Even on the hottest and driest days, rays from the sun are too weak to ignite a fire. But with a magnifying glass (or, in some unfortunate cases, a glass garden ornament), you can focus sunlight into a beam bright enough ...
Optics & Photonics
Feb 3, 2021
0
19
In recent years, satellites have become smaller, cheaper, and easier to make with commercial off the shelf parts. Some even weigh as little as one gram. This means more people can afford to send them into orbit. Now, satellite ...
Space Exploration
Jan 28, 2021
2
202
A lot is known about galaxies. We know, for instance, that the stars within them are shaped from a blend of old star dust and molecules suspended in gas. What remains a mystery, however, is the process that leads to these ...
Astronomy
Jan 25, 2021
0
2317
It was previously thought that collisions between galaxies would necessarily add to the activity of the massive black holes at their centers. However, researchers have performed the most accurate simulations of a range of ...
Astronomy
Jan 25, 2021
0
56
Student-led teams aren't the only ones testing out novel electric propulsion techniques recently. Back in November, a company called Exotrail successfully tested a completely new kind of electric propulsion system in space—a ...
Astronomy
Jan 19, 2021
2
69
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration, a large group of researchers from different institutes worldwide, has recently gathered the very first evidence of top quark production in nucleus-nucleus collisions. Their work, ...
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN usually collides protons together. It is these proton–proton collisions that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. But the world's biggest accelerator was also designed ...
General Physics
Dec 18, 2020
0
435
Building on their newfound ability to induce molecules in ultracold gases to interact with each other over long distances, JILA researchers have used an electric "knob" to influence molecular collisions and dramatically raise ...
Quantum Physics
Dec 10, 2020
0
146
The positively charged protons in atomic nuclei should actually repel each other, and yet even heavy nuclei with many protons and neutrons stick together. The so-called strong interaction is responsible for this. Prof. Laura ...
General Physics
Dec 9, 2020
1
1605
The Standard Model, the most exhaustive existing theory outlining fundamental particle interactions, predicts the existence of what are known as triboson interactions. These interactions are processes in which three-gauge ...
