Category Archives: Phys.org

Physicists in China have simulated the effect of “false vacuum decay”: a phenomenon believed to play out constantly in the seemingly empty expanses of space, and which one theory even suggests could bring an abrupt end to the entire universe. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, Yu-Xin Chao and colleagues at Tsinghua University, Beijing, mimicked the effect using a simple tabletop experiment.

British scientists have launched a crew of microscopic worms to the International Space Station in a pioneering experiment that could help unlock the secrets of long-duration space travel—and support ambitions to reach the moon and beyond.

The successful Artemis II trip around the moon was a historic achievement—the first crewed lunar fly-by in more than 50 years, and the greatest distance yet traveled by humans from our “pale blue dot.”

Light, as we usually conceive of it, is defined by the astonishing velocity at which it moves from one point to another. For example, in just one second, light can travel most of the distance between Earth and the moon. This property is what makes light useful for communication, which we expect to happen at lightning speed in the modern age.

Never-before-glimpsed views of the moon’s far side. Check. Total solar eclipse gracing the lunar scene. Check. New distance record for humanity. Check.

As NASA’s Artemis II mission completed its lunar flyby, the astronauts sent back a stunning image of the colorful Earth setting behind the moon. This breathtaking photo, called Earthset, draws inevitable comparisons with the original Earthrise photo from the Apollo 8 flight in 1968.

Scientists in Japan have developed a high-resolution X-ray telescope sharp enough to distinguish an object just 3.5 mm wide from one kilometer away, by combining precision mirror-making technology with space astronomy. To test its performance, they built a first-of-its-kind evaluation system, capable of simulating starlight on the ground to measure the telescope’s sharpness before its launch on the US-Japan FOXSI sounding rocket mission. The findings, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, represent a landmark achievement for Japanese X-ray astronomy and pave the way for high-resolution X-ray observations on future smaller satellites.

For decades, astronomers were only able to study the universe’s very first stars using theoretical models. Now, observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed what may be the most compelling evidence to date for these ancient “Population III” stars, finding them clustered around a small companion object that formed just 400 million years after the Big Bang.

We’ve spent decades scratching the surface of Mars trying to uncover life there. But we’ve been searching a barren wasteland bombarded by radiation and bathed in toxic perchlorates. The entire time, it’s likely that it’s been too hostile to harbor extant life. So if we want a better shot at finding currently living life on Mars, we need to go underground. That is exactly the purpose of Orpheus, a proposed Mars vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) hopper mission put forth in a paper presented by Connor Bunn and Pascal Lee of the SETI Institute at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC).

NASA’s Artemis II mission sent four astronauts—three Americans and one Canadian—on the first lunar flyby in more than 50 years.

With Artemis II successfully completing its historic lunar mission on Friday, NASA is banking on billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for the next step: landing astronauts on the moon.

When NASA flight director Zebulon Scoville was working a shift during the uncrewed Artemis I test flight, he realized the US space agency wasn’t consistently livestreaming the spacecraft’s journey to Earth.

Artemis II’s astronauts closed out humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century with a Pacific splashdown on Friday, blazing new records near the moon with grace and joy.

Elements essential to life, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, were “delivered” to Earth and the moon during the early stages of the solar system via asteroids and comets impacting their surfaces. These exogenous materials may have provided the chemical building blocks necessary for the origin and early evolution of life on Earth. But extensive geological activity and biological processes on Earth have largely erased the direct records of these early inputs on our planet.

Observations conducted with the Subaru Telescope and its first-generation wide-field camera, Suprime-Cam, have revealed new insights into the relationship between the color and size of Jupiter Trojan asteroids.

Thirty-four years after Cornell University scientists first conceived it, the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) now rises above the Atacama Desert, near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile. FYST will help answer some of the most important questions in astronomy, including how the universe works, the nature of dark energy and dark matter, how galaxies form and evolve and what happened in those mysterious first moments after the Big Bang.

Researchers from the Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy have flipped a long-held assumption in optics, showing that deliberately introducing controlled disorder into ultra-thin optical devices can dramatically increase their power and versatility, without making them bigger or more complex.

As the Orion spacecraft hurtles home, friction caused by reentry into Earth’s atmosphere will drastically decrease its speed from a potential 25,000 miles per hour (40,000 kilometers per hour).

Most polychaete species spend their lives in burrows in the seabed. However, adult individuals of two species, Alitta succinea and Platynereis dumerilii, leave their burrows to spawn during warm summer nights around the full moon.

Their dramatic grand finale fast approaching, Artemis II’s astronauts aimed for a splashdown in the Pacific on Friday to close out humanity’s first voyage to the moon in more than half a century.