The record-breaking beam is powered by a pulsar, a rapidly rotating collapsed star with a strong magnetic field.

With its tremendous scale, this beam may help explain the surprisingly large numbers of positrons, the antimatter counterparts to electrons, throughout the Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers first discovered the beam, or filament, in 2020, but they did not know its full length because it extended beyond the edge of the Chandra detector. New Chandra observations by the same pair of researchers taken in February and November 2021 show the filament is about three times as long as originally seen. The filament spans about half the diameter of the full Moon on the sky, making it the longest one from a pulsar as seen from Earth.

“It’s amazing that a pulsar that’s only 10 mile...

Exposure to even moderate ambient lighting during nighttime sleep, compared to sleeping in a dimly lit room, harms your cardiovascular function during sleep and increases your insulin resistance the following morning, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study.

“The results from this study demonstrate that just a single night of exposure to moderate room lighting during sleep can impair glucose and cardiovascular regulation, which are risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome,” said senior study author Dr. Phyllis Zee, chief of sleep medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine physician. “It’s important for people to avoid or minimize the amount of light exposure during sleep.”

There is already evidence that li...

Experimental physicists led by Gerhard Kirchmair, together with theoretical physicists at the University of Oulu, Finland, have succeeded for the first time in controlling protected quantum states—so-called dark states—in superconducting quantum bits. The entangled states are 500 times more robust and could be used in quantum simulations. The method could also be used on other technological platforms.

In Gerhard Kirchmair’s laboratory at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck, Austria, superc...

Two black holes orbiting one another eventually will merge. A team of researchers from Purdue University and other institutions have discovered a supermassive black hole binary system, one of only two known such systems. The two black holes, which orbit each other, likely weigh 100 million suns each. One of the black holes powers a massive jet that moves outward at very close to the speed of light. The system is so far away that the visible light seen today was emitted 8.8 billion years ago.

The two are only between 200 AU and 2,000 AU apart (one AU is the di...