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Physics clues to substrate of mind.

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The Big Bang theory is not threatened, but astrophysicists need to explain why these supermassive black holes exist.

Can planets form under extreme conditions, such as high levels of ultraviolet radiation? This is something a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters hopes to find out as a team of international researchers used data obtained from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as part of the eXtreme Ultraviolet Environments (XUE) JWST program to study the formation and evolution of young planetary systems. This particular study, known as XUE 1, focuses on the star cluster Pismis 24, with the team identifying some key ingredients for life as we know it.

Artist rendition of a protoplanetary disk where planets are forming around a young star. (Credit: ESO/L. Calçada)

“We find that the inner disk around XUE 1 is remarkably similar to those in nearby star-forming regions,” said Dr. Rens Waters, who is a professor of astrophysics at Radboud University in the Netherlands and a co-author on the study. “We’ve detected water and other molecules like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrogen cyanide, and acetylene. However, the emission found was weaker than some models predicted. This might imply a small outer disk radius.”

With a hydrogen production rate of 139 millimoles per hour and per gram of catalyst, the material holds the world record for green hydrogen production with sunlight.

Scharfsinn86/iStock.

Professor Emiliano Cortés, a leading figure in experimental physics and energy conversion at LMU, and Dr. Matías Herrán, a postdoc researcher at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, delved into the intricate world of nanotechnology to develop high-performance nanostructures that could revolutionize solar energy utilization.

Continue reading “New research links world record holding material to hydrogen generation” »

Interactions between intense laser pulses and plasma mirrors have been the focus of several recent physics studies due to the interesting effects they produce. Experiments have revealed that these interactions can generate a non-linear physical process known as high-order harmonics, characterized by the emission of extreme ultraviolet radiation (XUV) and brief flashes of laser light (i.e., attosecond pulses).

Researchers at The Extreme Light Infrastructure ERIC in Czechia and Osaka University in Japan recently uncovered a surprising transition that takes place during interactions between intense laser pulses and plasma mirrors. This transition, marked by an anomalous emission of coherent XUV radiation, was outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters.

“Relativistic oscillating mirrors are a fascinating concept with great potential for intense attosecond pulse and bright XUV generation,” Marcel Lamač, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org.

Published on Monday, Nov. 27, in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement, the catalog serves as a collaborative effort involving 170 scientists globally.

In a groundbreaking discovery, researchers have identified evidence of long-sought vibrations resulting from the largest black-hole merger ever detected.

Researchers find massive merger’s signature aftershocks hidden in 2019 data from LIGO and Virgo detectors.

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Dark, mysterious and consuming everything around them, black holes will rip apart anything that passes their event horizons. But could there be more? What would happen if you fell into one of those monstrosities? How could you possibly travel through the black hole itself? And if you emerged on the other side, where would you end up?

Continue reading “What If You Traveled Through a Black Hole?” »

A ground-breaking new discovery by University of Leeds scientists could transform the way astronomers understand some of the biggest and most common stars in the Universe.

Research by PhD student Jonathan Dodd and Professor René Oudmaijer, from the University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, points to intriguing new evidence that massive Be stars — until now mainly thought to exist in double stars — could in fact be “triples.”

The remarkable discovery could revolutionise our understanding of the objects — a subset of B stars — which are considered an important “test bed” for developing theories on how stars evolve more generally.