In the scientific literature, a citation acts as a mechanism to signal prior knowledge, enhance credibility, and protect against plagiarism. But it also gives credit to the individual or team who established or discovered the knowledge in question, and citations have thus emerged as a metric to measure the impact of a work or researcher.
AD — Go to https://ground.news/drbecky to stay fully informed with the latest Space and Science news. Subscribe through my link to get 40% off the Vantage plan for unlimited access this month only. | I often get asked how do we know dark matter exists? Which is why I’ve made a video on all the observational evidence we have before (linked below)! But occasionally I’ll get asked how do we know how much dark matter there is, which is a really fun question. There’s many different ways we can calculate this, including the ratio between normal (baryonic) and dark matter, but in this video I just wanted to highlight three different ways astrophysicists calculate this.
Here’s my previous video on all the evidence we have for dark matter — • All the evidence we have for dark mat…
My previous video on whether dark matter could be made of black holes — • Is dark matter made of black holes?
My previous video on whether black holes contain dark matter — • Do black holes contain dark matter?
My previous video on why galaxies merge if the universe is expanding — • If the Universe is expanding, then wh…
Continue reading “How do we know how much dark matter there is in the Universe?” »
A new article explores the physics behind the popular party trick of infinite mirrors, explaining why it may not actually create infinite reflections. While it may seem like a never-ending loop, the reality is that the reflections eventually become too faint to see. This phenomenon is a result of the way light behaves and can be explained by the laws of physics.
With pulses of sound through tiny speakers, Cornell physics researchers have clarified the basic nature of a new superconductor.
Does free will exist? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice sit down with astrophysicist Charles Liu sit down to discuss the existence of free will and whether physics allows for choice in our lives.
We explore cause and effect: how does uncertainty and chaos in the universe factor into free will? How important is the illusion of free will to society? What does a society that acknowledges a lack of free will look like?
An international research team at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University has successfully created five new isotopes, bringing the stars closer to Earth.
The isotopes — known as thulium-182, thulium-183, ytterbium-186, ytterbium-187, and lutetium-190 — were reported Feb. 15 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
These represent the first batch of new isotopes made at FRIB, a user facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, or DOE-SC, supporting the mission of the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics. The new isotopes show that FRIB is nearing the creation of nuclear specimens that currently only exist when ultradense celestial bodies known as neutron stars crash into each other.
By nudging a thorium-229 nucleus into a higher energy state, physicists have made it possible to develop a nuclear clock that could probe the most fundamental forces in physics. However, there is still a long way to go.
The find, simulated with computer modeling, might explain what happens to liquid water across the universe.
“Water is really important for life,” said Eryn Cangi, co-author and a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, in a press release. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”
At one point, Venus might have hosted seas like Earth. So, what happened? The study’s scientists suspect that Venus underwent a powerful greenhouse event that raised temperatures to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. After this happened, all the planet’s water evaporated, leaving some droplets behind. Even the few drops that were left over might have vanished because of an ion, HCO+, in the planet’s atmosphere.
A team of scientists, astrophysicists and physicists, in an experiment called BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation 2), carried out over nine years at an astronomical observatory at the South Pole, reported that they had discovered undeniable traces of a much sought-after phenomenon in astrophysics: gravitational waves. It was also announced that the method used to make the discovery had provided an important confirmation of the theoretical model of Big Bang cosmology, and would allow the first moments after this primordial explosion—the moment of creation for modern astrophysics—to be studied experimentally.
When you don’t find gravitational waves…
If we imagine space and time as the surface of an ocean, gravitational waves can be thought of as ripples in that ocean. More precisely, gravitational waves are theoretical ripples in space-time, first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 on the basis of his general theory of relativity. Like electromagnetic waves, which are produced by the oscillation of an electric charge, it is thought that a sufficiently strong oscillation of a very massive object should produce gravitational waves, which carry energy in the form of gravitational energy.
“Water is really important for life,” said Dr. Eryn Cangi. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”
How did the planet Venus lose its water? This debate has rage on for some time and something a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) and the University of Arizona (UoA) as they have potentially conducted a groundbreaking study that could help explain the processes responsible for making Venus the hellish world it is today, whereas scientists have long hypothesized that the second planet from the Sun was much more hospitable billions of years ago.
“Water is really important for life,” said Dr. Eryn Cangi, who is a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at UCB and a co-author of the study. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”
Continue reading “Venus Unveiled: The Mystery of Water Loss Revealed” »
