A team of astronomers, including researchers at MIT, has picked up on a curious, repeating rhythm of fast radio bursts emanating from an unknown source outside our galaxy, 500 million light years away.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are short, intense flashes of radio waves that are thought to be the product of small, distant, extremely dense objects, though exactly what those objects might be is a longstanding mystery in astrophysics. FRBs typically last a few milliseconds, during which time they can outshine entire galaxies.

Since the first FRB was observed in 2007, astronomers have catalogued over 100 fast radio bursts from distant sources scattered across the universe, outside our own galaxy. For the most part, these detections were one-offs, flashing briefly before disappearing entirely. In a handful of instances, astronomers observed fast radio bursts multiple times from the same source, though with no discernible pattern.

This new FRB source, which the team has catalogued as FRB 180916.J0158+65, is the first to produce a periodic, or cyclical pattern of fast radio bursts. The pattern begins with a noisy, four-day window, during which the source emits random bursts of radio waves, followed by a 12-day period of radio silence.

The astronomers observed that this 16-day pattern of fast radio bursts reoccurred consistently over 500 days of observations. This FRB were reporting now is like clockwork, says Kiyoshi Masui, assistant professor of physics in MITs Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. Its the most definitive pattern weve seen from one of these sources. And its a big clue that we can use to start hunting down the physics of whats causing these bright flashes, which nobody really understands.

Masui is a member of the CHIME/FRB collaboration, a group of more than 50 scientists led by the University of British Columbia, McGill University, University of Toronto, and the National Research Council of Canada, that operates and analyzes the data from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, a radio telescope in British Columbia that was the first to pick up signals of the new periodic FRB source.

The CHIME/FRB Collaboration has published the details of the new observation today in the journal Nature.

A radio view

In 2017, CHIME was erected at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia, where it quickly began detecting fast radio bursts from galaxies across the universe, billions of light years from Earth.

CHIME consists of four large antennas, each about the size and shape of a snowboarding half-pipe, and is designed with no moving parts. Rather than swiveling to focus on different parts of the sky, CHIME stares fixedly at the entire sky, using digital signal processing to pinpoint the region of space where incoming radio waves are originating.

From September 2018 to February 2020, CHIME picked out 38 fast radio bursts from a single source, FRB 180916.J0158+65, which the astronomers traced to a star-churning region on the outskirts of a massive spiral galaxy, 500 million light years from Earth. The source is the most active FRB source that CHIME has yet detected, and until recently it was the closest FRB source to Earth.

As the researchers plotted each of the 38 bursts over time, a pattern began to emerge: One or two bursts would occur over four days, followed by a 12-day period without any bursts, after which the pattern would repeat. This 16-day cycle occurred again and again over the 500 days that they observed the source.

These periodic bursts are something that weve never seen before, and its a new phenomenon in astrophysics, Masui says.

Circling scenarios

Exactly what phenomenon is behind this new extragalactic rhythm is a big unknown, although the team explores some ideas in their new paper. One possibility is that the periodic bursts may be coming from a single compact object, such as a neutron star, that is both spinning and wobbling an astrophysical phenomenon known as precession. Assuming that the radio waves are emanating from a fixed location on the object, if the object is spinning along an axis and that axis is only pointed toward the direction of Earth every four out of 16 days, then we would observe the radio waves as periodic bursts.

Another possibility involves a binary system, such as a neutron star orbiting another neutron star or black hole. If the first neutron star emits radio waves, and is on an eccentric orbit that briefly brings it close to the second object, the tides between the two objects could be strong enough to cause the first neutron star to deform and burst briefly before it swings away. This pattern would repeat when the neutron star swings back along its orbit.

The researchers considered a third scenario, involving a radio-emitting source that circles a central star. If the star emits a wind, or cloud of gas, then every time the source passes through the cloud, the gas from the cloud could periodically magnify the sources radio emissions.

Maybe the source is always giving off these bursts, but we only see them when its going through these clouds, because the clouds act as a lens, Masui says.

Perhaps the most exciting possibility is the idea that this new FRB, and even those that are not periodic or even repeating, may originate from magnetars a type of neutron star that is thought to have an extremely powerful magnetic field. The particulars of magnetars are still a bit of a mystery, but astronomers have observed that they do occasionally release massive amounts of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, including energy in the radio band.

People have been working on how to make these magnetars emit fast radio bursts, and this periodicity weve observed has since been worked into these models to figure out how this all fits together, Masui says.

Very recently, the same group made a new observation that supports the idea that magnetars may in fact be a viable source for fast radio bursts. In late April, CHIME picked up a signal that looked like a fast radio burst, coming from a flaring magnetar, some 30,000 light years from Earth. If the signal is confirmed, this would be the first FRB detected within our own galaxy, as well as the most compelling evidence of magnetars as a source of these mysterious cosmic sparks.

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Researchers have detected a regular rhythm of radio waves with unknown origins - Tdnews

The undergrad research series is where we feature the research thatyouredoing. If youve missed the previous installments, you can find themunder the Undergraduate Research category here.

Are you doingan REU thissummer? Were you working onanastro research project during this past school year? If you, too, have been working on a project that you want to share,we want to hear from you!Think youre up to the challenge of describing your research carefully and clearly to a broad audience, in only one paragraph? Then send us a summary of it!

You can share what youre doing by clickinghereand using the form provided to submit a brief (fewer than 200 words) write-up of your work. The target audience is one familiar with astrophysics but not necessarily your specific subfield, so write clearly and try to avoid jargon. Feel free to also include either a visual regarding your research or else a photo of yourself.

We look forward to hearing from you!

************

Ellie White

Marshall University

Ellie White is a second-year undergraduate studying Physics at Marshall University, and plans to pursue a career in radio astronomy. She conducted this research as part of an Independent Study course at MU in collaboration with experts at the Green Bank Observatory.

The Green Bank Telescope (GBT) is an engineering marvel. Weighing in at 17 million pounds with a 100-meter by 110-meter dish, it is the largest fully-steerable telescope on the planet. One of the challenges for large, ground-based telescopes like the GBT is achieving pointing accuracy that is good enough for observing at the high end of the telescopes 0.1 116 GHz range. As the frequency at which the telescope is observing increases, the beam size (or pixel size) gets smaller, meaning the pointing accuracy must be very high within just a few arcseconds for the GBT. The pointing performance of the GBT is degraded by factors such as the telescopes flexure due to gravity; when the telescope tilts to different elevations, it sags due to the Earths gravitational pull, which causes the pointing direction to change slightly. Similarly, thermal expansion and contraction can cause deflections to the telescopes line of sight, as can tilt and bumpiness in the azimuth track (the circular track that the telescope rotates on with its 16 wheels), as well as small misalignments and offset errors within the structure itself. The GBTs pointing model corrects for these effects by including terms for structural misalignments, as well as terms incorporating metrology data from the GBTs structural temperature sensors, and from logs of measurements of the tracks surface.

In our project, we found that when the pointing model is applied with no calibrations, the blind nighttime pointing error RMS (root mean squared, which is a statistical measure obtained by taking the square root of the average squared value of your data points) was a mere 9 arcseconds, which is about 5 thousandths the diameter of the full moon). When calibrations are applied, the RMS pointing error is a fraction of this observers will see pointing accuracy on the order of 2-3 arcseconds, though further analysis is needed to determine a more exact value. Despite the GBTs asymmetrical design, which makes it more challenging to correct for pointing errors, our results show that the telescope achieves excellent blind pointing performance.

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UR #20: Pointing the Green Bank Telescope | astrobites - Astrobites

This post is part of our series #BlackInAstro. For our cornerstone post, see here. In this installment, we look at the experience of Black folks in STEM in the United States. While we chose to focus on the U.S. here, it is important to note that many other countries have a similarly stark landscape (for example, see this thread on the underrepresentation of Black physicists in the U.K.).

Black students and researchers are drastically underrepresented in physics and astronomy. In this post, we break down some of the statistics about the representation of Black students in academia, and summarize some of the existing research on the experiences of Black students and researchers in STEM.

