Lifeboat Foundation

Trying to understand the makeup and evolution of the solar system’s Kuiper belt has kept researchers busy since it was hypothesized soon after the discovery of Pluto in 1930. In particular, binary pairs of objects there are useful as indicators since their existence today paints a picture of how energetic or violent the evolution of the solar system was in its early days four billion years ago.

Looking closely at the evolution of an ultrawide (in separation) binary object, researchers included more physics that reveals much about their architecture and unfolding. They found that these ultrawide binaries may not have been formed in the primordial solar system as has been thought. Their work has been published in Nature Astronomy.

“In the outer reaches of the solar system, there exists a population of binary systems so widely separated that it seemed worth looking into whether or not they could even survive 4 billion years without being [completely] separated somehow,” said Hunter M. Campbell of the University of Oklahoma in the US.

It’s hard to tell when you’re catching some rays at the beach, but light packs a punch. Not only does a beam of light carry energy, it can also carry momentum. This includes linear momentum, which is what makes a speeding train hard to stop, and orbital angular momentum, which is what the Earth carries as it revolves around the sun.

In a new paper, scientists seeking better methods for controlling the quantum interactions between light and matter have demonstrated a novel way to use light to give electrons a spinning kick. They reported the results of their experiment, which shows that a light beam can reliably transfer orbital angular momentum to itinerant electrons in graphene, on Nov. 26, 2024, in the journal Nature Photonics.

Having tight control over the way that light and matter interact is an essential requirement for applications like quantum computing or quantum sensing. In particular, scientists have been interested in coaxing electrons to respond to some of the more exotic shapes that light beams can assume.

Astronomers from China and South Korea report the detection of a contact binary system with an extremely low mass ratio of only 0.0356. The newfound system, which received the designation TYC 3801−1529−1, is therefore the lowest mass ratio contact binary discovered to date. The finding was detailed in a paper published November 19 on the preprint server arXiv.

Contact binaries consist of two stars orbiting so closely that they share a common gaseous envelope. The components of such systems often have similar effective temperatures and luminosities, regardless of their respective masses.

The cutoff mass ratio for contact binaries is still a subject of debate. Latest studies suggest that these binaries should have a minimum mass ratio of about 0.038−0.041.

While NASA’s NEOWISE telescope ended its journey through space on Nov. 1, 2024, the team at IPAC, a science center at Caltech, was working on one further gift from the prolific mission.

The final data release from NEOWISE was released to the astronomy community just two weeks later, on Nov. 14, encompassing over 26 million images and nearly 200 billion sources detected by the telescope. And today, IPAC is releasing six new images from the mission’s archival data as a tribute to this landmark project, available here.

NEOWISE was launched as the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) in 2009 and then reactivated in 2013 as NEOWISE, the asteroid-hunting phase of the mission. The infrared space telescope studied the entire night sky and conducted 21 complete sky surveys during more than a decade of operation.

A study that sheds new light on how pulsar signals—the spinning remnants of massive stars—distort as they travel through space, published in The Astrophysical Journal, was led by Dr. Sofia Sheikh, SETI Institute researcher, and performed by a multi-year cohort of undergraduate researchers in the Penn State branch of the Pulsar Search Collaboratory student club.

Maura McLaughlin, Chair, Eberly Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, West Virginia University, created the Pulsar Search Collaboratory to engage high schoolers and undergraduates in pulsar science, and she helped facilitate access to the data used in this study.

Using archival data from the Arecibo Observatory, the student team found patterns that show how pulsar signals change as they move through the interstellar medium (ISM), the gas and dust that fills the space between stars. The team measured scintillation bandwidths for 23 pulsars, including new data for six pulsars not previously studied.

Researchers have discovered a way to recycle the tiny particles used to create supraparticle lasers, a technology that precisely controls light at a very small scale. The breakthrough could help manage these valuable materials in a more sustainable way.

Supraparticle lasers work by trapping light inside a tiny sphere made of special particles called quantum dots, which can absorb, emit, and amplify light very efficiently.

They are made by mixing quantum dots in a solution that helps them stick together in tiny bubbles. However, not all attempts succeed, and even successful lasers degrade over time. This leads to wasted materials, which can be expensive.

Over the past several decades, researchers have been getting better and better at manipulating tiny particles with acoustic waves. Dubbed “acoustic tweezers,” the technology started with the simplistic trapping of particles and has since expanded to include the precise rotation and movement of cells and organisms in three dimensions.

These abilities make the technology well suited to address challenges in biological studies, medical diagnostics and therapeutics through the precise, dexterous, biocompatible manipulation of bioparticles.

In a new paper published in the journal Science Advances, engineers from Duke University demonstrate an entirely new approach to the technology using “ring resonators.” With the ability to carry out tasks with high precision while requiring much lower power inputs, the work could inspire a new generation of these devices.

Radiative heat transfer is one of the most critical energy transfer mechanisms in nature. However, traditional blackbody radiation, due to its inherent characteristics, such as its non-directional, incoherent, broad-spectrum, and unpolarized nature, results in energy exchange between the radiating body and all surrounding objects, significantly limiting heat transfer efficiency and thermal flow control. These limitations hinder its practical application.

A recent study published in Science utilized thermal photonics to achieve cross-band synergistic control of thermal radiation in both angle and spectrum. The researchers then designed a directional emitter with cross-scale symmetry-breaking, angularly asymmetric and spectrally selective thermal emission, achieving daytime subambient radiative cooling on vertical surfaces.

The research team was led by Prof. Wei Li from the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics (CIOMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with Prof. Shanhui Fan’s team from Stanford University and Prof. Andrea Alu’s team from the City University of New York.

INTERPOL arrests 1,006 in Africa, dismantling 134,089 cybercrime networks and saving $193M from online fraud.