Research at Argonne reimagining building blocks of devices that power cellphones, space probes and more.
The Earth’s magnetic field plays a big role in protecting people from hazardous radiation and geomagnetic activity that could affect satellite communication and the operation of power grids. And it moves.
Scientists have studied and tracked the motion of the magnetic poles for centuries. The historical movement of these poles indicates a change in the global geometry of the Earth’s magnetic field. It may even indicate the beginning of a field reversal—a “flip” between the north and south magnetic poles.
A companion robot dog, designed to provide emotional support to astronauts, has been unveiled by a student from South Korea’s Hongik University.
The small-scale robot dog Laika is named after the first dog to orbit the Earth aboard Sputnik 2.
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Number 4 Hamilton Place is a be-columned building in central London, home to the Royal Aeronautical Society and four floors of event space. In May, the early 20th-century Edwardian townhouse hosted a decidedly more modern meeting: Defense officials, contractors, and academics from around the world gathered to discuss the future of military air and space technology.
Things soon went awry. At that conference, Tucker Hamilton, chief of AI test and operations for the United States Air Force, seemed to describe a disturbing simulation in which an AI-enabled drone had been tasked with taking down missile sites. But when a human operator started interfering with that objective, he said, the drone killed its operator, and cut the communications system.
Scientists detected an extremely high-energy cosmic ray beaming from outer space — which confusingly came from nowhere in particular.
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“Researchers can extract more knowledge from the same data, contributing to a deeper understanding of the cosmos”
Worlds orbiting a sun-like star 100 light-years from Earth could unlock secrets surrounding the formation of our solar system.
They are the most common type of planet observed in our Milky Way galaxy — two to three times the diameter of Earth but smaller than Neptune, and orbiting closer to their stars than our solar system’s innermost planet Mercury does to the sun.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has a number of missions ongoing to discover and study exoplanets, which are planets outside of our solar system.
One of those missions, Cheops (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite), has uncovered a rare star system that lies around 100 light-years away.
It’s an important find because it can tell us about the formation and evolution of the planetary system, according to ESA.
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in conjunction with the international Fermi Large Area Telescope Collaboration, announce the discovery of nearly 300 gamma ray pulsars in the publication of their Third Catalog of Gamma Ray Pulsars. This milestone comes 15 years after the launch of Fermi in 2008 when there were fewer than ten known gamma-ray pulsars.
“Work on this important catalog has been going on in our group for years,” said Paul Ray, Ph.D., head of the High Energy Astrophysics and Applications Section at NRL. “Our scientists and postdocs have been able to both discover and analyze the timing behavior and spectra of many of these newfound pulsars as part of our quest to further our understanding of these exotic stars that we are able to use as cosmic clocks.”
Pulsars are formed when massive stars have burned through their fuel supply and become unable to resist the inward pull of their own gravity. This results in the star collapsing into a dense, spinning, magnetized neutron star. Their spinning magnetic fields send out beams of gamma rays, the most energetic form of light. As these beams sweep across the Earth, the highly sensitive Fermi gamma-ray telescope can observe their periodic energy pulses. With more than 15 years of data, Fermi has transformed the field of pulsar research.
