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Category: physics – Page 183

Star’s mysterious orbit around black hole proves einstein was right all along—again.

The star, known as S2, has a 16-year elliptical orbit. It came near 20 billion kilometers of our black hole, Sagittarius A*, last year. If Isaac Newton’s traditional definition of gravity is correct, S2 should then continue on its previous orbit’s course through space. But it didn’t work.

Instead, it took a slightly divergent route, with the axis of its ellipse altering slightly, according to research published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics by a team employing the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. As predicted by general relativity, the process known as Schwarzschild precession will eventually force S2 to trace out a spirograph-like floral pattern in space (as illustrated above).

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Mikhail Kokorich is the founder of Destinus. This serial entrepreneur has been dubbed Russia’s Elon Musk by his public relations team. The Russian businessman says his business, Destinus, is developing a hydrogen-powered, zero-emissions transcontinental delivery drone that can travel at speeds up to Mach 15.

Destinus plans to combine the technological advancements from a spaceplane with the ordinary and straightforward physics from a glider to create a hyperplane that will meet the many demands of a hyper-connected world.

This hyperplane will use clean hydrogen fuel to transport cargo between Europe and Australia in mere hours. The hyperplane will be fully autonomous; it will take off from ordinary runways, traveling leisurely to the coast before accelerating to supersonic speeds.

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First predicted in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravitational waves are tiny ripples in spacetime generated by titanic and powerful cosmic events. The great physicist believed that no equipment would ever be sensitive to detect these faint cosmic ripples. Fortunately, Einstein was wrong, but that doesn’t mean that the detection of gravitational waves has been easy.

The history of a planned array to be built in Europe during the late 1980s, the reasons this failed, and the parallels with current detectors, are documented in a new paper published in The European Physical Journal H, authored by Adele La Rana, University of Verona, and INFN Section of Sapienza University, Italy.

La Rana explains that following the announcement of the first detections of by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration in 2016 and 2017, questions arose regarding “the missed opportunity” of having an array of two or more long-based GW interferometers in Europe.

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Universe has an abundance of gravitational wave sources. Recently, an international team of scientists unveiled a tsunami of gravitational waves. This discovery is the most significant number of gravitational waves ever detected.

Scientists detected 35 new gravitational waves. These waves were formed by merging black holes or neutron stars and black holes smashing together. The observation was made by the LIGO and Virgo observatories between November 2019 and March 2020.

This brings the total number of detections to 90 after three observing runs between 2015 and 2020.

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X-ray laser experiments show that intense light distorts the structure of a thermoelectric material in a unique way, opening a new avenue for controlling the properties of materials.

Thermoelectric materials convert heat to electricity and vice versa, and their atomic structures are closely related to how well they perform.

Now researchers have discovered how to change the atomic structure of a highly efficient thermoelectric material, tin selenide, with intense pulses of laser light. This result opens a new way to improve thermoelectrics and a host of other materials by controlling their structure, creating materials with dramatic new properties that may not exist in nature.

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Physicists have discovered a new way to coat soft robots in materials that allow them to move and function in a more purposeful way. The research, led by the University of Bath, is described in a paper published on March 11, 2022, in Science Advances.

Authors of the study believe their breakthrough modeling on ‘active matter’ could mark a turning point in the design of robots. With further development of the concept, it may be possible to determine the shape, movement, and behavior of a soft solid not by its natural elasticity but by human-controlled activity on its surface.

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