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The Bullseye Galaxy: A Stunning Case of a Galaxy ‘Hit’ by a Dwarf Galaxy

“This was a serendipitous discovery,” said Imad Pasha.


How many rings can galaxies have? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters hopes to address as an international team of researchers discovered a unique galaxy with nine rings, possessing six more rings than any known galaxy, that they aptly named the Bullseye Galaxy. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of galaxies throughout the universe, potentially resulting in identifying where we could find life.

The Bullseye Galaxy is known as a collisional ring galaxy (CRG) and whose radius is approximately 70 kiloparsecs (228,309 light-years), which is two and a half times larger than our Milky Way Galaxy, which is known as a spiral galaxy. After significant image analysis from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory, the researchers estimate the Bullseye Galaxy was created approximately 50 million years ago when a smaller blue dwarf galaxy collided with the center of the former, resulting in nine giant rings like ripples being created when a pebble is dropped in a water.

En route to Jupiter, Europa Clipper captures images of stars

Three months after its launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the agency’s Europa Clipper has another 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometers) to go before it reaches Jupiter’s orbit in 2030 to take close-up images of the icy moon Europa with science cameras.

Meanwhile, a set of cameras serving a different purpose is snapping photos in the space between Earth and Jupiter. Called star trackers, the two imagers look for stars and use them like a compass to help mission controllers know the exact orientation of the spacecraft—information critical for pointing telecommunications antennas toward Earth and sending data back and forth smoothly.

In early December, the pair of star trackers (formally known as the stellar reference units) captured and transmitted Europa Clipper’s first imagery of space. The picture, composed of three shots, shows tiny pinpricks of light from stars 150 to 300 light-years away. The starfield represents only about 0.1% of the full sky around the spacecraft, but by mapping the stars in just that small slice of sky, the orbiter is able to determine where it is pointed and orient itself correctly.

Thermalization and criticality on an analogue–digital quantum simulator

The advent of quantum simulators in various platforms8,9,10,11,12,13,14 has opened a powerful experimental avenue towards answering the theoretical question of thermalization5,6, which seeks to reconcile the unitarity of quantum evolution with the emergence of statistical mechanics in constituent subsystems. A particularly interesting setting is that in which a quantum system is swept through a critical point15,16,17,18, as varying the sweep rate can allow for accessing markedly different paths through phase space and correspondingly distinct coarsening behaviour. Such effects have been theoretically predicted to cause deviations19,20,21,22 from the celebrated Kibble–Zurek (KZ) mechanism, which states that the correlation length ξ of the final state follows a universal power-law scaling with the ramp time tr (refs. 3, 23,24,25).

Whereas tremendous technical advancements in quantum simulators have enabled the observation of a wealth of thermalization-related phenomena26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35, the analogue nature of these systems has also imposed constraints on the experimental versatility. Studying thermalization dynamics necessitates state characterization beyond density–density correlations and preparation of initial states across the entire eigenspectrum, both of which are difficult without universal quantum control36. Although digital quantum processors are in principle suitable for such tasks, implementing Hamiltonian evolution requires a high number of digital gates, making large-scale Hamiltonian simulation infeasible under current gate errors.

In this work, we present a hybrid analogue–digital37,38 quantum simulator comprising 69 superconducting transmon qubits connected by tunable couplers in a two-dimensional (2D) lattice (Fig. 1a). The quantum simulator supports universal entangling gates with pairwise interaction between qubits, and high-fidelity analogue simulation of a U symmetric spin Hamiltonian when all couplers are activated at once. The low analogue evolution error, which was previously difficult to achieve with transmon qubits due to correlated cross-talk effects, is enabled by a new scalable calibration scheme (Fig. 1b). Using cross-entropy benchmarking (XEB)39, we demonstrate analogue performance that exceeds the simulation capacity of known classical algorithms at the full system size.

10 Minutes of Violence Gave The Moon Its Very Own ‘Grand Canyons’

Arizona’s magnificent Grand Canyon is painstaking result of the Colorado River’s current wearing away the planet’s surface over millions of years.

Earth, however, isn’t the only body in the Solar System with canyons and gorges. The Moon has structures comparable to Earth’s Grand Canyon; although, in the absence of liquid water, their formation mechanism has been difficult to determine.

Now, scientists believe that they have figured it out. Two huge canyons scored into the surface of the Moon were created in the wake of a giant impact – and, in stark and jaw-dropping contrast to the Grand Canyon, their creation could have taken less than 10 minutes.

Super-Earth vs Sub-Neptune? The Winner is Super-Venus!

New observational data from the James Webb Space Telescope and simulation models have confirmed a new type of planet unlike anything found in the Solar System. This provides another piece of the puzzle to understand how planets and planetary systems form.

To date, more than 5,000 exoplanets have been confirmed around stars other than the Sun.

Many exoplanets are unlike any of the planets in the Solar System, making it difficult to guess their true natures.

Thermal interface material slashes AI data center cooling cost and GPU/CPU power use

With an assist from the NEID spectrograph, a team of astronomers have confirmed the existence of exoplanet Gaia-4b—one of the most massive planets known to orbit a low-mass star. Gaia-4b is also the first planet detected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft using the astrometric technique.

