In a new paper, researchers report a camera that could offer a much less expensive way to achieve ultrafast imaging for a wide range of applications such as real-time monitoring of drug delivery or high-speed lidar systems for autonomous driving. Researchers show that their new diffraction-gated real-time ultrahigh-speed mapping (DRUM) camera can capture a dynamic event in a single exposure at 4.8 million frames per second.

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Herbig-Haro (HH) objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars, formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from these newborn stars form shock waves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. This image of HH 211 from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals an outflow from a Class 0 protostar, an infantile analog of our Sun when it was no more than a few tens of thousands of years old and with a mass only 8% of the present-day Sun (it will eventually grow into a star like the Sun).

Infrared imaging is powerful in studying newborn stars and their outflows, because such stars are invariably still embedded within the gas from the molecular cloud in which they formed...

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed small robotic devices that can change how they move through the air by “snapping” into a folded position during their descent.

When these “microfliers” are dropped from a drone, they use a Miura-ori origami fold to switch from tumbling and dispersing outward through the air to dropping straight to the ground...

A research team relies on measuring the number of galaxy members to determine the mass of galaxy clusters. One of the most interesting and important questions in cosmology is, “How much matter exists in the universe?” An international team, including scientists at Chiba University, has now succeeded in measuring the total amount of matter for the second time. Reporting in The Astrophysical Journal, the team determined that matter makes up 31% of the total amount of matter and energy in the universe, with the remainder consisting of dark energy.

“Cosmologists believe that only about 20% of the total matter is made of regular or ‘baryonic’ matter, which includes stars, galaxies, atoms, and life,” explains first author Dr...