We think it is particularly important to be familiar with research on the experience of marginalised groups in STEM. Just like with astronomy papers, understanding social science research papers can be difficult at first, but we at Astrobites are here to help get you started.

There is a severe lack of representation of Black students in STEM fields and careers in the United States. This disproportionate distribution begins before the university level. A 2015 nationwide school survey by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) found that 27% of Black students took high school physics, compared to 29% of Hispanic, 43% of white and 57% of Asian students. This discrepancy in physics enrollment is tied in part to socioeconomic status, which is often racialized due to historical patterns of oppression. As a result, 44% of Black students attend schools considered worse off (as judged by their teachers), while 22% attend well off schools. This is in stark contrast with those numbers for white students, with 23% attending worse off schools and 40% attending better off schools. Schools considered worse off saw an 11% lower rate of enrollment in physics programs compared to better off schools.

The issue of underrepresentation is further worsened at the university level. A 2015 study found that 7% of students enrolled in public college were Black, despite making up 15% of the college-age population (64% of students were white, despite making up 54% of the college-aged population). In the nations top universities, the proportion of Black students varies wildly: for example, in 2020, Brown Universitys student body consisted of 6.3% Black students, compared to Harvards 13.7%.

While those statistics encompass all subjects studied at University, things look worse in physics. A major study by the AIP found that in 2017, only 3% of undergraduate Physics degrees were awarded to Black students. This is a significantly lower fraction than even most other STEM fields. While this represents an increase in total degrees awarded compared to historical data, the fraction of Black students graduating with Physics degrees has actually dropped, down from 4.5% in 1995. The number of Bachelors degrees in Physics awarded to Black students increased by only 4% between 2005 and 2015, compared to a 57% increase for all students. Astronomy looks a bit better: it saw a 67% increase in degrees awarded to Black students, compared to 25% for all students, although it is important to note that only 2% of astronomy degrees that year were awarded to Black students.

As one might expect, underrepresentation continues to get worse as we climb the academic hierarchy. In 2012, only 2% of Physics PhDs awarded to US citizens were to Black students, while 88.2% went to white students. It is a similar story at the faculty level: in 2012, Black scientists represented 2.1% of all Physics faculty in the US, compared to 6.6% across all disciplines (white scientists represented 79.2% of Physics faculty, 74.9% across all disciplines). This gets worse again where race intersects with gender. At time of writing, only 22 Black women have been awarded a PhD in astronomy in the United States. In total, 144 Black women currently hold PhDs in physics or physics-adjacent fields (such as physical chemistry).

These statistics make clear that Black students are disproportionately underrepresented in physics and astronomy at all levels of the academic process. The AIPs TEAM-UP Task Force finds in their report that this underrepresentation is independent of potential or aptitude: Black students have the same drive, motivation, intellect, and capability to obtain physics and astronomy degrees as students of other races and ethnicities. The report attributes this in part to the lack of a supportive environment in Physics and Astronomy departments across the country, and provides detailed information of five factors responsible for the success or failure of Black students in the field.

Why are there so few Black students in STEM? One common response is that this is a pipeline problem, in which disparities in academic preparation start in grade school and become increasingly insurmountable by the time students get to university. However, research suggests that retaining Black students in STEM is a pressing issue even at the undergraduate level. For instance, Riegle-Crumb et al. demonstrate that Black students who begin a STEM major in undergrad are more likely to switch out of their field than their white peers, a difference that is unique to STEM fields (and one that is not fully explained by differences in academic preparation).

One of the leading reasons for this failure of retention is the discrimination Black students face in STEM departments. According to a Pew study from 2018, an overwhelming 72% of Black STEM professionals believe discrimination is a major reason they are underrepresented in STEM. However, this effect is severely underestimated by their white colleagues: just 27% of white STEM professionals believe that discrimination is a major issue for Black professionals. Figure 1 shows a breakdown of these statistics in more detail.

The study further shows the extent of this discrimination: 62% of Black STEM professionals report that they have experienced discrimination at work due to their race. This is even higher than the rate of 50% in non-STEM sectors. More specifically, while most white STEM professionals (about 75%) believe Black STEM professionals are treated fairly in hiring and advancement, not even half of Black STEM professionals (only about 40%) believe that they are treated fairly in these regards.

How might faculty discriminate against Black students? In 2019, Eaton et al. conducted a study in which they ask faculty in physics to rate hypothetical candidates applying for a postdoc out of graduate school. They asked the faculty members to evaluate CVs that were identicalexcept for changing the name of the applicant to a common white, Black, Asian, or Latinx name. They gave the candidates an average number of publications, along with a few arguable strengths (e.g. a university prize with a years worth of funding) and a few arguable weaknesses (e.g. no external funding). They chose to focus on an average applicant because past work has shown that reviewers are more likely to discriminate against average candidates than the absolute best applicants.

In their study, Eaton et al. found that Black (and Latinx) applicants were rated over 1 point lower on a 9-point scale than white or Asian applicants in both competence and hireability. Since the authors designed the study to include both major strengths and major weaknesses on the CVs, they argue that with white or Asian applicants, reviewers were more likely to reward applicants for their arguable strengths (and ignore their arguable weaknesses). On the other hand, with Black (or Latinx) applicants, reviewers were more prone to use their arguable weaknesses as an excuse to rate them lower (while ignoring their arguable strengths).

In general, both faculty and students contribute to a discriminatory learning environment through racial microaggressions, a term devised by Professor Chester Pierce in 1970 specifically to refer to statements made against Black folks. Microaggressions are everyday statements that imply an attack on a persons (1) competence, (2) identity, (3) right to have opinions or concerns, and/or (4) their sense of belonging. These attacks are often much more obvious to the victim than they are to the perpetrator. It is also common for the perpetrator to become defensive when accused of making a microaggression. Solrzano et al. specifically demonstrated that the cumulative effects [of microaggressions on Black college students] can be quite devastating.

Sue et al. revitalized academic interest on microaggressions with a broad seminal review of the subject in 2007. They note that almost all interracial encounters are prone to microaggressions and list a variety of racially motivated microaggressions in their paper. Some of these examples are shown in Figure 2 (modified by us to better reflect analogous situations in academia).

We note that these studies are just two examples of how bias and discrimination affect Black students in STEM and the representation of Black researchers in these fields. Other research finds that discrimination extends into nearly every arena of academia and science, from elementary school to graduate admissions.

The underrepresentation of Black students in STEM. The lack of retention of Black students in STEM majors. The further underrepresentation of Black STEM researchers at the PhD and faculty levels. The discrepancy between how white and Black STEM professionals view discrimination. The bias against researchers names. The prevalence of microaggressions. These are all facets of how the anti-Blackness that pervades our society manifests in our academic spaces.

It is clear that STEM workplaces are not doing enough to prevent discrimination and address biasand this is strongly felt by Black students and researchers. Fighting discrimination in our departments is crucial to retaining Black students in STEM, and to ensuring that our scientific spaces support Black astronomers and physicists.

We would like to acknowledge that we are summarizing research outside of our field. While we are trained astronomers and physicists, and practiced writers of paper summaries, we are not experts in social science research. We have done our best to capture the findings of this literature accurately and respectfully, but do defer to the original papers and to the authors of the studies.

Originally posted here:

#BlackInAstro: Black Representation in Astro/Physics and the Impact of Discrimination - Astrobites

Once again, physicists have confirmed one of Albert Einstein's core ideas about gravity this time with the help of a neutron star flashing across space.

The new work makes an old idea even more certain: that heavy and light objects fall at the same rate. Einstein wasn't the first person to realize this; there are contested accounts of Galileo Galilei demonstrating the principle by dropping weights off the Tower of Pisa in the 16th century. And suggestions of the idea appear in the work of the 12th-century philosopher Abu'l-Barakt al-Baghdd. This concept eventually made its way into Isaac Newton's model of physics, and then Einstein's theory of general relativity as the gravitational "strong equivalence principle" (SEP). This new experiment demonstrates the truth of the SEP, using a falling neutron star, with more precision than ever.

The SEP has appeared to be true for a long time. You might have seen this video of Apollo astronauts dropping a feather and a hammer in the vacuum of the moon, showing that they fall at the same rate in lunar gravity.