NEID is a high-precision radial-velocity spectrograph that is designed to measure the extremely minute wobble of using the radial velocity effect. This effect results from the mutual gravitational force between a planet and its which causes the star’s position to shift very slightly as the planet travels around it. With this powerful capability, one of NEID’s main science goals is to confirm exoplanet candidates found by other exoplanet missions.

NEID is mounted on the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at the U.S. National Science Foundation Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), a program of NSF NOIRLab.

Interaction of kinetic waves and suprathermal particles could be key to unlocking biggest mystery in heliophysics

A graduate research assistant at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of The University of Alabama system, has published a paper in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics that builds on an earlier study to help understand why the solar corona is so hot compared to the surface of the sun itself.

To shed further light on this age-old mystery, Syed Ayaz, a Ph.D. candidate in the UAH Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR), employed a statistical model known as a Kappa distribution to describe the velocity of particles in space plasmas, while incorporating the interaction of suprathermal particles with kinetic Alfvén waves (KAWs).

KAWs are oscillations of the charged particles and as they move through the , caused by motions in the photosphere, the sun’s outer shell. The waves are a valuable tool for modeling various phenomena in the solar system, including particle acceleration and wave-particle interactions.

The non-carbonaceous nature of Earth’s late-stage accretion

Constraining the origin of Earth’s building blocks requires knowledge of the chemical and isotopic characteristics of the source region(s) where these materials accreted. The siderophile elements Mo and Ru are well suited to investigating the mass-independent nucleosynthetic (i.e., “genetic”) signatures of material that contributed to the latter stages of Earth’s formation. Studies contrasting the Mo and Ru isotopic compositions of the bulk silicate Earth (BSE) to genetic signatures of meteorites, however, have reported conflicting estimates of the proportions of the non-carbonaceous type or NC (presumptive inner Solar System origin) and carbonaceous chondrite type or CC (presumptive outer Solar System origin) materials delivered to Earth during late-stage accretion (likely including the Moon-forming event and onwards).

Two space startups have merged to create the next generation of telescopes

On a clear spring evening in Michigan, the stars aligned — just not in the way Upfront Ventures partner Nick Kim expected.

He’d just led a $9.5 million seed round for OurSky, a software platform for space observational data, and was eager to see what its telescope partner PlaneWave Instruments could do.

But when they rolled out the telescopes that night at PlaneWave’s manufacturing facility, he was stuck waiting.

Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence — Graham Oppy

Professor Graham Oppy discusses the Turing Test, whether AI can understand, whether it can be more ethical than humans, moral realism, AI alignment, incoherence in human value, indirect normativity and much more.

Chapters:
0:00 The Turing test.
6:06 Agentic LLMs.
6:42 Concern about non-anthropocentric intelligence.
7:57 Machine understanding & the Chinese Room argument.
10:21 AI ‘grokking’ — seemingly understanding stuff.
13:06 AI and fact checking.
15:01 Alternative tests for assessing AI capability.
17:35 Moral Turing Tests — Can AI be highly moral?
18:37 Philosophy’s role in AI development.
21:51 Can AI help progress philosophy?
23:48 Increasing percision in the language of philosophy via technoscience.
24:54 Should philosophers be more involved in AI development?
26:59 Moral realism & fining universal principles.
31:02 Empiricism & moral truth.
32:09 Challenges to moral realism.
33:09 Truth and facts.
36:26 Are suffering and pleasure real?
37:54 Signatures of pain.
39:25 AI leaning from morally relevant features of reality.
41:22 AI self-improvement.
42:36 AI mind reading.
43:46 Can AI learn to care via moral realism?
45:42 Bias in AI training data.
46:26 Metaontology.
48:27 Is AI conscious?
49:45 Can AI help resolve moral disagreements?
51:07 ‘Little’ philosophical progress.
54:09 Does the human condition prevent or retard wide spread value convergence?
55:04 Difficulties in AI aligning to incoherent human values.
56:30 Empirically informed alignment.
58:41 Training AI to be humble.
59:42 Paperclip maximizers.
1:00:41 Indirect specification — avoiding AI totalizing narrow and poorly defined goals.
1:02:35 Humility.
1:03:55 Epistemic deference to ‘jupiter-brain’ AI
1:05:27 Indirect normativity — verifying jupiter-brain oracle AI’s suggested actions.
1:08:25 Ideal observer theory.
1:10:45 Veil of ignorance.
1:13:51 Divine psychology.
1:16:21 The problem of evil — an indifferent god?
1:17:21 Ideal observer theory and moral realism.

See Wikipedia article on Graham Oppy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_https://twitter.com/oppygraham #AI #philosophy #aisafety #ethics Many thanks for tuning in! Please support SciFuture by subscribing and sharing! Have any ideas about people to interview? Want to be notified about future events? Any comments about the STF series? Please fill out this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mr9P… Kind regards, Adam Ford

x: https://twitter.com/oppygraham.

#AI #philosophy #aisafety #ethics.

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