Research unlocks supernova stardust secrets
Curtin University-led research has discovered a rare dust particle trapped in an ancient extra-terrestrial meteorite that was formed by a star other than our sun.
Curtin University-led research has discovered a rare dust particle trapped in an ancient extra-terrestrial meteorite that was formed by a star other than our sun.
Astronomy
12 hours ago
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122
It carries more than 100 times as much water as all the world's rivers combined. It reaches from the ocean's surface to its bottom, and measures as much as 2,000 kilometers across. It connects the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific ...
Earth Sciences
20 hours ago
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16
In a talk at the ongoing Rencontres de Moriond conference, the ATLAS collaboration presented the result of its latest test of a key principle of the Standard Model of particle physics known as lepton flavor universality. ...
General Physics
Mar 26, 2024
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114
Experimental and theoretical physicists from the Würzburg Institute for Topological Insulators have observed a re-entrant quantum Hall effect in a mercury telluride device and have identified it as a signature of parity ...
Condensed Matter
Mar 26, 2024
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67
Dark matter is a ghostly substance that astronomers have failed to detect for decades, yet which we know has an enormous influence on normal matter in the universe, such as stars and galaxies. Through the massive gravitational ...
Astronomy
Mar 23, 2024
9
78
Erin McCarthy '23, physics summa cum laude, is a rarity among young scientists. As an undergraduate researcher in Syracuse University's College of Arts & Sciences' Department of Physics, she guided a study that appeared in ...
General Physics
Mar 22, 2024
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285
A challenge to space scientists to better understand our hazardous near-Earth space environment has been set in a new study led by the University of Birmingham.
Astronomy
Mar 21, 2024
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33
Everyone loves a two-for-one deal—even physicists looking to tackle unanswered questions about the cosmos. Now, scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are getting just such a twofer: ...
Astronomy
Mar 21, 2024
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1249
Autoimmune diseases are mysterious. It wasn't until the 1950s that scientists realized that the immune system could harm the organs of its own body. Even today, the fundamental causes and inner workings of most autoimmune ...
Bio & Medicine
Mar 21, 2024
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110
As the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to increase and climate change impacts become more costly, the scientific community is redoubling efforts to investigate the potential risks and benefits of artificially ...
Environment
Mar 21, 2024
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11
In the physical sciences, a particle is a small localized object to which can be ascribed several physical properties such as volume or mass. The word is rather general in meaning, and is refined as needed by various scientific fields.
Whether objects can be considered particles depends on the scale of the context; if an object's own size is small or negligible, or if geometrical properties and structure are irrelevant, then it can be considered a particle. For example, grains of sand on a beach can be considered particles because the size of one grain of sand (c. 1 mm) is negligible compared to the beach, and the features of individual grains of sand are usually irrelevant to the problem at hand. However, grains of sand would not be considered particles if compared to buckyballs (~1 nm).
The concept of particles is particularly useful when modelling nature, as the full treatment of many phenomena is complex. It can be used to make simplifying assumptions concerning the processes involved. Francis Sears and Mark Zemansky, in University Physics, give the example of calculating the landing location and velocity of a baseball thrown in the air. They gradually strip the baseball of most of its properties, by first idealizing it as a rigid smooth sphere, then by neglecting rotation, buoyancy and friction, ultimately reducing the problem to the ballistics of a classical point particle.
Treatment of large numbers of particles is the realm of statistical physics. When studied in the context of an extremely small scale, quantum mechanics starts to kick in, and give rise to several phenomena such as the particle in a box problem and wave–particle duality, or theoretical considerations, such a whether particles can be considered distinct or identical.
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