Lifeboat Foundation

A joint Harvard-NASA study.

This discovery really drives home the point of just how little we know about the universe. We wouldn’t expect a planet this heavy around such a low-mass star to exist.

You’ve heard of hot Jupiters. You’ve heard of mini-Neptunes. You’ve heard of super-Earths. But have you heard of Eyeball Planets? Yep — planetary scientists think there might be a type of exoplanet out there that looks disturbingly like a giant eyeball. Just sitting there. Staring.

But it’s actually not as weird as it sounds — the appearance of these bodies has to do with tidal locking.

Tidal locking is when an orbiting body rotates at the same rate that it orbits. That means it always has one side facing the body it is orbiting, and the other side always facing away. The Moon, for instance, is tidally locked to Earth, that’s why we never see its far side from here.

Two galaxies in the early universe, which contain extremely productive star factories, have been studied by a team of scientists led by Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Using powerful telescopes to split the galaxies’ light into individual colours, the scientists were amazed to discover light from many different molecules – more than ever before at such distances. Studies like this could revolutionise our understanding of the lives of the most active galaxies when the universe was young, the researchers believe.

When the universe was young, galaxies were very different from today’s stately spirals, which are full of gently-shining suns and colourful gas clouds. New stars were being born, at rates hundreds of times faster than in today’s universe. Most of this however, was hidden behind thick layers of dust, making it a challenge for scientists to discover these star factories’ secrets – until now. By studying the most distant galaxies visible with powerful telescopes, astronomers can get glimpses of how these factories managed to create so many stars.

In a new study, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, a team of scientists led by Chalmers astronomer Chentao Yang, used the telescopes of NOEMA (NOrthern Extended Millimetre Array) in France to find out more about how these early star factories managed to create so many stars. Yang and his colleagues measured light from two luminous galaxies in the early universe – one of them classified as a quasar, and both with high rates of star formation.

Gravity is the reason things with mass or energy are attracted to each other. It is why apples fall toward the ground and planets orbit stars.

Magnets attract some types of metals, but they can also push other magnets away. So how come you feel only the pull of gravity?

Continue reading “Einstein’s Insight: Why Does Gravity Pull Us Down and Not Up?” »

Immigration to and living on Mars have often been themes in science fiction. Before these dreams can become reality, humanity faces significant challenges, such as the scarcity of vital resources like oxygen needed for long-term survival on the Red Planet. Yet, recent discoveries of water activity on Mars have sparked new hope for overcoming these obstacles.

Scientists are now exploring the possibility of decomposing water to produce oxygen through electrochemical water oxidation driven by solar power with the help of oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts. The challenge is to find a way to synthesize these catalysts in situ using materials on Mars, instead of transporting them from the Earth, which is of high cost.

China’s cyber-space regulator has unveiled draft measures that would make companies responsible for the data used to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, such as Midjourney and ChatGPT.

In its ground state, the helium-8 (⁸He) nucleus consists of an alpha particle (⁴He nucleus) and four neutrons. If, before its few-hundred-milliseconds life ends, an ⁸ He nucleus is nudged into its first 0⁺ excited state, the four neutrons form two pairs known as dineutron clusters. According to theory, the alpha particle and the two neutron clusters settle into a three-member nuclear analog of a Bose-Einstein condensate. That outcome has now been observed for the first time by Zaihong Yang of Peking University and his colleagues at the RIKEN Nishina Center in Japan [1].

The experiment entailed firing a high-intensity beam of ⁸ He nuclei at polyethylene and carbon targets. Some collisions excited the nuclei into the sought-after condensate state, which promptly broke up into a helium-6 (⁶He) nucleus and a single neutron pair. The ⁶ He nuclei made their way through dipole magnets to drift detectors and plastic scintillators for characterization. The neutrons struck a plastic scintillator whose layered construction made it possible to identify which neutrons were correlated—that is, members of a dineutron cluster—and which were not. The correlated neutron pairs and the scattering count rate’s dependence on energy, angle, and type of target were all consistent with theoretical predictions of the nature of the correlated ⁸ He excited state.

The ⁸ He condensate resembles the so-called Hoyle state of carbon-12, which consists of three alpha particles in the condensed state. Astronomer Fred Hoyle predicted the state in 1954 to account for the synthesis of carbon in helium-burning stars. Yang points out that nuclear condensates could also have implications for understanding the structures of exotic nuclei and neutron stars.

An organizer of an upcoming software and developer conference called DevTernity has been accused of cooking up fake women speakers featured on the event’s website — AI-generated headshots and all.

It looks a lot like a horrifically misfired attempt to pad out the apparent diversity in a heavily male-dominated space, a hypothesis the event’s organizer Eduards Sizovs has since forcefully denied.

The bizarre development triggered a resounding outcry, leading to high-profile engineering leaders from the likes of Microsoft and Google to bow out of the conference.