Sophomore math major Xzavier Herbert was never much into science fiction or the space program, but his skills in pure mathematics seem to keep drawing him into NASA’s orbit.
With an interest in representation theory, Herbert spent the summer virtually at NASA, studying connections between classical information theory and quantum information theory, each of which corresponds to a different set of laws: classical physics and quantum mechanics.
“What I’m doing involves how representation theory allows us to draw a direct analog from classical information theory to quantum information theory,” Herbert says. “It turns out that there is a mathematical way of justifying how these are related.”
HSC J023336-053022, a massive galaxy cluster located approximately 4 billion light-years away from Earth, is heating the material within it to hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius — over 25 times hotter than the core of the Sun.
Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and CEO Bioquark interviews Dr. Michelle Francl the Frank B. Mallory Professor of Chemistry, at Bryn Mawr College, and an adjunct scholar of the Vatican Observatory.
Ira Pastor comments:
Today, we have another fascinating guest working at the intersection of cutting edge science and spirituality.
Dr. Michelle Francl is the Frank B. Mallory Professor of Chemistry, at Bryn Mawr College, a distinguished women’s college in the suburbs of Philadephia, as well as an adjunct scholar of the Vatican Observatory.
Dr. Francl has a Ph.D. in chemistry from University of California, Irvine, did her post-doctoral research at Princeton University, and has taught physical chemistry, general chemistry, and mathematical modeling at Bryn Mawr College since 1986. In addition Dr. Francl has research interests in theoretical and computational chemistry, structures of topologically intriguing molecules (molecules with weird shapes), history and sociology of science, and the rhetoric of science.
Dr. Francl is noted for developing new methodologies in computational chemistry, is on a list of the 1,000 most cited chemists, is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling, is active in the American Chemical Society, and the author of “The Survival Guide for Physical Chemistry”. In 1994, she was awarded the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award by Bryn Mawr College for excellence in teaching.
On Earth, amethysts can form when gas bubbles in lava cool under the right conditions. In space, a dying star with a mass similar to the Sun is capable of producing a structure on par with the appeal of these beautiful gems.
As stars like the Sun run through their fuel, they cast off their outer layers and the core of the star shrinks. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have found a bubble of ultra-hot gas at the center of one of these expiring stars, a planetary nebula in our galaxy called IC 4593. At a distance of about 7,800 light years from Earth, IC 4593 is the most distant planetary nebula yet detected with Chandra.
This new image of IC 4593 has X-rays from Chandra in purple, invoking similarities to amethysts found in geodes around the globe. The bubble detected by Chandra is from gas that has been heated to over a million degrees. These high temperatures were likely generated by material that blew away from the shrunken core of the star and crashed into gas that had previously been ejected by the star.
It’s touchdown again on Mars, thanks to NASA’s InSight probe. This latest mission will continue our exploration of much that is still unknown about the planet.
As seen from Earth, the big red dot in the night sky has certainly caught the attention of humans since we started contemplating the universe.
The first observations with telescopes gave us a much clearer picture of Mars, with the poles covered in ice and different tones of red and black in the tropics.
