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Astrophysicists unveil biggest-ever 3D map of Universe

Geneva (AFP)

Astrophysicists on Monday published the largest-ever 3D map of the Universe, the result of an analysis of more than four million galaxies and ultra-bright, energy-packed quasars.

The efforts of hundreds of scientists from around 30 institutions worldwide have yielded a “complete story of the expansion of the universe”, said Will Percival of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

The United Arab Emirates will launch its 1st-ever Mars mission today. Here’s how to watch live

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) will launch its first-ever interplanetary mission today (July 19), and you can watch the historic liftoff live.

The Emirates Mars Mission, also known as Hope, is scheduled to launch atop an H-IIA rocket from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center today at 5:58 p.m. EDT (2158 GMT; 6:58 a.m. July 20 Japan Standard Time. You can follow the action live here at Space.com courtesy of the UAE Space Agency and the Dubai One news channel, or directly via the latter two organizations here.

Pentadiamond, a new addition to the carbon family

To calculate the most stable atomic configuration, as well as estimate its hardness, the team relied on a computational method called density functional theory (DFT). DFT has been successfully used throughout chemistry and solid-state physics to predict the structure and properties of materials. Keeping track of the quantum states of all the electrons in a sample, and their interactions, is usually an intractable task. Instead, DFT uses an approximation that focuses on the final density of electrons in space orbiting the atoms. This simplifies the calculation to make it suitable for computers, while still providing very precise results.

Based on these calculations, the scientists found that the Young’s modulus, a measure of hardness, for pentadiamond is predicted to be almost 1700 GPa – compared with about 1200 GPa for conventional diamond.

“Not only is pentadiamond harder than conventional diamond, its density is much lower, equal to that of graphite,” explains co-author Professor Mina Maruyama.