Inside the target chamber at the University of Rochester’s Omega Facility, a team of researchers including Princeton University’s Thomas Duffy and June Wicks use lasers to compress iron-silicon samples to the ultrahigh pressures found in the cores of super-Earths. Credit: Photo courtesy of Laboratory for Laser Energetics

How researchers are using lasers to recreate the extreme pressures of exoplanet interiors. Using high-powered laser beams, researchers have simulated conditions inside a planet three times as large as Earth. Scientists have identified more than 2,000 of these “super-Earths,” exoplanets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, the next-largest planet in our solar system...

Astronomers recently discovered a group of interacting and merging galaxies in the early universe, as seen in this artist’s illustration. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser; Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC-BY)

A dense flock of 14 galaxies from 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang is destined to become one of the most massive structures in the modern universe. For the 1st time, astronomers have witnessed the birth of a colossal cluster of galaxies. Their observations reveal at least 14 galaxies packed into an area only 4 times the diameter of the Milky Way’s galactic disk. Computer simulations of the galaxies predict that over time the cluster will assemble into one of the most massive structures in the modern universe, the astronomers report in the April 26 issue of Nature.

Galaxies w...

A: Food materials are pulverized under ultra-low temperature close to -100 degrees Celsius. B: Micro-sized food materials are reconstructed into a porous film-shaped material by jetting bonding an agent under optimized water content and heat conditions. The process to build film-type materials is repeated layer by layer to form to a three-dimensional food block. C: The exterior of foods and internal microstructure of a food block with specific porosity is designed to give texture with controlled human body absorption while eating and ingesting. Credit: Jin-Kyu Rhee, Ewha Womans University

Researchers 3D print food with customized texture and body absorption characteristics...

Wandering Supermassive Black Holes in Milky-Way-mass Halos. The Astrophysical Journal, 2018; 857 (2): L22 DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/aabc0a

Astronomers are beginning to understand what happens when black holes get the urge to roam the Milky Way. Typically, a supermassive black hole (SMBH) exists at the core of a massive galaxy. But sometimes SMBHs may “wander” throughout their host galaxy, remaining far from the center in regions such as the stellar halo, a nearly spherical area of stars and gas that surrounds the main section of the galaxy. Astronomers theorize that this phenomenon often occurs as a result of mergers between galaxies in an expanding universe. A smaller galaxy will join with a larger, main galaxy, depositing its own, central SMBH onto a wide orbit within the new host.

In a...