But small tests in the relatively weak gravitational fields of Earth, the moon or the sun don't really put the SEP through its paces, according to Sharon Morsink, an astrophysicist at the University of Alberta in Canada, who wasn't involved in the new study.

"At some level, the majority of physicists believe that Einstein's theory of gravity, called general relativity, is correct. However, that belief is mainly based on observations of phenomena taking place in regions of space with weak gravity, while Einstein's theory of gravity is meant to explain phenomena taking place near really strong gravitational fields," Morsink told Live Science. "Neutron stars and black holes are the objects that have the strongest known gravitational fields, so any test of gravity that involves these objects really test the heart of Einstein's gravity theory."

Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of dead stars. Super dense, but not dense enough to form black holes, they can pack masses greater than that of our sun into whirling spheres just a few miles wide.

The researchers focused on a type of neutron star called a pulsar, which from Earth's perspective seems to flash as it spins. That flashing is a result of a bright spot on the star's surface whirling in and out of view, 366 times per second. This spinning is regular enough to keep time by.

Related: 8 ways you can see Einstein's theory of relativity in real life

This pulsar, known as J0337+1715, is special even among pulsars: It's locked in a tight binary orbit with a white dwarf star. The two stars orbit each other as they circle a third star, also a white dwarf, just like Earth and the moon do as they circle the sun.

(Researchers have already shown that the SEP is true for orbits like this in our solar system: Earth and the moon are affected to exactly the same degree by the sun's gravity, measurements suggest.)

The precise timekeeping of J0337+1715, combined with its relationship to those two gravity fields created by the two white dwarf stars, offers astronomers a unique opportunity to test the principle.

The pulsar is much heavier than the other two stars in the system. But the pulsar still falls toward each of them a little bit as they fall toward the pulsar's larger mass. (The same thing happens with you and Earth. When you jump, you fall back toward the planet very quickly. But the planet falls toward you as well very slowly, due to your own low gravity, but at the exact same rate as a feather or a hammer would if you ignore air resistance.) And because J0337+1715 is such a precise timekeeper, astronomers on Earth can track how the gravitational fields of the two stars affect the pulsar's period.

To do so, the astronomers carefully timed the arrival of light from J0337+1715 using large radio telescopes, in particular the Nanay Radio Observatory in France. As the star moved around each of its neighbors one in a quick little orbit and one in a longer, slower orbit the pulsar got closer and farther from Earth. As the neutron star moved farther away from Earth, the light from its pulses had to travel longer distances to reach the telescope. So, to a tiny degree, the gaps between the pulses seemed to get longer.

As the pulsar swung back toward Earth, the gaps between the pulses got shorter. That allowed physicists to build a robust model of the neutron star's movement through space, explaining precisely how it interacted with the gravity fields of its neighbors. Their work built on a technique used in an earlier paper, published in the journal Nature in 2018, to study the same system.

The new paper, published online June 10 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, showed that the objects in this system behaved as Einstein's theory predicts or at least didn't differ from Einstein's predictions by more than 1.8 parts per million. That's the absolute limit of the precision of their telescope data analysis. They reported 95% confidence in their findings.

Morsink, who uses X-ray data to study the mass, widths, and surface patterns of neutron stars, said that this confirmation isn't surprising, but it is important for her research.

"In that work, we have to assume that Einstein's theory of gravity is correct, since the data analysis is already very complex," Morsink told Live Science in an in an email. "So tests of Einstein's gravity using neutron stars really make me feel better about our assumption that Einstein's theory describes the gravity of a neutron star correctly!"

Without understanding the SEP, Einstein would never have been able to develop his ideas of relativity. In an insight he described as "the most fortunate thought in my life," he recognized that objects in free fall don't feel the gravitational fields tugging on them.

(This is why astronauts in orbit around the Earth float. In constant free fall, they don't experience the gravitational field that holds them in orbit. Without windows, they wouldn't know Earth was there at all.)

Most of Einstein's key insights about the universe begin with the universality of free fall. So, in this way, the cornerstone of general relativity has been made that much stronger.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Einstein's core idea about gravity just passed an extreme, whirling test in deep space - Space.com

Artists view of the pulsar and its closest white-dwarf companion with their orbits and the second companion in the background. The system is not to scale. Credit: Guillaume Voisin CC BY-SA 4.0

An international collaboration of scientists has recorded the most accurate confirmation to date for one of the cornerstones of Einsteins theory of general relativity, the universality of free fall.

The new research shows that the theory holds for strongly self-gravitating objects such as neutron stars. Using a radio telescope, scientists can very accurately observe the signal produced by pulsars, a type of neutron star and test the validity of Einsteins theory of gravity for these extreme objects. In particular, the team analyzed the signals from a pulsar named PSR J0337+1715 recorded by the large radio telescope of Nanay, located in the heart of Sologne (France).

The universality of free fall principle states that two bodies dropped in a gravitational field undergo the very same acceleration independently of their composition. This was first demonstrated by Galileo who famously would have dropped objects of different masses from the top of Pisas tower to verify that they both reach the ground simultaneously.

This principle is also at the heart of Einsteins theory of general relativity. However, some hints such as the inconsistency between quantum mechanics and general relativity, or the conundrum of the domination of dark matter and dark energy in the composition of the Universe, have led many physicists to believe that general relativity might not be, after all, the ultimate theory of gravity.

The observations of Pulsar J0337+1715, which is a neutron star with a stellar core 1.44 times the mass of the Sun that has collapsed into a sphere of only 25km in diameter, shows that it orbits two white-dwarf stars which have a much weaker gravity field. The findings, published on June 10, 2020, in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, demonstrate the universality of free fall principle to be correct.

Dr Guillaume Voisin from The University of Manchester who led the research said: The pulsar emits a beam of radio waves which sweeps across space. At each turn this creates a flash of radio light which is recorded with high accuracy by Nanays radio telescope. As the pulsar moves on its orbit, the light arrival time at Earth is shifted. It is the accurate measurement and mathematical modeling, down to a nanosecond accuracy, of these times of arrival that allows scientists to infer with exquisite precision the motion of the star.

Above all, it is the unique configuration of that system, akin to the Earth-Moon-Sun system with the presence of a second companion (playing the role of the Sun) towards which the two other stars fall (orbit) that has allowed to perform a stellar version of Galileos famous experiment from Pisas tower. Two bodies of different compositions fall with the same acceleration in the gravitational field of a third one.

The pulsar emits a beam of radio waves which sweeps across space. At each turn this creates a flash of radio light which is recorded with high accuracy by Nanays radio telescope. As the pulsar moves on its orbit, the light arrival time at Earth is shifted. It is the accurate measurement and mathematical modelling, down to a nanosecond accuracy, of these times of arrival that allows scientists to infer with exquisite precision the motion of the star. Dr Guillaume Voisin

The measurements were recorded by a collaborative team from The University of Manchester, Paris Observatory PSL, the French CNRS and LPC2E (Orlans, France), and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. The pulsar orbits two white-dwarf stars, one of which orbits the pulsar in only 1.6 days at a distance about 10 times closer to the pulsar than the planet Mercury is from the Sun. This binary system, a bit like Earth and Moon in the solar system, orbits with a third star, a white dwarf of 40% the mass of Sun, located slightly further than the distance separating the Earth-Moon system from the Sun.

In the solar system, the Lunar-laser ranging experiment has allowed to verify that both Moon and Earth are identically affected by the gravity field of the Sun, as predicted by the universality of free-fall (orbital motion is a form a free-fall). However, it is known that some deviations to universality might occur only for strongly self-gravitating objects, such as neutron stars, that is objects the mass of which is significantly made of their own gravitational energy thanks to the famous Einsteins relation E=mc2. The new pulsar experiment carried out by the team fills the gap left by solar system tests where no object is strongly self-gravitating, not even the Sun.

The team has demonstrated that the extreme gravity field of the pulsar cannot differ by more than 1.8 part per million (with a confidence level of 95%) from the prediction of general relativity. This result is the most accurate confirmation that the universality of free fall is valid even in presence of an object which mass is largely due to its own gravity field, thus supporting further Einsteins theory of general relativity.

