The Southwest Research Institute-led Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) aboard NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft has made valuable observations of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which in July became the third officially recognized interstellar object to cross into our solar system. UVS had a unique view of the object during a period when Mars- and Earth-based observations were impractical or impossible.
Researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, in collaboration with Huzhou University, discovered that the entanglement workhorse of most quantum optics laboratories can have hidden topologies, reporting the highest ever observed in any system: 48 dimensions with over 17,000 topological signatures, an enormous alphabet for encoding robust quantum information.
Most quantum optics laboratories produce entangled photons by a process of spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC), which naturally produces entanglement in “space,” the spatial degrees of freedom of light. Now the team have found that hidden in this space is a world of high-dimensional topologies, offering new paradigms for encoding information and making quantum information immune to noise. The topology was shown using the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light, from two dimensional to very high dimensions.
Reporting in Nature Communications, the team showed that if one measures the OAM of two entangled photons it can be shown to have a topology: an underlying feature of the entanglement itself. Since OAM can take on an infinite number of possibilities, so too can the topology.
Describing matter under extreme conditions, such as those found inside neutron stars, remains an unsolved problem. The density of such matter is equivalent to compressing around 100,000 Eiffel Towers into a single cubic centimeter. In particular, the properties of so-called quark matter—which consists of the universe’s fundamental building blocks, the quarks, and may exist in extremely dense regions—play a central role.
Researchers from TU Darmstadt and Goethe University Frankfurt have studied this matter and its thermodynamic properties. Their findings are published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Theoretical studies suggest that quarks at very low temperatures enter a so-called color-superconducting state, which fundamentally alters the nature of matter. This state is analogous to the transition of an electron gas into an electrical superconductor—except that, instead of electrons, quarks pair up and create an energy gap in their excitation spectrum.
Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and elsewhere report the discovery of a new brown dwarf about 60 times more massive than Jupiter. The newfound substellar object, designated TOI-7019 b, is a brown dwarf known to orbit a star that is part of the Milky Way’s ancient thick disk. The finding is detailed in a paper published December 5 on the arXiv preprint server.
Brown dwarfs (BDs) are intermediate objects between planets and stars, occupying the mass range between 13 and 80 Jupiter masses (0.012 and 0.076 solar masses). However, although many brown dwarfs have been detected to date, these objects orbiting other stars are a rare find.
Recently, a team of astronomers led by CfA’s Jea Adams Redai found another rare brown dwarf, which is a companion to the star TOI-7019. This star was initially observed with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which detected a transit signal in its light curve. Now, follow-up observations of this star confirmed that the transit signal is produced by a substellar object.
The first planet ever found orbiting another star was detected in 1995, and it belonged to a class now known as a “hot Jupiter.” These exoplanets are comparable in mass to Jupiter but circle their stars in just a few days. Scientists now believe that hot Jupiters originally formed far from their stars, similar to Jupiter in our Solar System, and later moved inward.
Two main processes have been proposed to explain this journey: high-eccentricity migration, where gravitational interactions with other objects distort a planet’s orbit before tidal forces near the star gradually make it circular; and disk migration, in which a planet slowly spirals inward while embedded in the protoplanetary disk of gas and dust.
In a finding that echoes science fiction, astronomers at Northwestern University have captured a direct image of an exoplanet that orbits two stars, similar to the fictional world of Tatooine.
Directly imaging a planet beyond our solar system is uncommon on its own, but spotting one that revolves around a pair of suns is far more unusual. This newly identified planet stands out even among those rare cases. It travels closer to its two host stars than any other directly imaged planet found in a binary star system and sits six times nearer to its suns than comparable exoplanets discovered so far.
This observation gives scientists a valuable new way to study how planets form and move in systems with more than one star. By watching how the planet and its stars interact, researchers can better test and refine models of planetary formation under complex gravitational conditions.
If you feel a thrill every time we discover something new about the cosmos, then November 25th may have been a noteworthy day to you. That’s the day that NASA completed assembly of the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.
The two main segments of the powerful space telescope were joined together in the large clean room at Goddard Space Flight Center that day. This means that the telescope is on track for launch as early as Fall 2026.
The Roman is an infrared telescope that’s set to become a flagship in the telescope fleet. It has only two instruments, the Wide-Field Instrument (WFI) and the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI).
Although they are technically gas giants, Uranus and Neptune are referred to as “ice giants” due to their composition.
This refers to the fact that Uranus and Neptune have more methane, water, and other volatiles than their larger counterparts (Jupiter and Saturn).
Given the pressure conditions in the planets’ interiors, these elements become solid, essentially becoming ‘ices.’