Category Archives: Phys.org

It’s humanity’s first flight to the moon since 1972.

Utilizing the stellar evolution code named Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA), Chinese astronomers have investigated the evolution of a recently discovered ultra-compact double white dwarf binary system known as ATLAS J1138-5139. Results of this study, published March 20 on the arXiv pre-print server, allowed the researchers to determine the fate of this system.

As soon as Wednesday, NASA is poised to make history—sending the first woman, the first person of color, and the first non-American on a voyage around the moon.

NASA began the countdown Monday for humanity’s first launch to the moon in 53 years.

Planetary surface missions currently operate cautiously. On Mars, communication delays between Earth and rovers (typically between four and 22 minutes), as well as data transfer constraints due to uplink and downlink limitations, force scientists to plan operations in advance. Rovers are designed for energy efficiency and safety, and to move slowly across hazardous terrain.

The astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen are preparing to launch into space on a trajectory that will make them the first humans to travel to the moon in over half a century.

The next U.S. trip to the moon isn’t about planting a flag. It’s about learning how to live and work there. NASA has just reset its Artemis program, marking a clear strategic shift: Space exploration is moving away from a race to achieve milestones and toward a system built on repeated operations, a sustained presence and lunar infrastructure that could become part of the technology networks we rely on here on Earth.

Quantum physicists at ANU have observed atoms entangled in motion. “It’s really weird for us to think that this is how the universe works,” says Dr. Sean Hodgman from the ANU Research School of Physics. “You can read about it in a textbook, but it’s really weird to think that a particle can be in two places at once.”

The striped dog-like marsupial we know as the Tasmanian tiger has long been surrounded by mystery, and the subject of scientific curiosity. Now, newly discovered rock art depicting Tasmanian tigers and Tasmanian devils in northern Australia is providing fresh insights into their cultural importance and when they may have last roamed mainland Australia. A paper on this topic appears in Archaeology in Oceania.

The number of known proteins is infinitely small in comparison to the universe of possible proteins, which could in theory be realized. Yet these known proteins are the only major training ground for future protein design. Understanding how representative these proteins are of the overall potential diversity can therefore help inform strategies for a wide range of applications, including therapeutic, biocatalysis, or biomaterials development.

Earth and the moon may look very different today, but they formed under similar conditions in space. In fact, a dominant hypothesis says that the early Earth was hit by a Mars-sized object, and it was this giant impact that spun off material to form the moon. But unlike Earth, the moon lacks plate tectonics and an atmosphere capable of reshaping its surface and recycling elements such as oxygen over billions of years.

Planetary scientists have long debated where the material that formed Earth comes from. Despite its location in the inner solar system, they consider it likely that 6–40% of this material must have come from the outer solar system, i.e., beyond Jupiter. For a long time, material from the outer solar system was considered necessary to bring volatile components such as water to Earth. Accordingly, there must also have been an exchange of material between the outer and inner solar systems during the formation of Earth. But is that really true?

Astronomers have discovered an exceptionally rare radio galaxy that has three distinct pairs of radio lobes. This system falls into a subpopulation of radio galaxies known as “triple-double” radio galaxies (TDRGs). Located nearly 7.5 billion light-years away, this unique system, cataloged as J022248−060934, is only the seventh known example of its kind. A paper outlining this discovery was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on February 25.

The people who toiled night and day to put astronauts on the moon during Apollo are thrilled that NASA is finally going back. They just wish these Artemis moonshots had happened sooner while more of Apollo’s workforce was still alive.

NASA’s Apollo moonshots are a tough act to follow, even after all this time.

California’s Bay Area may be a culinary hot spot for people, but food options for fish in the San Francisco Estuary have been limited and declining in recent decades. A new study from the University of California, Davis, shows there is a part of the estuary that is teeming with fish food—the managed wetlands of Suisun Marsh.

Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered an extrasolar planet orbiting TOI-4616—a nearby M-dwarf star. The newfound alien world, which received designation TOI-4616 b, is slightly larger than Earth. The finding was reported in a research paper published March 11 on the arXiv pre-print server.

More than 10,000 Starlink satellites currently orbit Earth. We see them crawling across dark skies, no matter how remote our location, and streaking through images from research telescopes.

Waterloo scientists have developed a new way to understand how the universe began, and it could change what we know about the Big Bang and the earliest moments of cosmic history. Their work suggests that the universe’s rapid early expansion could have arisen naturally from a deeper, more complete theory of quantum gravity. The paper, “Ultraviolet completion of the Big Bang in quadratic gravity,” appears in Physical Review Letters.

When an invisible entity making up 85% of the universe’s mass stumps the greatest scientific minds of our time, awe is an understandable response.