For decades, scientists have been searching for the universe’s elusive “missing matter,” and now they say they finally found it.
Category: space – Page 3
Developer Proves His Game Engine Runs Faster Than Unity on Web
Gabriel Dechichi, a developer you might know from his challenge of making an Unreal Engine game in 4 weeks, is building his own C engine, and he’s ready to prove it’s better than Unity, at least in web space.
Dechichi made a demo where you can add hundreds of running mannequins and see how your system reacts to the stress. The creator claims his engine is “10x faster, 10x lighter, 10x better” than other software, and 14 times quicker than Unity in particular.
It’s obvious from first glance even at 100 characters that Dechichi’s engine runs smoother, but I tested it on my MacBook Pro, and while the C engine works with 1,000 units at 250 ms and 1 FPS, Unity took forever to load so many characters at 1,300 ms and 1 FPS. So, I guess, Dechichi is right, and we’ll see a nice addition to the gamedev world soon.
The Cosmic Owl: Astronomers discover a peculiar galaxy merger
An international team of astronomers reports the detection of a peculiar merger of two similar ring galaxies that morphologically resemble an owl’s face. The discovery of this galaxy merger, dubbed the “Cosmic Owl,” is presented in a research paper published June 11 on the arXiv preprint server.
Galaxy mergers play a crucial role in the evolution of galaxies. These events redistribute the gas around galaxies, impact the stellar kinematics, transform galaxy morphology, and eventually lead to effective stellar mass assembly.
Some galaxy mergers lead to the formation of collisional ring galaxies (CRGs), which are relatively rare as only a few hundred of them have been detected in the local universe. Rings in such galaxies are created when one galaxy passes directly through the disk of another in a nearly head-on collision, causing gas and stars to be shocked outward into a circular or near-circular pattern.
Highly charged muonic ions observed in gas-phase experiment for first time
An international team of researchers, including members from the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU, WPI), has directly observed “highly charged muonic ions,” a completely new class of exotic atomic systems, in a gas-phase experiment for the first time. The study was published online on June 16 in Physical Review Letters.
The observation highlights the capabilities of advanced superconducting transition-edge-sensor (TES) microcalorimeters in revealing previously inaccessible atomic phenomena.
Normal atoms consist of a nucleus and bound electrons and are electrically neutral. However, when many electrons are removed, the atom becomes highly charged. These charged atoms, known as highly charged ions, are valuable tools for research across various fields, including fundamental physics, nuclear fusion, surface science, and astronomy.
By measuring gases around young stars, astronomers unlock major clues to planet formation
An international team of scientists led by astronomers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison has produced the most accurate measurement of the gases swirling around young stars and how their mass changes over time. The discovery joins many pieces of a puzzle that may reveal which kinds of planets form—rocky Earth-types, gas giants like Jupiter, or balls of ice in the Neptune mold—as star systems mature.