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Category: physics – Page 53

MAUVE: An Ultraviolet Astrophysics Probe Mission Concept

For the past 30 years, NASA’s Great Observatories—the Hubble, Spitzer, Compton, and Chandra space telescopes—have revealed some amazing things about the universe. In addition to some of the deepest views of the universe provided by the Hubble Deep Fields campaign, these telescopes have provided insight into the unseen parts of the cosmos—i.e., in the infrared, gamma-ray, and ultraviolet spectrums.

With the success of these observatories and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA is contemplating future missions that would reveal even more of the “unseen universe.”

This includes the UltraViolet Explorer (UVEX), a space telescope NASA plans to launch in 2030 as its next Astrophysics Medium-Class Explorer mission. In a recent study, a team led by researchers from the University of Michigan proposed another concept known as the Mission to Analyze the UltraViolet universE (MAUVE). This telescope and its sophisticated instruments were conceived during the inaugural NASA Astrophysics Mission Design School. According to the team’s paper, this mission would hypothetically be ready for launch by 2031.

‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years

The British-Canadian computer scientist often touted as a “godfather” of artificial intelligence has shortened the odds of AI wiping out humanity over the next three decades, warning the pace of change in the technology is “much faster” than expected.

Prof Geoffrey Hinton, who this year was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for his work in AI, said there was a “10% to 20%” chance that AI would lead to human extinction within the next three decades.

New physics engine lets robots practice tasks 430,000x faster

Genesis integrates various physics solvers and their coupling into a unified framework.

AI robotics training has been increased tremendously with the help of a new tool. Called ‘Genesis’, the tool is a new open-source computer simulation system.

Unveiled by a large group of university and private industry researchers, the system reportedly lets robots practice tasks in simulated reality 430,000 times faster than in the real world.

According to researchers, an AI agent is also planned to generate 3D physics simulations from text prompts.

The universe’s evolution seems to be slowing and we don’t know why

As the universe evolves, scientists expect large cosmic structures to grow at a certain rate: dense regions such as galaxy clusters would grow denser, while the void of space would grow emptier.

But University of Michigan researchers have discovered that the rate at which these large structures grow is slower than predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

They also showed that as dark energy accelerates the universe’s global expansion, the suppression of the cosmic structure growth that the researchers see in their data is even more prominent than what the theory predicts. Their results are published in Physical Review Letters.

Physicists Unlock the Potential of In-Plane Magnetic Fields for Advanced Magnetotransport

In-plane magnetic fields unveil novel Hall effect behaviors in advanced materials, transforming our understanding of electronic transport.

Researchers from the Institute of Science Tokyo have reported that in-plane magnetic fields induce an anomalous Hall effect in EuCd₂Sb₂ films. By investigating how these fields alter the electronic structure, the team uncovered a significant in-plane anomalous Hall effect. This discovery opens new avenues for controlling electronic transport in magnetic fields, with potential applications in magnetic sensors.

The Hall effect, a fundamental phenomenon in material science, occurs when a material carrying an electric current is subjected to a magnetic field, creating a voltage perpendicular to both the current and the field. While the Hall effect has been extensively studied in materials under out-of-plane magnetic fields, the effects of in-plane magnetic fields have received comparatively little attention.

LLNL researchers explore next-gen 3D printing to harness fusion energy

When Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) achieved fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in December 2022, the world’s attention turned to the prospect of how that breakthrough experiment — designed to secure the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile — might also pave the way for virtually limitless, safe and carbon-free fusion energy.

Advanced 3D printing offers one potential solution to bridging the science and technology gaps presented by current efforts to make inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plants a reality.

“Now that we have achieved and repeated fusion ignition,” said Tammy Ma, lead for LLNL’s inertial fusion energy institutional initiative, “the Lab is rapidly applying our decades of know-how into solving the core physics and engineering challenges that come with the monumental task of building the fusion ecosystem necessary for a laser fusion power plant. The mass production of ignition-grade targets is one of these, and cutting-edge 3D printing could help get us there.”

Toward a Second Law for Living Systems

A new theory related to the second law of thermodynamics describes the motion of active biological systems ranging from migrating cells to traveling birds.

In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger published the book What is life? [1]. Therein, he reasoned about the origin of living systems by using methods of statistical physics. He argued that organisms form ordered states far from thermal equilibrium by minimizing their own disorder. In physical terms, disorder corresponds to positive entropy. Schrödinger thus concluded: “What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy […] freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.” This statement poses the question of whether the second law of thermodynamics is valid for living systems. Now Benjamin Sorkin at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and colleagues have considered the problem of entropy production in living systems by putting forward a generalization of the second law [2].

Latest gravitational wave observations conflict with expectations from stellar models

Almost 300 binary mergers have been detected so far, indicated by their passing gravitational waves. These measurements from the world’s gravitational wave observatories put constraints on the masses and spins of the merging objects such as black holes and neutron stars, and in turn this information is being used to better understand the evolution of massive stars.

Thus far, these models predict a paucity of black hole binary pairs where each black hole has around 10 to 15 times the mass of the sun. This “dip or mass gap” in the mass range where seldom form depends on assumptions made in the models; in particular, the ratio of the two masses in the binary.

Now a new study of the distribution of the masses of existing black holes in binaries finds no evidence for such a dip as gleaned from the that have been detected to date. The work is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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