On March 15, 2024, near the peak of the current solar cycle, the sun produced a solar flare and an accompanying coronal mass ejection (CME), a massive explosion of gas and magnetic energy that carries with it large amounts of solar energetic particles. This solar activity led to stunning auroras across the solar system, including at Mars, where NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover made history by detecting them for the first time from the surface of another planet.
“This exciting discovery opens up new possibilities for auroral research and confirms that auroras could be visible to future astronauts on Mars’ surface,” said Elise Knutsen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo in Norway and lead author of the Science Advancesstudy, which reported the detection.
A study by Dartmouth researchers proposes a new theory about the origin of dark matter, the mysterious and invisible substance thought to give the universe its shape and structure. They say the hypothetical force shaping the universe sprang from particles that rapidly condensed, like steam into water.
The researchers report in Physical Review Letters that dark matter could have formed in the early life of the universe from the collision of high-energy massless particles that lost their zip and took on an incredible amount of mass immediately after pairing up, according to their mathematical models.
Hypothetical dark matter is believed to exist based on observed gravitational effects that cannot be explained by visible matter. Scientists estimate that 85% of the universe’s total mass is dark matter.
A surprising effect was discovered through a collaborative study by researchers from TU Wien and institutions in Croatia, France, Poland, Singapore, Switzerland, and the US during the investigation of a special material: the atoms are arranged in a completely disordered manner but produce magnetic order.
The study is published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
Superconductivity is one of the central topics in modern materials science: certain materials can conduct electrical current without any resistance—at least below a certain temperature. However, how to produce materials that still exhibit this property at higher temperatures remains an unsolved problem.
Researchers at National Taiwan University have developed a new type of spintronic device that mimics how synapses work in the brain—offering a path to more energy-efficient and accurate artificial intelligence systems.
In a study published in Advanced Science, the team introduced three novel memory device designs, all controlled purely by electric current and without any need for an external magnetic field.
Among the devices, the one based on “tilted anisotropy” stood out. This optimized structure was able to achieve 11 stable memory states with highly consistent switching behavior.
A puzzling discovery in NGC 1068 shows a flood of neutrinos but weak gamma rays. Scientists now suspect helium atoms exploding near a black hole are the source, opening a whole new view of how particles behave in deep space.
We know that all the other forces governed by quantum mechanics are transmitted by indivisible particles: photons for the electromagnetic force, which governs light and the basic chemistry of matter; gluons for the strong force, which sticks together protons and neutrons inside atoms; and W and Z bosons for the weak force, which enables certain particles to radioactively decay. If gravity has the same underlying theory as these forces, it should also be carried by its own particle: a graviton. Now researchers, including Claudia Du Rham at Imperial in London, are in the hunt for these mysterious and vanishingly weak particles. – Learn more ➤ https://www.newscientist.com/article/.… ➤ https://bit.ly/NSYTSUBS Get more from New Scientist: Official website: https://bit.ly/NSYTHP Facebook: https://bit.ly/NSYTFB Twitter: https://bit.ly/NSYTTW Instagram: https://bit.ly/NSYTINSTA LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/NSYTLIN About New Scientist: New Scientist was founded in 1956 for “all those interested in scientific discovery and its social consequences”. Today our website, videos, newsletters, app, podcast and print magazine cover the world’s most important, exciting and entertaining science news as well as asking the big-picture questions about life, the universe, and what it means to be human. New Scientist https://www.newscientist.com/
About New Scientist: New Scientist was founded in 1956 for “all those interested in scientific discovery and its social consequences”. Today our website, videos, newsletters, app, podcast and print magazine cover the world’s most important, exciting and entertaining science news as well as asking the big-picture questions about life, the universe, and what it means to be human.
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Correction to the screen text at 05:04: It’s in the range of microgram. What I say is correct, the text isn’t. Sorry about that.
This video comes with a quiz which you can take here: https://quizwithit.com/start_thequiz/.… are one of the most sought-after particles in physics. They could help physicists combine quantum physics with gravity to create a theory of “quantum gravity.” We thought until recently they were for all practical purposes impossible to detect, but now scientists are coming up with some ideas for how graviton-detecting experiments could work for real. Let’s take a look. 🤓 Check out my new quiz app ➜ http://quizwithit.com/ 💌 Support me on Donorbox ➜ https://donorbox.org/swtg 📝 Transcripts and written news on Substack ➜ https://sciencewtg.substack.com/ 👉 Transcript with links to references on Patreon ➜ / sabine 📩 Free weekly science newsletter ➜ https://sabinehossenfelder.com/newsle… 👂 Audio only podcast ➜ https://open.spotify.com/show/0MkNfXl… 🔗 Join this channel to get access to perks ➜ / @sabinehossenfelder 🖼️ On instagram ➜ / sciencewtg #science #sciencenews #physics #gravity.
Gravitons are one of the most sought-after particles in physics. They could help physicists combine quantum physics with gravity to create a theory of \.
For a while now, there has been a problematic mystery at the heart of the standard cosmological model. Although all observations support the expanding Universe model, observations of the early period of the cosmos give a lower rate of acceleration than more local observations. We call it the Hubble tension problem, and we have no idea how to solve it. Naturally, there have been several proposed ideas: what if general relativity is wrong; what if dark matter doesn’t exist; what if the rate of time isn’t uniform; heck, what if the entire Universe rotates. So, let’s add a new idea to the pile: what if dark matter evolves?
While there have been several models proposing an evolving dark energy, the idea of evolving dark matter hasn’t been widely considered. The reason for this is twofold. First, the observations we have of dark matter are excellent. They point to the presence of some kind of material that doesn’t interact strongly with light. The only major weak point is that we haven’t observed dark matter particles directly. Second, the vast majority of folk opposed to dark matter focus on eliminating it altogether through things like modified gravity. They figure dark matter is fundamentally wrong, not something to be tweaked. That makes this new idea rather interesting.
In this work, the authors look at both evolving dark energy and evolving dark matter and argue that the latter is a much better fit to observational data. The first thing they note is that the two models are somewhat related. Since the evolution of the cosmos depends in part on the ratio of energy density to matter density, a model with constant dark matter and evolving dark energy will always appear similar to a model with evolving dark matter and constant dark energy.
Researchers at the University of Turku in Finland have developed a simple method to explore a complex area of quantum science. The discovery makes research in this field cheaper and more accessible, which could significantly impact the development of future laser, quantum and high-tech display technologies.
A team of researchers developed a new method for fabricating small structures known as optical microcavities. These structures allow scientists to study how light interacts with matter in a very precise process that can lead to the creation of novel quantum states called polaritons. Polaritons are unusual hybrid particles made from light and matter.
The results have been published in the journal Advanced Optical Materials.
Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other.
But our modern knowledge tells us the basic difference between an atom of lead and an atom of gold: the lead atom contains exactly three more protons. So can we create a gold atom by simply pulling three protons out of a lead atom?
