Gaia comes into focus

(Phys.org) —Europe's billion-star surveyor Gaia is slowly being brought into focus.

Nearby failed stars may harbor planet

(Phys.org) —Astronomers, including Carnegie's Yuri Beletsky, took precise measurements of the closest pair of failed stars to the Sun, which suggest that the system harbors a third, planetary-mass object.The research is ...

Iron in the sun: A greenhouse gas for X-ray radiation

(Phys.org) —Scientists from the Heidelberg Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in cooperation with DESY (Hamburg) at the synchrotron PETRA III have investigated for the first time X-ray absorption of highly ...

LISA Pathfinder: From CAD models to ready-to-fly hardware

LISA Pathfinder space mission reached another important milestone: Its heart, the optical bench, was now further integrated into the core assembly of the satellite. Dr Christian Killow (Scottish Universities Physics Alliance ...

Squeezed light produced using silicon micromechanical system

One of the many counterintuitive and bizarre insights of quantum mechanics is that even in a vacuum—what many of us think of as an empty void—all is not completely still. Low levels of noise, known as quantum fluctuations, ...

Atomic clock precision could soon be used at home and work

A new development in fibre optic technology could soon bring atomic clock precision to any home or business with a fibre connection, according to researchers at The University of Western Australia and the University of Adelaide.

Decoding material fluxes in the tropical ocean

How is vital oxygen supplied to the tropical ocean? For the first time, oceanographers at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel were able to make quantitative statements regarding this question. They showed that ...

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the lowest noise of them all

Although it may not be immediately obvious, the mechanical properties of optical components have a significant impact on the performance of lasers employed in precision sensing applications. Currently, the mechanical damping ...

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