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Category: space

In recent years, physicists have been trying to better understand the behavior of individual quantum particles as they move in space. Yet directly imaging these particles with high precision has so far proved challenging, due to the limitations of existing microscopy methods.

Researchers at CNRS and École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, have now developed a new protocol to directly image the evolution of a single-atom wave packet, a delocalized quantum state that determines the probability that an associated atom will be found in a specific location. This imaging technique, introduced in Physical Review Letters, could open exciting possibilities for the precise study of complex quantum systems in continuous space.

“Our group is interested in the study of ultracold atoms, the coldest systems in the universe, just a few billionths of degrees above absolute zero, where matter displays fascinating behaviors,” Tarik Yefsah, senior author of the paper, told Phys.org. “One of these behaviors is the so-called superfluidity, a remarkable state of matter, where particles flow without friction.

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Astronomers have finally traced mysterious radio pulses in the Milky Way.

The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System and is part of the Local Group of galaxies. It is a barred spiral galaxy that contains an estimated 100–400 billion stars and has a diameter between 150,000 and 200,000 light-years. The name “Milky Way” comes from the appearance of the galaxy from Earth as a faint band of light that stretches across the night sky, resembling spilled milk.

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From across the Milky Way galaxy, something has been sending out signals.

Every two hours or so, a pulse of radio waves ripples through space-time, appearing in data going back years. Now a team of astronomers led by Iris de Ruiter of the University of Sydney has identified the source of this mystery signal – and it’s something we’ve never seen before.

Around 1,645 light-years from Earth sits a binary star system, containing a white dwarf and a red dwarf on such a close orbit that each revolution smacks their magnetic fields together, producing a burst of radio waves our telescopes can detect. This source has been named ILT J110160.52+552119.62 (ILT J1101+5521).

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The X-37B is a reusable robotic space plane operated by the US Space Force. It resembles a miniature space shuttle at just under 9 metres long with a 4.5 metre wingspan and is an uncrewed vehicle designed for long-duration missions in low Earth orbit.

The craft launches vertically atop a rocket, lands horizontally like a conventional aircraft and serves as a testbed for new technologies and experiments that can be returned to Earth for analysis.

It’s development was a collaborative effort between NASA, Boeing, and the US Department of Defence. It was originally conceived by NASA in the late 1990s to explore reusable spaceplane technologies but transitioned to the US Air Force in 2004 for military purposes.

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We stand on the brink of a transformative era in space exploration: a shift from government-led to commercial-led activities off-planet. With this shift comes the need to recognize that the United States commercial space industry will play a pivotal role in maintaining the nation’s leadership in low Earth orbit (LEO). And while NASA has long shouldered this responsibility, its commitment to pass the torch, to foster commercial partnerships and support commercial space development, is falling short. The new Trump administration has a unique opportunity to ensure that American leadership is not usurped by our fiercest geopolitical adversary, China. To maintain U.S. leadership, the government must act with urgency to support a smaller number of companies most likely to achieve success in the critical foothold of LEO.

For a quarter of a century, the U.S. has benefited from sustaining a continuous human presence in space on the International Space Station (ISS), a strategy that China is emulating with its Tiangong space station, which has been continuously crewed since 2022. Through the ISS achievement, the U.S. not only advanced scientific understanding but also brought nations together and spurred economic growth through uncontested leadership. However, with the ISS set to retire by the end of this decade, it is imperative to transition from a government-run space station to a robust commercial space framework. This transition is essential to ensuring U.S. presence, enabling discovery, fueling our space economy and safeguarding our strategic priorities in space.

A commercial platform will continue to support the nation’s needs at a much lower cost than the ISS while stimulating a new generation of technologies that will revolutionize our economy and preserve the national asset that is our LEO workforce. Hard-working Americans in this microgravity industry are the lifeblood of what makes America great and will ensure the Chinese never surpass us in space technology.

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Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have characterized the atmosphere of a hot super-Neptune exoplanet designated WASP-166 b. As a result, they found that the atmosphere of this alien world contains water and carbon dioxide. Their findings were reported Dec. 31 on the arXiv preprint server.

