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Category: space – Page 744

The Force of Nothingness Has Been Used to Manipulate Objects

Scientists can use some pretty wild forces to manipulate materials. There’s acoustic tweezers, which use the force of acoustic radiation to control tiny objects. Optical tweezers made of lasers exploit the force of light. Not content with that, now physicists have made a device to manipulate materials using the force of… nothingness.

OK, that may be a bit simplistic. When we say nothingness, we’re really referring to the attractive force that arises between two surfaces in a vacuum, known as the Casimir force. The new research has provided not just a way to use it for no-contact object manipulation, but also to measure it.

The implications span multiple fields, from chemistry and gravitational wave astronomy all the way down to something as fundamental and ubiquitous as metrology — the science of measurement.

Perseid meteor shower promises big show for stargazers

ST. LOUIS (KTVI) — The Perseid meteor shower is now underway and is about one week from its mid-August peak.

Considered the best meteor shower of the year, you can see up to 50 meteors per hour, according to NASA, and sometimes even more if conditions are right. The fast and bright meteors often leave long wakes of light behind them as they streak through the atmosphere, making them easy to see even for the casual astronomer.

The Perseids get their name from the constellation Perseus because they appear to radiate from that spot in the sky, but the constellation isn’t the source. When comets come around the sun, they leave a dusty trail behind them. This time each year, Earth passes by debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle, which burns up in our atmosphere.

Uncovering our solar system’s shape

Scientists have developed a new prediction of the shape of the bubble surrounding our solar system using a model developed with data from NASA missions.

All the planets of our are encased in a magnetic bubble, carved out in space by the Sun’s constantly outflowing material, the . Outside this bubble is the interstellar medium—the ionized gas and magnetic field that fills the space between stellar systems in our galaxy. One question scientists have tried to answer for years is on the shape of this bubble, which travels through space as our Sun orbits the center of our galaxy. Traditionally, scientists have thought of the as a comet shape, with a rounded leading edge, called the nose, and a long tail trailing behind.

Research published in Nature Astronomy in March and featured on the journal’s cover for July provides an alternative shape that lacks this long tail: the deflated croissant.

Valley formation on early Mars

The southern highlands of Mars are dissected by hundreds of valley networks, which are evidence that water once sculpted the surface.

Some valleys in the southern highlands of Mars may have formed by subglacial erosion, consistent with a cold and icy early Mars, according to a statistical analysis of valley morphometry.

Professor’s milestone in nuclear physics seeks to understand the universe itself

A nuclear physics professor from Florida International University was among a team of researchers that proposed something so out of this world, colleagues first hesitated to accept it was possible.

In 1993, they boldly predicted how the densest materials in the universe—known to exist only in rare neutron —could be made here on Earth. Ultimately, their research was published in Physical Review C, a leading focused on nuclear .

It spawned a wave of follow up research that in 2006 confirmed their prediction was true. For the tiniest sliver of a second, researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia were able to briefly create the material that exists inside a neutron star.

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