New light has been shed on a mysterious and long-standing conundrum at the very heart of our galaxy. The new work offers a potential solution to the so-called "Galactic bar paradox," whereby different observations produce ...
Astronomy
Aug 25, 2020
2
940
Astronomers have used the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to make the first measurement of wind speed on a brown dwarf—an object intermediate in mass ...
Astronomy
Apr 9, 2020
3
1177
While those wonderful light sabers in the Star Wars films remain the figment of George Lucas' fertile imagination, light mills - rotary motors driven by light - that can power objects thousands of times greater in size are ...
General Physics
Jul 5, 2010
8
2
You may not realize it, but the Doppler effect is everywhere in our lives, from tracking the speed of cars with radar to locating satellites in the sky. It's all about how waves change their frequency when a source (like ...
Optics & Photonics
Oct 20, 2023
0
321
A team of physicists at the Technical University of Denmark has found the reason a spinning magnet can cause a secondary magnet to levitate without the need for stabilization. In their paper published in the journal Physical ...
On Oct. 5, 2020, the rapidly rotating corpse of a long-dead star about 30,000 light years from Earth changed speeds. In a cosmic instant, its spinning slowed. And a few days later, it abruptly started emitting radio waves.
Astronomy
Jan 27, 2023
27
496
As telescopes have become more advanced and powerful, astronomers have been able to detect more and more distant galaxies. These are some of the earliest galaxies to form in our universe that began to recede away from us ...
Astronomy
Jun 30, 2022
0
352
Asteroids hold many clues about the formation and evolution of planets and their satellites. Understanding their history can, therefore, reveal much about our solar system. While observations made from a distance using electromagnetic ...
Astronomy
Mar 22, 2022
0
75
When astronomers discovered a new kind of star just a few years ago, they were puzzled: The stars were spinning far too quickly given their age. Nicknamed "blue lurkers," these stars hid for decades within clusters of other ...
Astronomy
Jan 13, 2022
2
147
Light-driven molecular motors have been around for over 20 years. These motors typically take microseconds to nanoseconds for one revolution. Thomas Jansen, associate professor of physics at the University of Groningen, and ...
Materials Science
Jun 18, 2021
4
161
