Category Astronomy/Space

The breakthrough nanophotonic chip that can harness the angular momentum of light, paving the way for next generation optical technologies and enabling scientists to gain a deeper understanding of black holes. Credit: RMIT University

>>paves way for next generation optical technologies and enables deeper understanding of black holes. The Australian team designed an integrated nanophotonic chip that can achieve unparalleled control over angular momentum (AM) of light. The pioneering work opens new opportunities for using AM at a chip-scale for generation, transmission, processing and recording of information, and could also be used to help scientists better understand the evolution and nature of black holes.

While traveling approximately in a straight line, a beam of light also spins and tw...

Possible manifestations of brown dwarfs (artist’s impression). As brown dwarfs are nearly invisible in the optical light and only emit radiation in the IR regime, they exhibit different colors in that range. Credit: AIP/J. Fohlmeister

When re-analysing catalogued and updated observational data of brown dwarfs in the solar neighbourhood, astronomers from Potsdam have found a significant number of nearby brown dwarfs should still be out there. The study challenges the previously established picture of brown dwarfs in the solar neighborhood.

Brown dwarfs are objects that are too large to be called planets, yet too small to be stars...

Artist’s interpretation of a hypothetical moon in orbit around a planet found in a tight-knit triple-star system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Crisp, clear images of a “hot Jupiter” system captured by a University of Notre Dame physicist were vital in determining that a newly found planet inhabits a 3-star system, a phenomenon documented only a few times before.

KELT-4Ab is a “hot Jupiter”, a gas giant that orbits extremely close to one of the stars in its solar system. While the KELT, or Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope, detected the likely presence of the planet now called KELT-4Ab about 685 light years from Earth, Crepp was able to capture crisp, clear images of the system, discovering that the planet was in fact a member of a triple star system – one of only a few found to date.

The ...

This is a simulation of gravitational waves from a collapsing Neutron star. Credit: Luciano Rezzolla

Astrophysicists have found a simple formula for the maximum mass of a rotating neutron star and hence answered a question that had been open for decades. Neutron stars are the most extreme and fascinating objects known to exist in our universe: Such a star has a mass that is up to twice that of the sun but a radius of only a dozen kilometres: hence it has an enormous density, thousands of billions of times that of the densest element on Earth.

An important property of neutron stars, distinguishing them from normal stars, is their mass cannot grow without bound. Indeed, if a nonrotating star increases its mass, also its density will increase...