https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Scientists digging through data collected by the Cassini spacecraft have found new complex organic molecules spewing from Saturn's moon Enceladus. This is a clear sign that complex chemical reactions are taking place within its underground ocean. Some of these reactions could be part of chains that lead to even more complex, potentially biologically relevant molecules. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-cassini-complex-chemistry-enceladus-ocean.html Astrobiology Wed, 01 Oct 2025 05:00:02 EDT news678441061 In the 17th century, astronomers Christiaan Huygens and Giovanni Cassini trained their telescopes on Saturn and uncovered a startling truth: the planet's luminous bands were not solid appendages, but vast, separate rings composed of countless nested arcs. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-simulations-saturn-moon-enceladus-ice.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 30 Sep 2025 15:52:04 EDT news678466322 A new approach to manufacturing multicolor lenses could inspire a new generation of tiny, cheap, and powerful optics for portable devices such as phones and drones. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-tiny-metamaterial-lenses-imaging-smartphones.html Optics & Photonics Tue, 09 Sep 2025 11:20:07 EDT news676635601 The puzzling behavior of Titan's atmosphere has been revealed by researchers at the University of Bristol for the first time. By analyzing data from the Cassini-Huygens mission, a joint venture between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Italian Space Agency, the team have shown that the thick, hazy atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon doesn't spin in line with its surface, but instead wobbles like a gyroscope, shifting with the seasons. https://phys.org/news/2025-05-titan-mysterious-atmosphere-gyroscope.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 22 May 2025 10:12:03 EDT news667127521 Southwest Research Institute partnered with the Carnegie Institution for Science to perform laboratory experiments to better understand how Saturn's moon Titan can maintain its unique nitrogen-rich atmosphere. Titan is the second largest moon in our solar system and the only one that has a significant atmosphere. https://phys.org/news/2025-01-corroborate-theory-titan-atmosphere.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 27 Jan 2025 12:52:02 EST news657204718 Researchers at TU Delft have discovered that E. coli bacteria can synchronize their movements, creating order in seemingly random biological systems. By trapping individual bacteria in micro-engineered circular cavities and coupling these cavities through narrow channels, the team observed coordinated bacterial motion. Their findings, which have potential applications in engineering controllable biological oscillator networks, were recently published in Small. https://phys.org/news/2024-12-tiny-dancers-scientists-synchronize-bacterial.html Bio & Medicine Tue, 03 Dec 2024 16:41:18 EST news652466465 Reservoir computing (RC) has a few benefits over other artificial neural networks, including the reservoir that gives this technique its name. The reservoir functions mainly to nonlinearly transform input data more quickly and efficiently. Spin waves, propagating wave-like disturbances arising from magnetic interactions, can traverse through a material. These excitations are driven by the spin of electrons. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-reservoir-chips-edge.html Condensed Matter Tue, 15 Oct 2024 12:42:11 EDT news648214928 A new study of radar experiment data from the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn has yielded fresh insights related to the makeup and activity of the liquid hydrocarbon seas near the north pole of Titan, the largest of Saturn's 146 known moons. https://phys.org/news/2024-07-analysis-cassini-yields-insights-titan.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 16 Jul 2024 11:00:01 EDT news640337101 A study led by Western astrobiologist Catherine Neish shows the subsurface ocean of Titan—the largest moon of Saturn—is most likely a non-habitable environment, meaning any hope of finding life in the icy world is dead in the water. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-saturn-largest-moon-uninhabitable.html Astrobiology Wed, 14 Feb 2024 16:59:40 EST news627152375 Titan's "magic islands" are likely floating chunks of porous, frozen organic solids, a new study finds, pivoting from previous work suggesting they were gas bubbles. The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters. https://phys.org/news/2024-01-titan-magic-islands-honeycombed-hydrocarbon.html Planetary Sciences Fri, 05 Jan 2024 10:08:14 EST news623671688 A team of Earth and planetary scientists from the Southwest Research Institute, Yale University, Université Paris-Saclay, Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea and Sorbonne Université has created a 3D model to show the likely impact of methane lakes on local weather on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. They have published a paper on the arXiv preprint server describing the factors that went into their model and comparing it with 2D models. https://phys.org/news/2023-10-3d-methane-lake-impact-local.