How atoms arrange themselves at the smallest scale was thought to follow a ‘drum-skin’ rule, but mathematicians have now found a simpler solution.
Atomic arrangements in different materials can provide a lot of information about the properties of materials, and what the potential is for altering what they can be used for.
However, where two materials touch – at their interface – complex interactions arise that make predicting the arrangement of atoms difficult.
The results promise to shed light on this and, in the long run, help us better predict how and when Earth’s magnetic shield can suddenly become porous to let outside particles in. Details: https://go.nasa.gov/2G8lTeX&h=AT0CScAabrNYUB0DKGANhglZ-EihhF…51Yf7jUjKw
It’s pretty cool how NASA knows the spacecraft is in interstellar space.
It’s only the second object made by humans to ever reach this distance, following Voyager 1 in 2012.
The long journey: Since launching more than 40 years ago back in 1977, the probe has traveled 11 billion miles to get to cross into interstellar space. While it launched before Voyager 1, its flight path put Voyager 2 on a slower path to reach this milestone.
What does that mean? No, Voyager 2 hasn’t left the solar system. Our solar system is huge and goes way beyond its last planet. Instead, it means Voyager 2 has left the heliosphere, the pocket of particles and magnetic fields created by our closest star. Solar wind, the charged plasma particles that come out from the sun, generates this bubble.
We’ve discovered water on the asteroid Bennu! Our OSIRIS-REx mission has revealed water locked inside the clays that make up Bennu.
Recently analyzed data from NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission has revealed water locked inside the clays that make up its scientific target, the asteroid Bennu.
During the mission’s approach phase, between mid-August and early December, the spacecraft traveled 1.4 million miles (2.2 million km) on its journey from Earth to arrive at a location 12 miles (19 km) from Bennu on Dec. 3. During this time, the science team on Earth aimed three of the spacecraft’s instruments towards Bennu and began making the mission’s first scientific observations of the asteroid. OSIRIS-REx is NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission.
Data obtained from the spacecraft’s two spectrometers, the OSIRIS-REx Visible and Infrared Spectrometer (OVIRS) and the OSIRIS-REx Thermal Emission Spectrometer (OTES), reveal the presence of molecules that contain oxygen and hydrogen atoms bonded together, known as “hydroxyls.” The team suspects that these hydroxyl groups exist globally across the asteroid in water-bearing clay minerals, meaning that at some point, Bennu’s rocky material interacted with water. While Bennu itself is too small to have ever hosted liquid water, the finding does indicate that liquid water was present at some time on Bennu’s parent body, a much larger asteroid.
Inspired by the insulation on a humble electrical cable, researchers have found that tiny ceramic particles can make plastic-backed cladding fire-safe.
How do you make a light-weight cladding material that doesn’t catch fire? It’s a question the building industry globally is wrestling with in the wake of the 2017 Grenfell Tower blaze in London that cost the lives of 72 people.
But according to new research, the answer is under your desk in the plastic insulation around the electrical cable powering your computer.
As on Earth, so in space. A four-satellite mission that is studying magnetic reconnection—the breaking apart and explosive reconnection of the magnetic field lines in plasma that occurs throughout the universe—has found key aspects of the process in space to be strikingly similar to those found in experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). The similarities show how the studies complement each other: The laboratory captures important global features of reconnection and the spacecraft documents local key properties as they occur.
The observations made by the Magnetospheric Multiscale Satellite (MMS) mission, which NASA launched in 2015 to study reconnection in the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth, correspond quite well with past and present laboratory findings of the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX) at PPPL. Previous MRX research uncovered the process by which rapid reconnection occurs and identified the amount of magnetic energy that is converted to particle energy during the process, which gives rise to northern lights, solar flares and geomagnetic storms that can disrupt cell phone service, black out power grids and damage orbiting satellites.
Australian scientists have investigated new directions to scale up qubits—utilising the spin-orbit coupling of atom qubits—adding a new suite of tools to the armory.
Spin-orbit coupling, the coupling of the qubits’ orbital and spin degree of freedom, allows the manipulation of the qubit via electric, rather than magnetic-fields. Using the electric dipole coupling between qubits means they can be placed further apart, thereby providing flexibility in the chip fabrication process.
In one of these approaches, published in Science Advances, a team of scientists led by UNSW Professor Sven Rogge investigated the spin-orbit coupling of a boron atom in silicon.
Antoine Henri Becquerel (born December 15, 1852 in Paris, France), known as Henri Becquerel, was a French physicist who discovered radioactivity, a process in which an atomic nucleus emits particles because it is unstable. He won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Marie Curie, the latter of whom was Becquerel’s graduate student. The SI unit for radioactivity called the becquerel (or Bq), which measures the amount of ionizing radiation that is released when an atom experiences radioactive decay, is also named after Becquerel.
Becquerel was born December 15, 1852 in Paris, France, to Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel and Aurelie Quenard. At an early age, Becquerel attended the preparatory school Lycée Louis-le-Grand, located in Paris. In 1872, Becquerel began attending the École Polytechnique and in 1874 the École des Ponts et Chaussées (Bridges and Highways School), where he studied civil engineering.
Four researchers came together to propose the addition of six novel particles to tackle five enduring issues within the current Standard Model Theory. This new proposed model, detailed in APS Physics, is named SMASH for “Standard Model Axion See-saw Higgs portal inflation.” The team proposed that particles rho and axion could explain inflation and dark matter respectively, along with three heavy right-handed neutrinos.
With these findings, the researchers hope to answer the following questions about the Standard Model:
There’s a new form of matter out there and it’s called a supersolid. Born in the labs of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), this new matter is seemingly a contradiction. The supersolid combines properties of solids and superfluids — or fluids with zero viscosity, thereby flowing without losing kinetic energy. Supersolids have previously been predicted by physicists, but have not been observed in a lab until now.
“It is counterintuitive to have a material which combines superfluidity and solidity,” says team leader Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT and 2001 Noble laureate. “If your coffee was superfluid and you stirred it, it would continue to spin around forever.” Their research was published in the journal Nature.
To develop this seemingly contradictory form of matter, Ketterle’s team manipulated the motion of atoms in a superfluid state of dilute gas, called a Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. Ketterle co-discovered BEC, which won him his Noble prize in physics. “The challenge was now to add something to the BEC to make sure it developed a shape or form beyond the shape of the ‘atom trap,’ which is the defining characteristic of a solid,” Ketterle explained.