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An international team of astronomers using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has detected a rocky planet, about half the mass of Earth, in an extraordinarily short 7.7-hour orbit around its parent star.

It’s a reminder that the science of extrasolar planet hunting seems to enter bizarro land with each new discovery. Planetary scientists still haven’t figured out how our own tiny Mercury — which orbits our Sun once every 88 days — actually formed and evolved. So, this iron-rich ultrashort-period (USP) planet, dubbed GJ 367b should really boggle their minds.

It’s completely rocky, unlike most previously detected gaseous hot Jupiters on extremely short stellar orbits. As a result, the tiny planet is estimated to have a surface with temperatures of 1,500 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt iron; hardly an Earth 2.0.

Continue reading “New sub-Jupiter-mass exoplanet detected by astronomers” »

The model describing a material where order doesn’t disappear as heat is applied also has implications for our understanding of the early universe.

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The sun was once surrounded by rings of gas and dust similar to those orbiting Saturn, a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy reveals.

These rings played a vital role in the formation of our solar system and in the size and habitability of Earth.

The early sun’s dust and gas rings may have stopped our planet from becoming a “super-Earth,” according to the Rice University astrophysicists behind the new paper. “In the solar system, something happened to prevent the Earth from growing to become a much larger type of terrestrial planet called a super-Earth,” Rice University astrophysicist André Izidoro, said in a press statement.

Supernovae and black holes, although they surprise scientists, are gradually being studied and recorded. Scientists are much more concerned with strange places in the Universe, which are difficult to explain by the laws of physics and nature we know. The Bootes Void is one such place. It is not considered to be emptiness by chance – there is absolutely nothing in it. Astronomers for a long time could not believe their own eyes, because in a colossal area of 300 million light years there was not a single galaxy or star. Solid blackness extends over unimaginable distances. Like anomalien.com on Facebook…

Anhui research facility expected to provide plasma physics insights crucial to setting up industrial-size reactors to generate clean energy.

JWST operating temperature is less than 50 degrees above absolute zero (−223° C or-370° F) and will be the largest telescope ever placed at that cold temperature (50 Kelvin).

Webb will be able to see what the universe looked like around a quarter of a billion years (possibly back to 100 million years) after the #BigBang, when the first stars and galaxies started to form. JWST will change our view of the cosmos by taking Baby Pictures of #Universe, looking back to big bang.

#JWST is going to be like “Magic spectacles” that allow you to see things that you can’t normally see.
which is the pictures of the infant universe.

Continue reading “Keeping an #infrared telescope at very cold operating temperatures isn’t an option, it’s an absolute necessity” »

About a decade ago, MIT researchers discovered a technique that speeds physics modeling by 1000X. They spun this out into a new company, called Akselos, which has been helping enterprises to weave the tech into various kinds of digital twins used to improve shipping, refining, and wind power generation.

A digital twin is a virtual representation of an object or system that spans its lifecycle, is updated from real-time data, and uses simulation, machine learning, and reasoning to help decision-making. Connected sensors on the physical asset collect data that can be mapped onto the virtual model.

The specific innovation improves the performance of finite element analysis (FEA) algorithms which underpin most types of physics simulations. Akselos experience over the last decade can help executives explore the implications of the million-fold improvements in physics simulation that Nvidia is now demonstrating thanks to improvement in hardware, scalability, and new algorithms.

Many of these systems are kept out of equilibrium because individual constituents have their own power source — ATP for cells, gas for cars. But all these extra energy sources and mismatched reactions make for a complex dynamical system beyond the reach of statistical mechanics. How can we analyze phases in such ever-changing systems?

Vitelli and his colleagues see an answer in mathematical objects called exceptional points. Generally, an exceptional point in a system is a singularity, a spot where two or more characteristic properties become indistinguishable and mathematically collapse into one. At an exceptional point, the mathematical behavior of a system differs dramatically from its behavior at nearby points, and exceptional points often describe curious phenomena in systems — like lasers — in which energy is gained and lost continuously.

Now the team has found that these exceptional points also control phase transitions in nonreciprocal systems. Exceptional points aren’t new; physicists and mathematicians have studied them for decades in a variety of settings. But they’ve never been associated so generally with this type of phase transition. “That’s what no one has thought about before, using these in the context of nonequilibrium systems,” said the physicist Cynthia Reichhardt of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “So you can bring all the machinery that we already have about exceptional points to study these systems.”

Just seven months after it announced a milestone record for plasma fusion, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has absolutely smashed it.

Their ‘artificial Sun’ tokomak reactor is has maintained a roiling loop of plasma superheated to 120 million degrees Celsius (216 million degrees Fahrenheit) for a gobsmacking 1,056 seconds, the Institute of Plasma Physics reports.

This also beats the previous record for plasma confinement of 390 seconds, set by the Tore Supra tokamak in France in 2003.