particles That May Lurk in the Universe].