Reference: An improved test of the strong equivalence principle with the pulsar in a triple star system by G. Voisin, I. Cognard, P. C. C. Freire, N. Wex, L. Guillemot, G. Desvignes, M. Kramer and G. Theureau, 10 June 2020, Astronomy and Astrophysics.DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202038104

Link:

Cornerstone of Einsteins Theory of Relativity Confirmed by Astrophysicists Using the Pulsar in a Triple Star System - SciTechDaily

Scientists from the international XENON collaboration announced today that data from their XENON1T, the world's most sensitive dark matter experiment, show a surprising excess of events. The scientists do not claim to have found dark matter; rather, they have observed an unexpected number of events, the source of which is not yet fully understood. The signature of the excess is similar to what might result from a tiny residual amount of a hydrogen isotope, tritium, but it could also be a sign of something more exciting, for example, the existence of a new particle called a solar axion, or of previously unknown properties of neutrinos.

Dr. Ran Budnik of the Weizmann Institute of Sciences Particle Physics and Astrophysics Department is a member of the team operating the XENON1T deep underground in the INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy. The XENON collaboration comprises 163 scientists from 28 institutions across 11 countries. That experiment, which ran from 2016 to 2018, was primarily designed to detect dark matter, thought to make up 85% of the matter in the universe. So far, XENON1T has set thebest limit on the interaction probability over a wide range of theoretical masses for one possible type dark matter. XENON1T was also sensitive to different types of new particles and interactions. Last year, using the same detector, these scientists reported in Nature their observation of the rarest nuclear decay ever directly measured.

The XENON1T detector was lled with 3.2 tons of ultra-pure liqueed xenon, 2.0 t of which served as a target for particle interactions. A handful of particles that crossed this target hit a xenon atom and generated tiny signals of light and free electrons from the atom. Most of these interactions resulted from particles that are known to exist, so the scientists in first carefully estimated the number of background events projected to occur over the two-year period. When data of XENON1T were compared to known backgrounds, an excess of 53 events over the expected 232 events was observed.

One explanation for the excess could be a previously unconsidered source of background events caused by the presence of tiny amounts of tritium (a hydrogen atom with one proton and two neutrons) in the XENON1T detector. Only a few tritium atoms for every 1025 xenon atoms would be needed to explain the excess. Currently, there are no independent measurements that can conrm or disprove the presence of tritium.

Their detection would mark the rst observation of a new class of new particle

But another explanation could be the existence of a new particle. The excess observed has an energy spectrum similar to that expected from axions produced in the Sun. Axions are hypothetical particles that have been proposed to preserve a time-reversal symmetry of the nuclear force, and the Sun may be a strong source of them. While solar axions are not dark matter candidates, their detection would mark the rst observation of a new class of new particle; this would have a large impact on our understanding of fundamental physics, as well as of astrophysical phenomena. And axions produced in the early universe could, according to one theory, also be the source of dark matter.

Alternatively, the excess could be due to neutrinos, which rarely interact with matter. The magnetic moment (a property of all particles) of neutrinos could be larger than the value assigned them in the Standard Model of elementary particles. This would be a strong hint that some new physics might be needed to explain the discrepancy.

Of the three explanations considered by the XENON collaboration, the observed excess is most consistent with a solar axion signal, though the other two cannot be ruled out, at this stage.

XENON1T is now upgrading to its next phase XENONnT with an active xenon mass three times larger and a background that is expected to be lower than that of XENON1T. With better data from XENONnT, the XENON collaboration is condent it will soon nd out whether this excess is a mere statistical uke, a background contaminant, or something far more exciting: a new particle or interaction that goes beyond known physics.

Dr. Ran Budnik's research is supported by theWeizmann Institute "la Caixa" Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowships. Dr. Budnik is the incumbent of theAryeh and Ido Dissentshik Career Development Chair.

Link:

Observation of Excess Events in the XENON1T Dark Matter Experiment - Weizmann Institute of Science

The very-high-energy gamma ray emission from quasars are not concentrated in the region close to their central black holes but in fact extend over several thousand light-years along jets of plasma, new research reveals.

Writing in the journal Nature, a team of more than 200 astrophysicists from 13 countries describes its observations using the HESS observatory in Namibia which, it says, shake up current scenarios for the behaviour of these jets.

The work was carried out as part of the international High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) collaboration, and led by the CNRS and CEA in France, the Max Planck Society and other German research institutions and universities.

They studied the highly luminous Centaurus A the closest radio galaxy to Earth at unparalleled resolution for more than 200 hours, enabling them to identify the region emitting the very high-energy radiation while studying the trajectory of the plasma jets.

In recent years, scientists have observed the Universe using gamma rays, which form part of the cosmic rays that constantly bombard the Earth. They originate from regions where particles are accelerated to huge energies.

Gamma rays are emitted by a wide range of cosmic objects, including quasars, which are active galaxies with a highly energetic nucleus. The intensity of the radiation emitted can vary over very short timescales of up to one minute.

It has therefore been assumed that the source of this radiation is very small and located in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole.

However, the researchers say they have shown that the gamma ray source extends over several thousand light-years. This in turn indicates that particle acceleration does not take place solely in the vicinity of the black hole, but along the entire length of the plasma jets.

Based on these results, the authors suggest the particles are reaccelerated by stochastic processes along the jet, and that many radio galaxies with extended jets accelerate electrons to extreme energies and might emit gamma-rays. This might explain the origins of a substantial fraction of the diffuse extragalactic gamma background radiation.

Here we report observations of Centaurus A at teraelectronvolt energies that resolve its large-scale jet, the authors write in their paper.

We interpret the data as evidence for the acceleration of ultrarelativistic electrons in the jet and favour the synchrotron explanation for the X-rays.

Given that this jet is not exceptional in terms of power, length or speed, it is possible that ultrarelativistic electrons are commonplace in the large-scale jets of radio-loud active galaxies.

Theres never been a more important time to explain the facts, cherish evidence-based knowledge and to showcase the latest scientific, technological and engineering breakthroughs. Cosmos is published by The Royal Institution of Australia, a charity dedicated to connecting people with the world of science. Financial contributions, however big or small, help us provide access to trusted science information at a time when the world needs it most. Please support us by making a donation or purchasing a subscription today.

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A new study conducted by a team of international scientists has found that the Antares star is much larger than its earlier prediction. As per reports, the star can even fit Saturns orbit inside it. A team of astronomers has designed a detailed map of the atmosphere which depicts the red supergiant star Antares. According to research, the size of the star shall depend on the wavelength of light it is observed with. The new study of the Antares star was published in the Journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

ALSO READ: NASA's Next Mars Rover To Honour All Medical Workers Fighting The Coronavirus Battle

Previous research of the Antares star predicted that the Antares star was about 700 times larger than the sun. However, the research also concluded that proportion to the sun was subject to change when mapped in a different spectrum. Further, as per studies, the Antares star is regarded as the largest star in the universe, in terms of volume. The Antares star is also the 15th brightest star in the night sky and the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius.

The Antares star is a Red Supergiant star. These stars are quite large and remain cool until the end of their lifetime. As per studies, these stars may soon run out of fuel and even collapse. By utilizing their stellar winds, these stars are capable of launching heavy elements into space. Such phenomenaalso worktowards providing a building block of life in the universe.

ALSO READ: NASA Lights Fire On Spacecraft To Test Safety Measures In Lead Up To 2024 Moon Mission

In order to the study Antares atmosphere, the team of astronomers utilized the readings of Very Large Array (VLA) and Atacama Large Millimeter (ALMA)/ submillimeter Array. While the ALMA map helped to observe shorter wavelengths close to the surface of Antares, the VLA map helped to observe longer wavelengths, farther from the stars atmosphere. These readings helped to design the most detailed map of Stars, besides the Sun. The recent study also revealed that the Antares chromosphere was much cooler as compared to the chromosphere of the sun. The study also helped to find the origination point of the winds.

