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Category: physics

Hubble captures rare collision in nearby planetary system

In an unprecedented celestial event, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) captured the dramatic aftermath of colliding space rocks within a nearby planetary system.

When astronomers initially spotted a bright object in the sky, they assumed it was a dust-covered exoplanet, reflecting starlight. But when the “exoplanet” disappeared and a new bright object appeared, the international team of astrophysicists—including Northwestern University’s Jason Wang—realized these were not planets at all. Instead, they were the illuminated remains of a cosmic fender bender.

Two distinct, violent collisions generated two luminous clouds of debris in the same planetary system. The discovery offers a unique real-time glimpse into the mechanisms of planet formation and the composition of materials that coalesce to form new worlds.

Hybrid excitons: Combining the best of both worlds

Faster, more efficient, and more versatile—these are the expectations for the technology that will produce our energy and handle information in the future. But how can these expectations be met? A major breakthrough in physics has now been made by an international team of researchers from the Universities of Göttingen, Marburg, the Berlin Humboldt in Germany, and Graz in Austria.

The scientists combined two highly promising types of material—organic semiconductors and two-dimensional semiconductors—and studied their combined response to light using photoelectron spectroscopy and many-body perturbation theory.

This enabled them to observe and describe fundamental microscopic processes, such as energy transfer, at the 2D-organic interface with ultrafast time resolution, meaning one quadrillionth of a second. The combination of these properties holds promise for developing new technology such as the next generation of solar cells. The results are published in Nature Physics.

A 3D-printed Christmas tree made entirely of ice

A team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam’s Institute of Physics has 3D-printed a Christmas tree made entirely of ice. Researchers Menno Demmenie, Stefan Kooij and Daniel Bonn used no freezing technology or refrigeration equipment—just water and a vacuum. In time-lapse videos, you can see how the Christmas tree is printed and how it melts again when the vacuum pump is turned off. The work is published on the arXiv preprint server.

The secret of the tree lies in so-called evaporative cooling. This is the same principle mammals use to regulate their body temperature.

In a low-pressure vacuum chamber, water evaporates rapidly at room temperature. As each water molecule evaporates, it takes with it a small amount of heat, causing the remaining water to become increasingly colder, eventually cooling to below 0°C. At that point, the water is still liquid, but supercooled. As soon as the ultra-thin stream (about as thin as a human hair: 16 micrometers) hits the already formed layer of ice, it freezes instantly.

The Psychedelic Scientist

The reality is Deamer and the psychedelics-inspired Damer may very well be right about the origin of life on Earth. They may never win over scientists like Nick Lane, an evolutionary biochemist at University College London, who argues life needed the singular mix of physics and chemistry in hydrothermal ocean vents to originate. As recently as 2024, Lane and chemist Joana C. Xavier of Imperial College London explained in Nature that the wet and dry cycles of hot springs, key to Deamer’s and Damer’s hypothesis, could not lead to “the network of hundreds of reactions that keeps all cells alive.”

However, biologist Jack Szostak, a Nobel laureate, whose lab at the University of Chicago focuses on the origin of life, told me it’s likely that life did begin in volcanically active regions or impact craters on Earth’s surface. “Deep sea hydrothermal vents are not a plausible site for the origin of life,” he said. “Geothermally active areas,” he added, “are attractive because they do provide the environmental fluctuations needed to drive the primordial cell cycle.” Synthetic biologist Kate Adamala, from the University of Minnesota, who builds artificial protocells to probe how life might have first taken shape, agreed. “I’m on Team Dave and Bruce,” she said.

Presented with either criticism or praise of his origin-of-life theory, Damer remained as sanguine as ever. “You’re never going to have a complete understanding of the origin of life on the early Earth, because we just can’t reproduce the exact conditions,” he said. Of course, he believed the hot springs hypothesis would stand the test of time.

