“We are expecting that when Rubin obtains very deep imaging of galaxies, we will see them surrounded by a faint network of stellar streams,” Romanowsky concluded. “The discovery of the stream shows the excellent characteristics of Rubin for making such observations, and points to a rich future of similar discoveries as vast areas of the sky are mapped out.”
The team’s research is available on the paper repository site arXiv.
This is a ~1 hour 12 minute talk titled “Computational Symbiogenesis” by Blaise Agüera y Arcas (https://research.google/people/106776/?&type=google), given for our symposium on the Platonic Space (https://thoughtforms.life/symposium-on-the-platonic-space/).
Some 200 light years from Earth, the core of a dead star is circling a larger star in a macabre cosmic dance. The dead star is a type of white dwarf that exerts a powerful magnetic field as it pulls material from the larger star into a swirling, accreting disk. The spiraling pair is what’s known as an “intermediate polar” — a type of star system that gives off a complex pattern of intense radiation, including X-rays, as gas from the larger star falls onto the other one.
Now, MIT astronomers have used an X-ray telescope in space to identify key features in the system’s innermost region — an extremely energetic environment that has been inaccessible to most telescopes until now. In an open-access study published in the Astrophysical Journal, the team reports using NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) to observe the intermediate polar, known as EX Hydrae.
The team found a surprisingly high degree of X-ray polarization, which describes the direction of an X-ray wave’s electric field, as well as an unexpected direction of polarization in the X-rays coming from EX Hydrae. From these measurements, the researchers traced the X-rays back to their source in the system’s innermost region, close to the surface of the white dwarf.
A vast region of our solar system, called the Kuiper belt, stretches from the orbit of Neptune out to 50 or so astronomical units (AU), where an AU is the distance between Earth and the sun. This region consists mostly of icy objects and small rocky bodies, like Pluto. Scientists believe Kuiper belt objects (KPOs) are remnants left over from the formation of the solar system.
Now, a new preprint paper on arXiv describes a newly identified region that appears to be completely distinct from other parts of the Kuiper belt—but some uncertainty remains.
Learn More About Anydesk: https://anydesk.com/spacetime.
Did God have any choice in creating the world? So asked Albert Einstein. He was being poetic. What he really meant, was whether the universe could have been any other way. Could it have had different laws of physics, driven by different fundamental constants. Or is this one vast and complex universe the inevitable result of an inevitable and unique underlying principle, perhaps expressible as a supremely elegant Theory of Everything. It certainly seems that Einstein thought this should be the case … that God had no choice in whether or how to create the world. It seems like a pretty arm-chair philosophical and perhaps unanswerable question, but the modern “problem” of naturalness may lead to an answer.
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If confirmed, the structure may be primordial.
The inside of giant planets can reach pressures more than one million times the Earth’s atmosphere. As a result of that intense pressure, materials can adopt unexpected structures and properties. Understanding matter in this regime requires experiments that push the limits of physics in the laboratory.
In a recent paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and their collaborators conducted such experiments with gold, achieving the highest-pressure structural measurement ever made for the material. The results, which show gold switching structure at 10 million times the Earth’s atmospheric pressure, are essential for planetary modeling and fusion science.
“These experiments uncover the atomic rearrangements that occur at some of the most extreme pressures achievable in laboratory experiments,” said LLNL scientist and author Amy Coleman.