At the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, cosmic rays have been detected from far off galaxies. Credit: Pierre Auger Observatory

Where do cosmic rays come from? Solving a 50-year-old mystery, a collaboration of researchers has discovered it’s much farther than the Milky Way. In an article published today in the journal Science, the Pierre Auger Collaboration has definitively answered the question of whether cosmic particles from outside the Milky Way Galaxy. The article notes that studying the distribution of the cosmic ray arrival directions is the first step in determining where extragalactic particles originate.

The collaborating scientists were able to make their recordings using the largest cosmic-ray observatory ever built, the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina...

Top Photo: A rendering of the Mars 20/20 Rover, courtesy of NASA.
Top right photo: False-color micro-XRF distribution maps for V, Fe, and S of a single leiosphaerid. Maximal area densities are given in µg/cm2 for each element at the top of each map. The scatter is shown in the Sa, which can be used as an indicator of thickness and density of the sample.
Bottom right: Bright field photomicrograph image of the large leiosphaerid acritarch analyzed in this work. Photos courtesy Craig Marshall.

A new article suggests NASA and others hunting for proof of Martian biology in the form of ‘microfossils’ could use the element vanadium in combination with Raman spectroscopy to confirm traces of extraterrestrial life...

The core element of our quantum repeater is a cube of glass. We put two independent photons in, and as long as we can detect two photons coming out the other sides we know that we can perform entanglement swapping. Credit: Wits University

Technique paves the way for high bit-rate secure long distance quantum communication. Researchers have demonstrated entanglement swapping and teleportation of orbital angular momentum ‘patterns’ of light. This is a crucial step towards realizing a quantum repeater for high-dimensional entangled states.

Quantum communication over long distances is integral to information security and has been demonstrated in free space and fibre with two-dimensional states, recently over distances exceeding 1200 km between satellites...

Hubble image of Comet Siding Spring before and after filtering, as captured by Wide Field Camera 3 on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J.-Y. Li (Planetary Science Institute)

When Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) passed just 140,000 kilometres from Mars on 19th October 2014, depositing a large amount of debris in the martian atmosphere, space agencies coordinated multiple spacecraft to witness the largest meteor shower in recorded history. It was a rare opportunity, as this kind of planetary event occurs only once every 100,000 years...