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 04 Oct 2023 10:20:01 EDT news615633403 Since the 17th century, when Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens first debated the nature of light, scientists have been puzzling over whether light is best viewed as a wave or a particle—or perhaps, at the quantum level, even both at once. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have revealed a new connection between the two perspectives, using a 350-year-old mechanical theorem—ordinarily used to describe the movement of large, physical objects like pendulums and planets—to explain some of the most complex behaviors of light waves. https://phys.org/news/2023-08-physicists-year-old-theorem-reveal-properties.html Optics & Photonics Mon, 21 Aug 2023 17:14:03 EDT news611856841 In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers from the Paul Drude Institute in Berlin, Germany, and the Instituto Balseiro, Bariloche, Argentina, demonstrated that light emitters with different resonance frequencies can asynchronously self-lock their relative energies by exchanging mechanical energy. This finding paves the way for increased control of light sources and GHz-to-THz interconversion relevant to quantum technology. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-self-locking-sources-opportunities-quantum-technologies.html Condensed Matter Mon, 19 Jun 2023 09:56:04 EDT news606387362 Christiaan Huygens built excellent lenses in the 17th century, but his telescopes lacked sharpness in comparison with what was possible at that time. In a recent study, Dr. Alex Pietrow, researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), investigated Huygens' calculations and has concluded that the Dutch astronomer and mathematician was probably near-sighted and would have needed eyeglasses to improve his telescopes. https://phys.org/news/2023-03-eyeglasses-prescription-christiaan-huygens-years.html Astronomy Thu, 02 Mar 2023 10:41:51 EST news596976106 How would our world be viewed by observers moving faster than light in a vacuum? Such a picture would be clearly different from what we encounter every day. "We should expect to see not only phenomena that happen spontaneously, without a deterministic cause, but also particles traveling simultaneously along multiple paths," argue theorists from universities in Warsaw and Oxford. https://phys.org/news/2022-12-dimensions-space-dimension-superluminal-spacetime.html General Physics Thu, 22 Dec 2022 15:18:09 EST news590944685 When NASA's 990-pound Dragonfly rotorcraft reaches the Selk crater region—the mission's target touchdown spot—on Saturn's moon Titan in 2034, Cornell's Léa Bonnefoy will have helped to make it a smooth landing. https://phys.org/news/2022-09-scientists-depict-dragonfly-site-saturn.html Space Exploration Wed, 28 Sep 2022 13:40:19 EDT news583591216 NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured its first images and spectra of Mars Sept. 5. The telescope, an international collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency), provides a unique perspective with its infrared sensitivity on our neighboring planet, complementing data being collected by orbiters, rovers, and other telescopes. https://phys.org/news/2022-09-mars-mighty-webb-red-planet.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 19 Sep 2022 14:23:37 EDT news582816212 In a paper recently published in The Planetary Science Journal, NASA scientists and engineers give new details about the agency's Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) mission, which will descend through the layered Venus atmosphere to the surface of the planet in mid-2031. DAVINCI is the first mission to study Venus using both spacecraft flybys and a descent probe. https://phys.org/news/2022-06-nasa-davinci-mission-plunge-massive.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 02 Jun 2022 17:03:48 EDT news573408224 Two different waves with the same frequency and wavelengths can be coupled, so that the amplitude alternates periodically between the two to form a phenomenon known as a coherent beating oscillation. The process can be observed often with a coupled pendulum, and at the cosmic scale as neutrino oscillations that occur due to fluctuations between diverse neutrinos. Solids too can equally maintain various wave excitations to contribute to their thermal and electromagnetic properties. https://phys.org/news/2022-05-coherent-oscillation-phonons-magnons.html Condensed Matter Mon, 30 May 2022 09:20:01 EDT news573118670 In 2006, the Cassini spacecraft recorded geyser curtains shooting forth from "tiger stripe" fissures near the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus—sometimes as much as 200 kilograms of water per second. A new study suggests how expanding ice during millennia-long cooling cycles could sometimes crack the moon's icy shell and let its inner ocean out, providing a possible explanation for the geysers. https://phys.org/news/2022-03-icy-moon-enceladus-expansion-ocean.html Astronomy Tue, 22 Mar 2022 11:49:54 EDT news567168589 Miniaturization of optical components is a challenge in photonics. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Friedrich Schiller University of Jena have now succeeded in developing a diffuser, a disk that scatters light, based on silicon nanoparticles. It can be used to specifically control the direction, color, and polarization of light. This novel technology may be used in transparent screens or augmented reality. The results are reported in Advanced Materials. https://phys.org/news/2021-12-optics-photonics-miniaturization-diffusers-applications.html Optics & Photonics Wed, 22 Dec 2021 07:44:24 EST news559381462 Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is a natural laboratory to study the origins of life. Like Earth, Titan has a dense atmosphere and seasonal weather cycles, but the chemical and mineralogical makeup are significantly different. Now, earthbound researchers have recreated the moon's conditions in small glass cylinders, revealing fundamental properties of two organic molecules that are believed to exist as minerals on Titan. https://phys.org/news/2021-08-titan-in-a-glass-hint-mineral-makeup-saturn.html Materials Science Thu, 26 Aug 2021 05:00:03 EDT news549171336 Among our solar system's many moons, Saturn's Titan stands out—it's the only moon with a substantial atmosphere and liquid on the surface. It even has a weather system like Earth's, though it rains methane instead of water. Might it also host some kind of life? https://phys.org/news/2021-08-dragonfly-mission-titan-big-science.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 10 Aug 2021 14:08:40 EDT news547823306 In a new report on Science Advances, Mark Elowitz, and a team of scientists in physical sciences, optical physics, planetary science and radiation research in the U.S., U.K., India, and Taiwan, presented the first analysis of far-ultraviolet reflectance spectra of regions on Rhea's leading and trailing hemispheres—as collected by the Cassini ultraviolet imaging spectrograph during targeted flybys. In this work, they specifically aimed to explain the unidentified broad absorption feature centered near 184 nanometers of the resulting spectra. Using laboratory measurements of the UV spectroscopy of a set of molecules, Elowitz et al. found a good fit to Rhea's spectra with both hydrazine monohydrate and several chlorine-containing molecules. They showed hydrazine monohydrate to be the most plausible candidate to explain the absorption feature at 184 nm. Hydrazine was also a propellant in Cassini's thrusters, however, in this instance, the thrusters were not used during icy satellite flybys and therefore the signal was assumed to not rise from spacecraft fuel. The scientists then detailed how hydrazine monohydrate may be chemically produced on icy surfaces. https://phys.org/news/2021-02-hydrazine-saturn-moon-rhea.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 04 Feb 2021 09:30:01 EST news531652194 With its dazzling system of icy rings, Saturn has been a subject of fascination since ancient times. Even now the sixth planet from the sun holds many mysteries, partly because its distance away makes direct observation difficult and partly because this gas giant (which is multiple times the size of our planet) has a composition and atmosphere, mostly hydrogen and helium, so unlike that of Earth. Learning more about it could yield some insights into the creation of the solar system itself. https://phys.org/news/2020-10-d-formation-hexagon-storm-saturn.html Astronomy Wed, 07 Oct 2020 04:12:28 EDT news521262670 More than 230 years ago astronomer William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus and two of its moons. Using the Herschel Space Observatory, a group of astronomers led by Örs H. Detre of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy now has succeeded in determining physical properties of the five main moons of Uranus. The measured infrared radiation, which is generated by the Sun heating their surfaces, suggests that these moons resemble dwarf planets like Pluto. The team developed a new analysis technique that extracted the faint signals from the moons next to Uranus, which is more than a thousand times brighter. The study was published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-uranian-moons.html Astronomy Mon, 14 Sep 2020 09:50:52 EDT news519295849 Mars may now be considered a barren, icy desert but did Earth's nearest neighbour once harbour life? https://phys.org/news/2020-07-quest-ancient-life-mars.html Space Exploration Sat, 11 Jul 2020 02:50:01 EDT news513654393 Research led by Queen Mary University of London, proposes a novel 'higher-order' Kuramoto model that combines topology with dynamical systems and characterises synchronization in higher-order networks for the first time. https://phys.org/news/2020-05-topology-synchronization-higher-order-networks.html General Physics Thu, 28 May 2020 10:23:31 EDT news509880203 Meteorological conditions on Saturn's large moon Titan, the strange, distant world that may be the most Earth-like in the solar system, appear conducive to the formation of dust devils, according to new research in AGU's journal Geophysical Research Letters. https://phys.org/news/2020-04-devils-roam-hydrocarbon-dunes-saturn.html Astronomy Fri, 17 Apr 2020 10:17:40 EDT news506337457 The upper layers in the atmospheres of gas giants—Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune—are hot, just like Earth's. But unlike Earth, the Sun is too far from these outer planets to account for the high temperatures. Their heat source has been one of the great mysteries of planetary science. https://phys.org/news/2020-04-saturn-atmosphere-hot.html Astronomy Tue, 07 Apr 2020 03:08:59 EDT news505447731