Surprising optics breakthrough could transform our view of the Universe

FROSTI revolutionizes mirror control in gravitational-wave detectors, opening the door to a far deeper view of the cosmos. FROSTI is a new adaptive optics system that precisely corrects distortions in LIGO’s mirrors caused by extreme laser power. By using custom thermal patterns, it preserves mirror shape without introducing noise, allowing detectors to operate at higher sensitivities. This leap enables future observatories like Cosmic Explorer to see deeper into the cosmos. The technology lays the groundwork for vastly expanding gravitational-wave astronomy.

Gravitational-wave detectors may soon get a major performance boost, thanks to a new instrumentation advance led by physicist Jonathan Richardson of the University of California, Riverside. In a paper published in the journal Optica, Richardson and his colleagues describe FROSTI, a full-scale prototype that successfully controls laser wavefronts at extremely high power inside the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO.

LIGO is an observatory that measures gravitational waves — tiny ripples in spacetime created by massive accelerating objects such as colliding black holes. It was the first facility to directly detect these waves, providing strong support for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Using two 4-km-long laser interferometers located in Washington and Louisiana, LIGO senses incredibly small disturbances, giving scientists a new way to study black holes, cosmology, and matter under extreme conditions.

AI learns to build simple equations for complex systems

A research team at Duke University has developed a new AI framework that can uncover simple, understandable rules that govern some of the most complex dynamics found in nature and technology.

The AI system works much like how history’s great “dynamicists”—those who study systems that change over time—discovered many laws of physics that govern such systems’ behaviors. Similar to how Newton, the first dynamicist, derived the equations that connect force and movement, the AI takes data about how complex systems evolve over time and generates equations that accurately describe them.

The AI, however, can go even further than human minds, untangling complicated nonlinear systems with hundreds, if not thousands, of variables into simpler rules with fewer dimensions.

Possible ‘superkilonova’ exploded not once but twice

When the most massive stars reach the ends of their lives, they blow up in spectacular supernova explosions, which seed the universe with heavy elements such as carbon and iron. Another type of explosion—the kilonova—occurs when a pair of dense dead stars, called neutron stars, smash together, forging even heavier elements such as gold and uranium. Such heavy elements are among the basic building blocks of stars and planets.

So far, only one kilonova has been unambiguously confirmed to date, a historic event known as GW170817, which took place in 2017. In that case, two neutron stars smashed together, sending ripples in space-time, known as gravitational waves, as well as light waves across the cosmos.

The cosmic blast was detected in gravitational waves by the National Science Foundation’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and its European partner, the Virgo gravitational-wave detector, and in light waves by dozens of ground-based and space telescopes around the world.

Consciousness May Be a Fundamental Force of the Universe, Not a Byproduct

You’ve probably grown up accepting that your thoughts, feelings, and inner awareness all emerge from the firing of neurons in your brain. It’s what science has taught us for decades. Your consciousness is simply what happens when billions of brain cells communicate. Simple enough, right?

What if you’ve been looking at this backwards the whole time? What if the entire universe has been trying to tell you something fundamentally different about the nature of reality itself?

A materials science professor from Uppsala University recently published a framework that proposes an entirely new theory of the origin of the universe. Here’s where things get interesting. This framework presents consciousness not as a byproduct of brain activity, but as a fundamental field underlying everything we experience, including matter, space, time, and life itself.

AI helps solve decades-old maze in frustrated magnet physics

The study, conducted by Brookhaven theoretical physicist Weiguo Yin and described in a recent paper published in Physical Review B, is the first paper emerging from the “AI Jam Session” earlier this year, a first-of-its-kind event hosted by DOE and held in cooperation with OpenAI to push the limits of general-purpose large language models applied to science research. The event brought together approximately 1,600 scientists across nine host locations within the DOE national laboratory complex. At Brookhaven, more than 120 scientists challenged and evaluated the capabilities of OpenAI’s latest step-based logical reasoning AImodel built for complex problem solving.

Yin’s AI study focused on a class of advanced materials known as frustrated magnets. In these systems, the electron spins—the tiny magnetic moments carried by each electron—cannot settle on an orientation because competing interactions pull them in different directions. These materials have unique and fascinating properties that could translate to novel applications in the energy and information technology industries.

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