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Neutrino astronomy enters a new era as ARCA tracks an ultra-high-energy particle, potentially the most powerful ever.

The ARCA observatory detects potentially the most energetic neutrino, opening new frontiers in neutrino astronomy and cosmic event studies.

Continue reading “Neutrino that can be most energetic detected by underwater observatory” »

Ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which emerge in extreme astrophysical environments—like the roiling environments near black holes and neutron stars—have far more energy than the energetic particles that emerge from our sun. In fact, the particles that make up these streams of energy have around 10 million times the energy of particles accelerated in the most extreme particle environment on earth, the human-made Large Hadron Collider.

Where does all that energy come from? For many years, scientists believed it came from shocks that occur in extreme astrophysical environments—when, for example, a star explodes before forming a black hole, causing a huge explosion that kicks up particles.

That theory was plausible, but, according to new research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the observations are better explained by a different mechanism. The source of the cosmic rays’ energy, the researchers found, is more likely magnetic turbulence. The paper’s authors found that magnetic fields in these environments tangle and turn, rapidly accelerating particles and sharply increasing their energy up to an abrupt cutoff.

New analysis supports Einstein’s relativity and narrows neutrino mass ranges, hinting at evolving dark energy.

Gravity, the fundamental force sculpting the universe, has shaped tiny variations in matter from the early cosmos into the vast networks of galaxies we see today. Using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), scientists have traced the evolution of these cosmic structures over the past 11 billion years. This research represents the most precise large-scale test of gravity ever conducted, offering unprecedented insights into the universe’s formation and behavior.

Introduction to DESI and its global impact.

Researchers have developed a new computational method to explore the neutron matter inside neutron stars at densities higher than previously studied.

This method provides insights into the behavior of neutrinos during supernova explosions, enhancing the accuracy of simulations and potentially improving our understanding of such cosmic events.

Advances in Neutron Matter Simulation.

For the first time, scientists have observed a collection of particles, also known as a quasiparticle, that’s massless when moving one direction but has mass in the other direction. The quasiparticle, called a semi-Dirac fermion, was first theorized 16 years ago, but was only recently spotted inside a crystal of semi-metal material called ZrSiS. The observation of the quasiparticle opens the door to future advances in a range of emerging technologies from batteries to sensors, according to the researchers.

The team, led by scientists at Penn State and Columbia University, recently published their discovery in the journal Physical Review X.

“This was totally unexpected,” said Yinming Shao, assistant professor of physics at Penn State and lead author on the paper. “We weren’t even looking for a semi-Dirac fermion when we started working with this material, but we were seeing signatures we didn’t understand—and it turns out we had made the first observation of these wild quasiparticles that sometimes move like they have mass and sometimes move like they have none.”

Researchers at the University of Reading and University College London have developed a new artificial intelligence model that can predict how atoms arrange themselves in crystal structures. Called CrystaLLM, the technology works similarly to AI chatbots, by learning the “language” of crystals by studying millions of existing crystal structures. It could lead to faster discovery of new materials for everything from solar panels to computer chips.

Read Full Story.

Nuclear theorists at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory have successfully employed a new theoretical approach to calculate the Collins-Soper kernel, a quantity that describes how the distribution of quarks’ transverse momentum inside a proton changes with the collision energy.

The research is published in the journal Physical Review D.

The new calculation precisely matches model-based reconstructions from particle collision data. It is particularly effective for quarks with low transverse momenta, where earlier methods fell short.

The universe is a stage filled with extreme phenomena, where temperatures and energies reach unimaginable levels. In this context, there are objects such as supernova remnants, pulsars, and active galactic nuclei that generate charged particles and gamma rays with energies far exceeding those involved in nuclear processes like fusion within stars. These particles, as direct witnesses of extreme cosmic processes, offer key insights into the workings of the universe.

Gamma rays, for instance, have the ability to traverse space without being altered, providing direct information about their sources of origin. However, charged particles, known as cosmic rays, face a more complex journey. When interacting with the omnipresent magnetic fields of the cosmos, these particles are deflected and lose part of their energy, especially high-energy electrons and positrons, referred to as cosmic-ray electrons (CRe). With energies surpassing one teraelectronvolt (TeV)—a thousand times more than visible light— these particles gradually fade away, complicating the identification of their point of origin.

Detecting high-energy particles such as CRe is a monumental task. Space instruments, with their limited detection areas, fail to capture sufficient particles at these extreme energies. On the other hand, ground-based observatories face an additional challenge: distinguishing particle cascades triggered by cosmic-ray electrons from the far more frequent ones generated by protons and heavier cosmic-ray nuclei.

It was 1,229 CE in the monastery of St Sabas, near Jerusalem, and a monk named Johannes Myronas was in need of some parchment. He had evidently been tasked with creating a copy of the Euchologion – an important book of prayer and worship directions for Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic churches.

The problem was, parchment was expensive and hard to come by. Recycling was the name of the game, and Johannes had just the thing: a 200-year-old manuscript filled with old math notes that nobody was all that interested in anymore. Compared with the Holy Word, there was no contest: he pulled it apart, scraped the old text off, and used the pages for the new book – a technique known as palimpsesting.

You probably know where this is going. In creating his Euchologion, Johannes had – presumably unwittingly – destroyed one of the most valuable relics of Archimedes’s work. Not just some notebook or single treatise, even: the manuscript now known as “Codex C” contained multiple works from the ancient polymath, some of which now exist nowhere else in the world.