ALSO READ: NASA Wants You To Help Drive Mars Rover Curiosity, And You Do Not Need A Driver's Licence!

Chris Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory gave a statement to a media portal whereby he mentioned that the National Radio Astronomy Observatory regarded the night sky as points of light. He felt that the map of the Supergiant Antares star was a true testament to technological advances in interferometry. He also said that the observations would help man to be closer to the universe.

ALSO READ: Kathy Lueders Becomes The First Ever Female Director Of Human Explorations At NASA

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The Antares Star is larger than the Sun, reveals a new map of the atmosphere - Republic World - Republic World

FP TrendingMay 20, 2020 13:15:44 IST

Scientists had announced earlier this year that they had detected a second gravitational wave signal fromacollision of two neutron stars. The event, which wasdubbed GW190425,resulted inthe two massive neutron stars mergingto form a binary objectlargerthan any other binary neutron star system formed by this processobserved till date.

The combined mass was 3.4 times the mass of the sun, according to the researchers. The team of astrophysicistsargue that they might have anexplanationfor the formation of the massive binary star.

An artist's illustration of merging neutron stars. The rippling space-time grid represents gravitational waves that travel out from the collision, while the narrow beams show the bursts of gamma rays that are shot out just seconds after the gravitational waves. Image: NSf/LIGO/Sonoma State Uni/A Simonnet

The theory for its formation was put forward by researchers from Australias ARC Center of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), led by Isobel Romero-Shaw from Monash University. The researchers claim to have explained both the high mass of the binaryobject andwhysimilar systems arent observedusing traditional radio astronomy techniques.

As per Romero-Shaw, GW190425 was formed through a process called unstable case BB mass transfer. Itbeginswith a neutron star that has a stellar partner a helium (He) star with a carbon-oxygen (CO) core. If the helium part of the star expands enoughthat it engulfs the neutron star, the helium cloud of the neutron star ends uppulling its stellar partnercloser beforethe clouddissipates and a binary object is formed from the two objects merging.

"The carbon-oxygen core of the star then explodes in a supernova and collapses to a neutron star, Romero explains. Thebinary neutron stars that form in this manner can be significantly more massive than those that are observed through radio waves, he adds.

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Mystery of a massive neutron star merger in Milky Way explained by new astrophysics theory - Firstpost

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is possibly the worlds strangest telescope. Located at the South Pole, it is made up of over 5,000 basketball-sized light sensors embedded in a cubic kilometer of ice. Thousands of computers back at the University of WisconsinMadison, IceCubes lead institution, scour data from those sensors for evidence of elusive subatomic particles that originate in outer space: astrophysical neutrinos.

Now, some of these computing resources are being used to simulate something differentprotein folding of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19. How proteins fold into three-dimensional shapes is difficult to predict but has big effects on biological interactions, like those between a virus and its host. These simulations will help researchers understand how the virus compromises human immune systems and reproduces.

While IceCube remains operational, its home research center at UWMadison, the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center, WIPAC, is temporarily providing some of its available computing resources to Folding@home. This citizen-science distributed-computing project crowdsources computationally intensive tasks like simulating protein dynamics. Distributed computing projects like Folding@home combine the power of thousands of individual computers contributed by their owners to process different portions of data simultaneously, significantly speeding up their results.

It just feels right to make the effort to share computing resources from fields as far removed from virology as neutrino astrophysics, says Kael Hanson, director of WIPAC. Were pleased to aid in research that could ultimately lead everyone impacted by the current COVID-19 situation out of the crisis.

Folding@home started in 1999, but it has recently seen a surge in interest as people seek ways to help researchers understand COVID-19. They include Benedikt Riedel, global computing coordinator for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and computing manager at WIPAC.

Riedel had been in touch with his scientific computing collaborators since mid-March to discuss how they could help the COVID-19 effort. When he heard from them about Folding@home, Riedel suggested supporting it to WIPAC administration, who then received approval from IceCubes primary funder, the National Science Foundation. Since the donated computing cycles primarily come from already available resources, they do not significantly hamper WIPAC or IceCube projects.

These are unprecedented times, and I feel like we should do what we can to help other researchers, says Riedel. So far it is going well, and I am hoping that we can continue to donate even after this ends.

IceCubes computing resources consist of roughly 5,000 traditional computers using CPUs (central processing units) and 300 computers using GPUs (graphical processing units), each containing massive numbers of simple parallel computing elements. As a member of the Open Science Grida national distributed-computing partnership that provides high-throughput computing resources to science projects around the countryIceCube had already been sharing computing resources for other projects. Dozens of other Open Science Grid members are also contributing their resources to COVID-19 research.

WIPAC is able to contribute to Folding@home thanks to software that manages the allocation of the centers diverse computing resources to different users competing computational tasks. Specifically, WIPAC uses tools from the HTCondor software suite that was developed and is maintained by UWMadisons Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) to effectively manage the computational workload.

The long partnership between WIPAC and CHTC is founded on a commitment to share resources and knowledge, says Miron Livny, director of the CHTC. It is gratifying to see this partnership contributing to the computing challenge of protein folding of SARS-CoV-2.

The first protein-folding simulations received high priority and will continue to be executed along with the day-in-day-out IceCube workload, which is continually submitted to the system. You can follow WIPACs contributions to Folding@home here.

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Most massive disk galaxies like our Milky Way formed gradually, reaching their large mass relatively late in the 13.8 billion-year history of the universe. But the discovery by an international team of astronomers of a massive rotating disk galaxy, seen when the universe was only ten percent of its current age, challenges the traditional models of galaxy formation.

The discovery, reported May 20 in Nature, was made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Galaxy DLA0817g, nicknamed the Wolfe Disk after the late astronomer Arthur M. Wolfe, is the most distant rotating disk galaxy ever observed. The unparalleled power of ALMA made it possible to see this galaxy spinning at 170 miles (272 kilometers) per second, similar to our Milky Way.

Its properties are astonishingly similar to our own galaxy, despite being only 1.5 billion years old, said coauthor J. Xavier Prochaska, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

While previous studies hinted at the existence of these early rotating gas-rich disk galaxies, thanks to ALMA we now have unambiguous evidence that they occur as early as 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, said lead author Marcel Neeleman of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany

How did the Wolfe Disk form?

The discovery of the Wolfe Disk provides a challenge for many galaxy formation simulations, which predict that massive galaxies at this point in the evolution of the cosmos grew through many mergers of smaller galaxies and hot clumps of gas.

Most galaxies that we find early in the universe look like train wrecks because they underwent consistent and often violent merging, explained Neeleman. These hot mergers make it difficult to form well-ordered, cold, rotating disks like we observe in our present universe.

In most galaxy formation scenarios, galaxies only start to show a well-formed disk around 6 billion years after the Big Bang. The fact that the astronomers found such a disk galaxy when the universe was only ten percent of its current age indicates that other growth processes must have dominated.

We think the Wolfe Disk has grown primarily through the steady accretion of cold gas, Prochaska said. Still, one of the questions that remains is how to assemble such a large gas mass while maintaining a relatively stable, rotating disk.

Star formation

The team also used the National Science Foundations Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to learn more about star formation in the Wolfe Disk. In radio wavelengths, ALMA looked at the galaxys movements and mass of atomic gas and dust, while the VLA measured the amount of molecular massthe fuel for star formation. Hubble observed massive stars in ultraviolet light.

The star formation rate in the Wolfe Disk is at least ten times higher than in our own galaxy, Prochaska said. It must be one of the most productive disk galaxies in the early universe.

A normal galaxy

The Wolfe Disk was first discovered by ALMA in 2017. Neeleman and his team found the galaxy when they examined the light from a more distant quasar. The light from the quasar was absorbed as it passed through a massive reservoir of hydrogen gas surrounding the galaxy, which is how it revealed itself. Rather than looking for direct light from extremely bright, but more rare galaxies, astronomers used this absorption method to find fainter and more normal galaxies in the early universe.

The fact that we found the Wolfe Disk using this method tells us that it belongs to the normal population of galaxies present at early times, said Neeleman. When our newest observations with ALMA surprisingly showed that it is rotating, we realized that early rotating disk galaxies are not as rare as we thought and that there should be a lot more of them out there.

