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A team of astronomers has released new observations of nearby galaxies that resemble colorful cosmic fireworks. The images, obtained with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), show different components of the galaxies in distinct colors, allowing astronomers to pinpoint the locations of young stars and the gas they warm up around them. By combining these new observations with data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner, the team is helping shed new light on what triggers gas to form stars.

Astronomers know that stars are born in clouds of gas, but what sets off star formation, and how galaxies as a whole play into it, remains a mystery. To understand this process, a team of researchers has observed various nearby galaxies with powerful telescopes on the ground and in space, scanning the different galactic regions involved in stellar births.

A dazzling new animation puts you aboard NASA’s robotic Juno spacecraft during its epic flybys last month of Jupiter and the huge moon Ganymede.

On June 7, Juno zoomed within just 645 miles (1038 kilometers) of Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system. It was the closest a probe had gotten to the icy, heavily cratered world since May 2000, when NASA’s Galileo spacecraft flew by at a distance of about 620 miles (1000 km).

Ark I is a self-sustaining space colony built to ensure humanity could survive disasters that make Earth uninhabitable such as nanoweapon disasters or particle accelerator mishaps.

Quantum mechanics deals with the behavior of the Universe at the super-small scale: atoms and subatomic particles that operate in ways that classical physics can’t explain. In order to explore this tension between the quantum and the classical, scientists are attempting to get larger and larger objects to behave in a quantum-like way.

In the case of this particular study, the object in question is a tiny glass nanosphere, 100 nanometers in diameter – about a thousand times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. To our minds that’s very, very small, but in terms of quantum physics, it’s actually rather huge, made up to 10 million atoms.

Pushing such a nanosphere into the realm of quantum mechanics is actually a huge achievement, and yet that’s exactly what physicists have now accomplished.

NASA’s Juno probe has flown closer to Jupiter and its largest moon, Ganymede, than any other spacecraft in more than two decades — and the images it beamed back of the gas giant and its icy orb are breathtaking.

Juno approached Ganymede on June 7, before making its 34th flyby of Jupiter the following day, traveling from pole to pole in under three hours.

Continue reading “NASA beams back spectacular images of Jupiter and our solar system’s biggest moon, Ganymede” »

Scientists have discovered a novel way to classify magnetized plasmas that could possibly lead to advances in harvesting on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars. The discovery by theorists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) found that a magnetized plasma has 10 unique phases and the transitions between them might hold rich implications for practical development.

The spatial boundaries, or transitions, between different phases will support localized wave excitations, the researchers found. “These findings could lead to possible applications of these exotic excitations in space and laboratory plasmas,” said Yichen Fu, a graduate student at PPPL and lead author of a paper in Nature Communications that outlines the research. “The next step is to explore what these excitations could do and how they might be utilized.”

Trapped ions discovered at midlatitudes can have energies exceeding 100 megaelectron volts per nucleon. Their detection adds to our understanding of the powerful radiation environment around Jupiter.

Jupiter’s planetary radiation environment is the most intense in the solar system. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been orbiting the planet closer than any previous mission since 2016, investigating its innermost radiation belts from a unique polar orbit. The spacecraft’s orbit has enabled the first complete latitudinal and longitudinal study of Jupiter’s radiation belts. Becker et al. leverage this capability to report the discovery of a new population of heavy, high-energy ions trapped at Jupiter’s midlatitudes.

Continue reading “NASA’s Juno spacecraft Detects Jupiter’s Highest-Energy Ions” »

Engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a new wearable device that turns the touch of a finger into a source of power for small electronics and sensors. The device is a thin, flexible strip worn on a fingertip and generates small amounts of electricity when a person’s finger sweats or presses on it.

More interestingly, this sweat-powered device is capable of generating power even when the wearer is asleep or sitting still. This could open up some very interesting possibilities in the wearable space, as the researchers have now figured out how to harness the energy that can be extracted from human sweat even when a person is not moving.

A new artificial intelligence method removes the effect of gravity on cosmic images, showing the real shapes of distant galaxies.