WASP-166 b is about seven times larger and 32 times more massive than the Earth. It orbits its every 5.44 days, at a distance of approximately 0.067 AU from it. The planet is relatively hot as its equilibrium temperature is estimated to be 1,270 K. The parameters of WASP-166 make it a representative of the so-called hot Neptune desert—a region of parameter space at high insolation fluxes and intermediate planet radii that is very sparsely populated.

The parent star WASP-166, which is located some 368 light years away, has a spectral type of F9V, and is about 20% larger and more massive than the sun. The star has an effective temperature of 6,050 K, metallicity at a level of 0.19 dex, and its age is estimated to be 2.1 billion years.

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In the San Diego suburb of Carlsbad, a new plant to desalinate seawater is almost ready. For about a billion dollars, it will produce 7 percent of the area’s drinking water, courtesy of the Pacific Ocean. But in these times of record drought, two Texas entrepreneurs are advocating another solution: Instead of pulling fresh water out of the sea, they want to pull it out of the air. The machine they’re developing at Trinity University in San Antonio, called an atmospheric water generator, is still in its pilot phrase. But to hear Moses West tell it, if the climate conditions are right, the AWG has the potential to end drought.

West, who’s testing the machine along with business partner John Vollmer, calls himself “a water farmer.” He explains that there are three potential sources of human drinking water: groundwater, rivers and gas. Thanks to NASA’s GRACE satellite system, which measures the abundance and quality of aquifers, we know that the Earth’s groundwater supply is dwindling — and increasingly contaminated by pesticides and runoff. Rivers, at least near any major metropolitan area, are out of the question as sources for drinking water. That leaves water vapor, which West calls “the purest, cleanest, most abundant, recyclable source of water that exists on the face of the earth.”

The atmospheric water generator was first developed in Spain, another country with perpetual drought problems, but according to West, it performs best in high-heat, high-humidity areas. It can reliably produce between 2,000 and 3,000 gallons of water per day, and with the proper institutional support, West says, “I know how to scale this up to produce a million gallons a day, 30 million gallons a month.”

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Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, have intrigued humans for decades. Now and then someone spots something strange in the sky and believes it to be extra-terrestrial. However, there is a kind of UFO that has only recently been seen in space. These are “UFO galaxies” that are a mystery to humans.

UFO galaxies are big, red and really dusty and can only be seen in infrared light, with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first to spot them in deep space.

This is why they were only discovered recently. They appear similar in size and shape to other galaxies but have never been caught on other telescopes, such as the Hubble. Scientists wanted to figure out more about these galaxies and why they were so red and dusty.

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An international team of astronomers led by scientists from the Netherlands has shown that a white dwarf and a red dwarf orbiting each other every two hours are emitting radio pulses. Thanks to observations with several telescopes, the researchers were able to determine the origin of these pulses with certainty for the first time. Their results are published in Nature Astronomy.

In recent years, thanks to better analysis techniques, researchers have detected pulses that last from seconds to minutes and seem to come from stars in the Milky Way. There have been many hypotheses about what triggers these pulses, but until now there has been no hard evidence. An international study led by Iris de Ruiter of the Netherlands changes this.

De Ruiter, who received her Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in October 2024, is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sydney (Australia). During the last year of her Ph.D., she developed a method to search for radio pulses of seconds to minutes in the LOFAR archive. While improving the method, she discovered a single in the 2015 observations. When she subsequently sifted through more archive data from the same patch of sky, she discovered six more pulses. All the pulses came from a source called ILTJ1101.

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Each is calculated to be just 20 to 30% the mass of Earth and completes one full trip around the star in only a few days.

These findings have caught many people’s attention because they point to greater precision in detecting smaller, more elusive planets.

“It’s a really exciting find – Barnard’s Star is our cosmic neighbor, and yet we know so little about it,” said Ritvik Basant, Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and first author on the study. “It’s signaling a breakthrough with the precision of these new instruments from previous generations.”

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