In addition to Neeleman and Prochaska, the coauthors of the paper include Nissim Kanekar at the National Center for Radio Astrophysics in Pune, India, and Mark Rafelski at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA construction and operations are led by ESO on behalf of its Member States; by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), on behalf of North America; and by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) on behalf of East Asia.

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Astronomers discover a massive rotating disk galaxy in the early universe - UC Santa Cruz

Researchers say theyve created a proof-of-concept bionic eye that could surpass the sensitivity of a human one.

In the future, we can use this for better vision prostheses and humanoid robotics, researcher Zhiyong Fan, at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told Science News.

The eye, as detailed in a paper published in the prestigious journal Nature today, is in essence a three dimensional artificial retina that features a highly dense array of extremely light-sensitive nanowires.

The team, led by Fan, lined a curved aluminum oxide membrane with tiny sensors made of perovskite, a light-sensitive material thats been used in solar cells.

Wires that mimic the brains visual cortex relay the visual information gathered by these sensors to a computer for processing.

The nanowires are so sensitive they could surpass the optical wavelength range of the human eye, allowing it to respond to 800 nanometer wavelengths, the threshold between visual light and infrared radiation.

That means it could see things in the dark when the human eye can no longer keep up.

A human user of the artificial eye will gain night vision capability, Fan told Inverse.

The researchers also claim the eye can react to changes in light faster than a human one, allowing it to adjust to changing conditions in a fraction of the time.

Each square centimeter of the artificial retina can hold about 460 million nanosize sensors, dwarfing the estimated 10 million cells in the human retina. This suggests that it could surpass the visual fidelity of the human eye.

Fan told Inverse that we have not demonstrated the full potential in terms of resolution at this moment, promising that eventually a user of our artificial eye will be able to see smaller objects and further distance.

Other researchers who were not involved in the project pointed out that plenty of work still has to be done to eventually be able to connect it to the human visual system, as Scientific American reports.

But some are hopeful.

I think in about 10 years, we should see some very tangible practical applications of these bionic eyes, Hongrui Jiang, an electrical engineer at the University of WisconsinMadison who was not involved in the research, told Scientific American.

READ MORE: A new artificial eye mimics and may outperform human eyes [Science News]

More on bionic eyes: SCIENTISTS PLUGGED A BIONIC EYE DIRECTLY INTO THIS WOMANS BRAIN

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This Bionic Eye Is Better Than a Real One, Scientists Say - Futurism

FP TrendingMay 20, 2020 14:13:43 IST

Astronomersat the W M Keck Observatory in Hawaii have captured the first-ever images a pair of giant planets being born around their parent star PDS 70. They achieve the feat using anovel infrared pyramid wavefront sensor, whichoffers adaptive optics (AO) correction in astrophysics detectors.

The team of researchers published their findings in The Astronomical Journal.

PDS 70 is a star located roughly 370 light-years from us, in the constellation of Centaurus. The star, which is technically classified as aK7-type pre-main sequence star, is a young star at5.4million years old, and alsogoes by'V* V1032 Cen' and 'IRAS 14050-4109'.

An artist's impression of the PDS 70 star system. The two planets are seen clearing a gap in the protoplanetary disk from which they were born. (Not to scale). Image credit: W M Keck Observatory

A report in Phys.orgnotes that PDS 70 is the first known multi-planetary systemin which astronomers have witnessed planet formation in action. The first direct image of PDS 70b (one ofthe newbornplanets orbiting PDS 70), was taken in 2018, the report adds. It was followed by images of the second planet PDS 70c in 2019.

There was some confusion when the two protoplanets were first photographed, lead author of the study, Dr Jason Wang, toldTechExplorist.

"Planet embryos form from a disk of dust and gas surrounding a newborn star. This circumstellar material accretes onto the protoplanet, creating a kind of smokescreen that makes it difficult to differentiate the dusty, gaseous disk from the developing planet in an image, he added.

An infrared image of the newborn planet PDS 70 b and its circumplanetary disc. The size of the solar system given for comparison. Image: V Christiaens et al./ESO

For further clarification, the researchers developed a method to disentangle the image signals from the circumstellar disk and the protoplanets. Subsequently, they were able to take pictures of the baby planets and confirm their existence.

The researchers knew the disks shape should be an asymmetrical ring around the star whereas a planet should be a single point in the image, Wang said.

"So even if a planet appears to sit on top of the disk, which is the case with PDS 70c, based on our knowledge of how the disk looks throughout the whole image, we can infer how bright the disk should be at the location of the protoplanet and remove the disk signal. All thats leftover is the planets emission, he explained.

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Formation of pair of baby planets around their parent star captured in remarkable first - Firstpost

GlobalData research has found the top big data influencers based on their performance and engagement online. Using research from GlobalDatas Influencer platform, Verdict has named ten of the most influential people in big data on Twitter during Q1 2020.

Ronald Van Loon is the director of Advertisement, which offers data consultancy, technology, and data engineering and automation solutions to its partners and clients. A known thought leader, Ronald believes that big data, AI, autonomous cars, analytics, and more are some technology areas that will be filling up with new job opportunities.

Twitter followers: 217,826

GlobalData influencer score: 100

Ganapathi Pulipaka is a chief data scientist at Accenture. He has developed a number of deep learning and machine learning programs and published them on GitHub and medium.com.

Twitter followers: 87,390

GlobalData influencer score: 96

Kirk Borne is an advisor and principal data scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton. An astrophysicist and big data advisor, Kirk specialises in data mining, data analytics, machine learning, and computational astrophysics, among others.

Kirk has engaged in several NASA projects, including its astronomy centre and its space science data operations for more than 20 years.

Twitter followers: 258,119

GlobalData influencer score: 86

Dr Iain Brown is a big data consultant and the head of data science for SAS UK&I. Over the past decade he has worked across a number of sectors, providing thought leadership on the topics of risk, AI and machine learning.

Twitter followers: 123,490

GlobalData influencer score: 68

Spiros Margaris is a venture capitalist and founder of Margaris Ventures. He is the first international influencer to have achieved The Triple Crown ranking.

Twitter followers: 96,901

GlobalData influencer score: 62

Yves Mulkers is a data strategist and the founder of 7wData, a digital publication that covers all types of news on data. As a data integration specialist, Yves focuses on data organisation and data architecture capabilities of an organisation. He provides technical expertise and vision on analytics, business intelligence, and data related issues.

Twitter followers: 97,174

GlobalData influencer score: 59

Mike Quindazzi is a digital alliances sales leader at PWC. He helps drive business results by offering consulting on emerging technologies such as drones, 3D printing, blockchain, IoT, big data, and robotics, among others. He has worked with brands such as Microsoft, SAP, Amazon, and Oracle, and has helped shape innovative approaches to solving their problems. Quindazzi is of the opinion that big data keeps getting bigger.

Twitter followers: 151,521

GlobalData influencer score: 58

Evan Kirstel is a top B2B tech influencer and co-creator of eVira Health, which offers consulting, product development, and business development strategies for the health tech community. He has worked with eminent brands such as IBM, Intel, and AT&T, among others to maximise their visibility and scale across 5G, blockchain, AI, cloud, IoT, AR, VR, big data, and analytics.

Twitter followers: 285,163

GlobalData influencer score: 57

Marcus Borba is the creator of Borba Consulting, an advisory and research firm which solves complex data challenges of companies through tools such as analytics, big data, and business intelligence. Regarded as one of the top data science and business intelligence influencers, Marcus has also contributed to publications such as SAPs and Microstrategys eBook.

Twitter followers: 38,723

GlobalData influencer score: 54

Michael Fisher is a tech evangelist and senior systems analyst at the Whitcraft Group. He is regarded as a top influencer of technologies such as cyber security, IoT, 5G, VR, and fintech, and specialises in areas such as cyber security, consulting, and infrastructure architecture, among others.

Twitter followers: 81,637

GlobalData influencer score: 53

GlobalData is this websites parent business intelligence company.

