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    Astronomers discover doomed pair of spiraling stars on our cosmic doorstep

    April 7, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    University of Warwick astronomers have discovered an extremely rare, high-mass, compact binary star system only ~150 light years away. These two stars are on a collision course to explode as a type 1a supernova, appearing 10 times brighter than the moon in the night sky.

    Type 1a supernovae are a special class of cosmic explosion, famously used as “standard candles” to measure distances between Earth and their host galaxies. They occur when a white dwarf (the dense remnant core of a star) accumulates too much mass, is unable to withstand its own gravity, and explodes.

    It has long been theoretically predicted that two orbiting white dwarfs are the cause of most type 1a supernova explosions...

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    Repurposed smartphone camera sensors create real-time, high-resolution imaging of antiproton annihilations

    April 4, 2025, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    Did you know that the camera sensor in your smartphone could help unlock the secrets of antimatter? The AEgIS collaboration, led by Professor Christoph Hugenschmidt’s team from the research neutron source FRM II at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has developed a detector using modified mobile camera sensors to image, in real time, the points where antimatter annihilates with matter.

    This new device, described in a paper published in Science Advances, can pinpoint antiproton annihilations with a resolution of about 0.6 micrometers, a 35-fold improvement over previous real-time methods.

    AEgIS and other experiments at CERN’s Antimatter Factory, such as ALPHA and GBAR, are on a mission to measure the free-fall of antihydrogen within Earth’s gravitational field with high pr...

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    Webb explores effect of strong magnetic fields on star formation

    April 4, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The MeerKAT radio telescope shows the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, with a graphic pullout highlighting a much smaller region on the right, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared light observations. The MeerKAT image is colored in blue, cyan, and yellow, with a very bright white-yellow center that indicates the location of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole. Painterly bubbles of various sizes, clouds, and vertical brushstroke-like streaks make up the radio image. The Webb inset shows stars and gas clouds in red, with an arching cloud of bright cyan that contains many straight, needle-like features that appear more crystalline than cloudy.
    An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT (formerly the Karoo Array Telescope) radio telescope array puts the James Webb Space Telescope’s image of the Sagittarius C region in context. Like a super-long exposure photograph, MeerKAT shows the bubble-like remnants of supernovas that exploded over millennia, capturing the dynamic nature of the Milky Way’s chaotic core. At the center of the MeerKAT image the region surrounding the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole blazes bright. Huge vertical filamentary structures echo those captured on a smaller scale by Webb in Sagittarius C’s blue-green hydrogen cloud.
    NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford)

    Follow-up research on a 2023 image of the Sagittarius ...

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    Vision restored: Retinal therapy research marks first successful induction of long-term neural regeneration

    April 3, 2025, Categories  Uncategorized

    Vision is one of the most crucial human senses, yet more than 300 million people worldwide are at risk of vision loss due to various retinal diseases. While recent advancements in retinal disease treatments have successfully slowed disease progression, no effective therapy has been developed to restore already lost vision—until now.

    KAIST researchers led by Professor Jinwoo Kim from the Department of Biological Sciences have successfully developed a novel drug to restore vision through retinal nerve regeneration. The research is published in the journal Nature Communications. The study was co-authored by Dr. Eun Jung Lee of Celliaz Inc. and Museong Kim, a Ph.D. candidate at KAIST, as joint first authors.

    The research team successfully induced neural regeneration and vision rec...

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