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    Category Astronomy/Space

    High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory Tests Speed of Light

    April 6, 2020, Categories  Physics, Astronomy/Space

    This compound graphic shows a view of the sky in ultra-high energy gamma rays. The arrows indicate the four sources of gamma rays with energies over 100 TeV from within our galaxy (courtesy of the HAWC collaboration) imposed over a photo of the HAWC Observatory’s 300 large water tanks. The tanks contain sensitive light detectors that measure showers of particles produced by the gamma rays striking the atmosphere more than 10 miles overhead (courtesy of Jordan Goodman)

    New measurements confirm, to the highest energies yet explored, that the laws of physics hold no matter where you are or how fast you’re moving...

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    Electron-eating Neon causes Star to Collapse

    April 3, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    An artist’s impression shows how an imaginary neon footballfish eats away at the electrons inside a star core. Credit: Kavli IPMU

    An international team of researchers has found that neon inside a certain massive star can consume the electrons in the core, a process called electron capture, which causes the star to collapse into a neutron star and produce a supernova.

    The researchers were interested in studying the final fate of stars within a mass range of eight to 10 solar masses, or eight to 10 times the mass of the sun. This mass range is important because it includes the boundary between whether a star has a large enough mass to undergo a supernova explosion to form a neutron star, or has a smaller mass to form a white dwarf star without becoming a supernova.

    An eight- to 1...

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    On Mars or Earth, Biohybrid can turn Carbon Dioxide into New Products

    April 2, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space, Chemistry/Nanotechnology, Biology/Biotechnology

    A device to capture carbon dioxide from the air and convert it to useful organic products. On left is the chamber containing the nanowire/bacteria hybrid that reduces CO2 to form acetate. On the right is the chamber where oxygen is produced. (UC Berkeley photo by Peidong Yang)

    Bacteria on nanowires convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to organic building blocks. Chemists have created a hybrid system of bacteria and nanowires that captures energy from sunlight and transfers it to the bacteria to turn carbon dioxide and water into organic molecules and oxygen. On Earth, such a biohybrid could remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. On Mars, it would provide colonists with raw material to manufacture organic compounds ranging from fuels to drugs...

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    Hubble finds best Evidence for Elusive Mid-sized Black Hole

    April 1, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This illustration depicts a cosmic homicide in action. A wayward star is being shredded by the intense gravitational pull of a black hole that contains tens of thousands of solar masses. The stellar remains are forming an accretion disk around the black hole. Flares of X-ray light from the super-heated gas disk alerted astronomers to the black hole’s location; otherwise it lurked unknown in the dark. The elusive object is classified as an intermediate mass black hole (IMBH), as it is much less massive than the monster black holes that dwell in the centers of galaxies. Therefore, IMBHs are mostly quiescent because they do not pull in as much material, and are hard to find. Hubble observations provide evidence that the IMBH dwells inside a dense star cluster...
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