At the BESSY II storage ring, a joint team of accelerator physicists, undulator experts and experimenters has shown how the helicity of circularly polarized synchrotron radiation can be switched faster—up to a million times ...
General Physics
Apr 1, 2020
0
34
When it comes to the challenges posed by interstellar travel, there are no easy answers. The distances are immense, the amount of energy needed to make the journey is tremendous, and the time scales involved are (no pun!) ...
Astronomy
Mar 2, 2020
1
113
Lightning—one, two, three—and thunder. For centuries, people have estimated the distance of a thunderstorm from the time between lightning and thunder. The greater the time gap between the two signals, the further away ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 21, 2020
34
3938
Nine sources of extremely high-energy gamma rays comprise a new catalog compiled by researchers with the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma-Ray Observatory. All produce gamma rays with energies over 56 trillion electron ...
General Physics
Jan 14, 2020
0
578
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration released the first image of a black hole with observations of the massive, dark object at the center of Messier 87, or M87, last April. This black hole has a mass of about 6.5 billion ...
Astronomy
Jan 7, 2020
20
1919
The first ever integrated nanoscale device which can be programmed with either photons or electrons has been developed by scientists in Harish Bhaskaran's Advanced Nanoscale Engineering research group at the University of ...
Nanophysics
Nov 29, 2019
0
919
A new study from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) describes how certain algae collectively sense and respond to light, a phenomenon called phototaxis.
Plants & Animals
Nov 5, 2019
0
23
Astrophysicists Jon Hakkila of the College of Charleston and Robert Nemiroff of the Michigan Technological University have published research indicating that blasts that create gamma-ray bursts may actually exceed the speed ...
Astronomy
Sep 23, 2019
1
103
Optical fibres are our global nervous system, transporting terabytes of data across the planet in the blink of an eye.
Optics & Photonics
Aug 19, 2019
1
765
When we look outward into space, we're looking backward in time. That's because light moves at the speed of light. It takes time for the light to reach us.
Astronomy
Aug 7, 2019
0
196