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Biggest influencers in big data in Q1 2020: The top companies and individuals to follow - Verdict

May 18, 2020

Editor's note:This story is part of a series of profiles ofnotable spring 2020 graduates.

Weighing the pros and cons, considering multiple variables, and a little bit of faith all roll into deciding where to pursue higher education. Fortunately for Department of Physics graduate Tanner Wolfram, the choice was simple. Wolfram enjoyed many travel opportunities during his undergraduate years. Photo courtesy of Tanner Wolfram. Download Full Image

An award-winning and published student, Wolfram is part of the third generation in his family to graduate from Arizona State University.

My family came to ASU forever, Wolfram said. My grandmother came here when I think it was still called Arizona State College. My mom went here, all of her sisters, my dad, and I think one of his siblings.

With such a rich history in his own family, Wolfram has had a front-row seat on ASU's evolution through decades of family stories.

My grandmother talks about how the original Palm Walk used to be different; she called it a small school, he said.

Patricia Reagan, Wolframs maternal grandmother, attended Arizona State College in 1953, before the 1958 vote to change the school name to the one we are used to today. And, in the past 60 years, that small school has sky-rocketed to a sprawling, innovative New American University with nearly 120,000 students spread across four campuses and several locations.

Thats one of the coolest things for me to see, maybe, being here just a little longer than a lot of students, said Wolfram. I got to see so many new buildings and so many new research areas develop here at ASU. To hear about them through emails, and things from the campus, and just to hear about all the progressions ASU is making, thats pretty cool."

Through family involvement in campus activities over the years, Wolfram saw the Tempe campus shift and evolve through his parents' eyes, listening to their stories and commentary on changes and new elements. Both his parents graduated from ASU in 1984.

When asked which changes seemed most remarkable, Wolframs father, Scott Wolfram, said, The addition of the whole science complex with Biodesign, theSchool of Earth and Space Explorationand then the addition of Barrett.

I think the new architectural designs are really beautiful. I also love the plant life that accents the campus, said Wolframs mother, Deborah Estrada. Im also really pleased that there are many places for the students to eat and hang out.

Wolframs earliest memory of ASU is of walking around the Tempe campus with his mother, who brought him to see the sights and also to participate in various campus activities for children, from bowling to violin lessons.

My mom says that the first thing I did at ASU was be part of the psychology child study lab. Obviously, I dont remember this, since I was something like 3 or 4, he said.

Wolfram remembers spending plenty of time in the Bateman Physical Sciences Center during events like ASUs Open Door, and Earth and Space Exploration Day. Fitting, then, that this is the building where he would spend so much time as a physics student.

Wolfram enjoys a broad range of interests and passions and loves to learn. In addition to school and community activities, both at ASU and otherwise, he grew up watching the Science Channel. As time went on and people started asking him what he wanted to do after graduation, he noticed a definite pattern in his favorite shows programs like Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Star Talk" and "How the Universe Works" heavily featured expert guests to explore varying topics.

I kept seeing their titles: astrophysicist, astrophysicist, Wolfram said.

He started as an astrophysics major, but soon switched to physics, not wanting to specialize too early.

I think that is the key, I really wanted a big foundation in physics, he said.

This foundation would help keep his options open and give him the freedom to explore his varied interests without the pressure of locking into a lifelong career path.

Wolfram likes options and has many interests besides his love of physics. In addition to his physics coursework, he enjoyed a wide range of extracurricular activities and completed two foreign language minors, Spanish and Chinese, and participated in a study abroad program in China.

He is very interested in politics, language, learning about new cultures and international relations. His many travel opportunities during his undergraduate years gave him insight, perspective and new experiences that he cant wait to take with him into whatever life holds in store next.

Building his solid foundation in physics, Wolfram also found new interests in his major. One of his favorite subjects, and perhaps his proudest accomplishment, was completing the full undergraduate quantum coursework including acing the notoriously difficult Quantum Physics III.

That one I worked really hard for, he said. It was a hard class. It was areallyhard class. The tests are very challenging; its very demanding. Im glad in the end that I had done enough to get the A.

Despite the level of difficulty, or perhaps because of it, Wolfram found he quite enjoyed abstract and theoretical topics.

Ive always liked things that are a little abstract, a little not-so-here, not so physical, he said. Problems and questions often stayed on his mind for weeks afterward.

I think I like the thinking side of it, he said. Just kind of sit with myself and ponder. You know, probably those were my favorite classes.

He also appreciated the close friendships formed with his classmates, as they all took on such challenging courses together.

I have to say, I really like the department here, thats a really big thing, said Wolfram.

It was a lot of fun because we would all be in the same classes. You know, we worked together, we generally studied together, so that was always fun, and kept things very interesting learning things with them and from them. That was one of the things I really liked about ASU.

Wolfram is currently considering graduate programs. Is there a chance he will end up moving into astrophysics, the topic that launched his undergraduate journey? Perhaps. He certainly hasnt lost his curiosity about the universe.

When asked what project he would tackle if suddenly gifted $40 million, he said he would devote it to furthering space exploration.

My personal viewpoint is that we have a lot of time (hopefully) here on Earth, but I think we should also spend part of that time trying to explore farther out, try to make new worlds, and new things, he said.

Thats probably way far in the distant future, he said. But if thats something I could have helped work on, getting people to different worlds even if I only contributed a little, minor thing that would be interesting.

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Embedded in the community: Outstanding physics student is a third-generation ASU student - ASU Now

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

Peter J. Brancazio, a physics professor who debunked concepts like the rising fastball (physically impossible) and Michael Jordans apparently endless hang time (much shorter than fans believed), died on April 25 in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 81.

The cause was complications of the novel coronavirus, his son Larry said.

Professor Brancazio, who taught at Brooklyn College for more than 30 years, was one of a small number of sports-minded physicists whose research anticipated the use of the advanced statistics that are now accessible through computerized tracking technology. His work, which he began in the 1980s, was filled with terms like launching angle (how high a ball is hit, in degrees) and spin rate (the measurement of a pitch in revolutions per minute) that are now part of baseballs lingua franca. (Launch angle, not launching angle, is the term now widely used.)

Although he was obsessed with basketball, Professor Brancazio was best known for what he had to say about baseball, notably his explanation that a so-called rising fastball could not rise even if pitches thrown by fireballers like Nolan Ryan had seemingly been doing that for decades.

The rising fastball is an illusion, Professor Brancazio told The Kansas City Star in 1987.

Gravity, he said, makes everything fall, even baseballs, and no one can throw one fast enough and with enough spin to overcome gravitys natural force. The rising fastball just looks as if its rising, he said. Its really just not dropping as far as a typical fastball.

A fastball thrown at 90 miles per hour and 1,800 revolutions per minute would drop three feet when it reached home plate, he said. But a fastball that is thrown with still more backspin will fall only two and a half feet, a six-inch difference that creates the illusion of rising.

Professor Brancazio, whose tools included a calculator and a TRS-80 computer, wrote about his research in professional journals; in magazines like Popular Mechanics; and in the 1984 book Sport Science: Physical Laws and Optimum Performance.

Several fans were asked during the segment to guess how long Jordan seemed to hang in the air. Their guesses ranged from six to 10 seconds.

No, Professor Brancazio, said. Even Jordan was subject to gravity. His hang time was only 0.9 seconds.

Later that year, Professor Brancazio elaborated on the physics of hang time for Popular Mechanics. In an article about the science of slam dunks, he devised a formula that determined that a 36-inch vertical leap would equal hang time of 0.87 seconds and that a four-foot vertical leap would equal one second.

No small part of Jordans greatness is the fact that he seems to cover enormous horizontal distances in the air, Professor Brancazio wrote. He accentuates this illusion by releasing his shots on the way down, rather than at the peak of his trajectory.

Peter John Brancazio was born on March 22, 1939, in the Astoria section of Queens. His mother, Ann (Salomone) Brancazio, was an actuarial worker for The Hartford, an insurance company. His father, also named Peter, sorted mail for the Post Office.

When Professor Brancazio and his future wife, Ronnie Kramer, were dating as teenagers, she gave him a gift that would help guide him in his professional life: a telescope. It made him want to study astronomy, she said.

After graduating with a bachelors degree in engineering science from New York University in 1959, he Brancazio earned a masters in nuclear engineering from Columbia University a year later. He began teaching physics at Brooklyn College in 1963 while working toward a Ph.D. in astrophysics from N.Y.U.

During his 34 years at Brooklyn College, he was also a director of the colleges observatory.

Professor Brancazio wrote his first sports article, about basketball, for The American Journal of Physics in 1981. In it, he calculated the optimum launching angles for shots from various distances on the floor.

Having distilled the lessons of shooting on the schoolyards of Astoria, he found that a ball was best launched at an angle of 45 degrees, plus half the angle of the incline from the shooters hand to the front of the rim of the basket, or about 50 to 55 degrees.

He had, he admitted, a personal reason for writing the paper.

In truth, he wrote, the major purpose of this research was to find some means to compensate for the authors stature (5 10 in sneakers), inability to leap more than eight inches off the floor, and advancing age.

His intellectual detour into baseball, basketball and other sports enlivened his classes and made him part of a small group of physicists who brought science to sports, among them the Yale professor Robert Adair, who wrote the 1990 book The Physics of Baseball.

Michael Lisa, a professor of physics at the Ohio State University, said that when he did the research for his 2016 book The Physics of Sports, Professor Brancazios book had been an inspiration. His book is a favorite among physicists for its clear, accurate treatment, Professor Lisa said. d.

Professor Brancazio had no doubt that the people he most wanted to impress athletes would disdain his research. And he knew why, or at least why they did in the era before advanced training techniques transformed athletic achievement.

Larry Bird does not need to be told to release his shots at the optimum launching angle, he wrote in The American Journal of Physics in 1988, nor does Dwight Gooden have to understand the Magnus effect in order to throw a devastating curveball.

Professor Brancazio retired from Brooklyn College in 1997 and then briefly taught adult education courses there and at Queens College. He lectured on science, religion and astronomy at Hutton House, part of Long Island University, from 1999 until last year.

In addition to his wife and his son Larry, Professor Brancazio is survived by another son, David, and five grandchildren.

Professor Brancazio became a sought-after physicist in the news media when sports met science. During Game 1 of the 1991 World Series, for instance, CBS introduced SuperVision, a computerized animation of the path and speed of pitches. One pitch, by Jack Morris of the Minnesota Twins, clocked in at 94 miles per hour when it left his right hand and was the same speed when it landed in the catchers mitt.

CBSs analysts were impressed. But when asked a day later, Professor Brancazio said that a ball could not maintain the same speed on its path of 60 feet 6 inches.

The ball has to slow down by air resistance, he told The New York Times in 1991. No way it can maintain speed or pick up speed. It should lose 9 percent of its speed along the way.

The inventor of SuperVision acknowledged the error, saying that the speeds had probably been rounded off the ball might have left Morriss hand at 94.4 m.p.h. but had landed at 93.6.

A pitch that maintained its speed, it turned out, was as magical as a rising fastball.

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Peter Brancazio, Who Explored the Physics of Sports, Dies at 81 - The New York Times

FP TrendingMay 19, 2020 16:07:42 IST

A team of scientists has discovered a star that is nearly as old as the universe.

The study, which was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, says that the star has already reached the last stages of its life.

According to a report in Science Alert, the red giant star named SMSS J160540.18144323.1 was found to have the lowest iron levels of any star yet analysed in the galaxy.

The report mentioned astronomer Thomas Nordlander of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions and the Australian National University as saying that the anaemic star likely formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. He added that the star has iron levels 1.5 million times lower than that of the Sun.

The formation of a star during the early Universe. Image Credit: Wise, Abel, Kaehler (KIPAC/SLAC)

Nordlander said the low iron levels indicate that the star is extremely old, as the very early Universe had no metals at all. The first stars were primarily made up of hydrogen and helium.

As per a report in Science News, the spectroscopic analysis showed the star had an iron content of just one part per 50 billion, which according to Nordlander is like one drop of water in an Olympic swimming pool.

The report added that the exploding star was just 10 times more massive than the Sun. It had exploded so feebly that the heavy elements had fallen back on the remnant neutron star itself.

Only a very small amount of newly-formed iron escaped the fallen star's gravity and went on to form a new star one of the first-second generation stars that has now been discovered.

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Scientists have discovered a star that is almost as old as the Universe, is in its last stages of life - Firstpost

The Russian RATAN-600 telescope helps to understand the origin of cosmic neutrinos. Credit: Daria Sokol/MIPT Press Office

Russian researchers trace high-energy neutrino origins to black holes in far-off quasars.

Russian astrophysicists have come close to solving the mystery of where high-energy neutrinos come from in space. The team compared the data on the elusive particles gathered by the Antarctic neutrino observatory IceCube and on long electromagnetic waves measured by radio telescopes. Cosmic neutrinos turned out to be linked to flares at the centers of distant active galaxies, which are believed to host supermassive black holes. As matter falls toward the black hole, some of it is accelerated and ejected into space, giving rise to neutrinos that then coast along through the universe at nearly thespeed of light.

The study was published on May 12, 2020, in the Astrophysical Journal.

Neutrinos are mysterious particles so tiny that researchers do not even know their mass. They pass effortlessly through objects, people, and even entire planets. High-energy neutrinos are created when protons accelerate to nearly the speed of light.

The Russian astrophysicists focused on the origins of ultra-high-energy neutrinos, at 200 trillion electron volts or more. The team compared the measurements of the IceCube facility, buried inthe Antarctic ice, with a large number of radio observations. Theelusive particles were found toemerge during radio frequency flares at the centers of quasars.

Quasars are sources of radiation at the centers of some galaxies. They are comprised by amassive black hole that consumes matter floating in a disk around it and spews out extremely powerful jets of ultrahot gas.

Our findings indicate that high-energy neutrinos are born in active galactic nuclei, particularly during radio flares. Since both the neutrinos and the radio waves travel at the speed of light, they reach the Earth simultaneously, said the studys first author Alexander Plavin.

Plavin is a PhD student at Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences(RAS) and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. As such, he is one of the few young researchers to obtain results of that caliber at the outset of their scientific career.

After analyzing around 50 neutrino events detected by IceCube, the team showed that these particles come from bright quasars seen by a network of radio telescopes around the planet. The network uses the most precise method of observing distant objects in the radio band: very long baseline interferometry. This method enables assembling a giant telescope by placing many antennas across the globe. Among the largest elements of this network is the 100-meter telescope of the Max Planck Society in Effelsberg.

Additionally, theteam hypothesized that the neutrinos emerged during radio flares. To test this idea, the physicists studied the data of the Russian RATAN-600 radio telescope in the North Caucasus. The hypothesis proved highly plausible despite the common assumption that high-energy neutrinos are supposed to originate together with gamma rays.

Previous research on high-energy neutrino origins had sought their source right under the spotlight. We thought we would test an unconventional idea, with little hope of success. But we got lucky! Yuri Kovalev from Lebedev Institute, MIPT, and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy commented. The data from years of observations on international radio telescope arrays enabled that very exciting finding, and the radio band turned out to be crucial in pinning down neutrino origins.

At first the results seemed too good to be true, but after carefully reanalyzing the data, we confirmed that the neutrino events were clearly associated with the signals picked up by radio telescopes, Sergey Troitsky from the Institute for Nuclear Research of RAS added. We checked that association based on the data of yearslong observations of the RATAN telescope of the RAS Special Astrophysical Observatory, and the probability of the results being random is only 0.2%. This is quite a success for neutrino astrophysics, and our discovery now calls for theoretical explanations.

The team intends to recheck the findings and figure out the mechanism behind the neutrino origins in quasars using the data from Baikal-GVD, an underwater neutrino detector in Lake Baikal, which is in the final stages of construction and already partly operational. The so-called Cherenkov detectors, used to spot neutrinos including IceCube and Baikal-GVD rely on alarge mass of water or ice as a means of both maximizing the number of neutrino events and preventing the sensors from accidental firing. Of course, continued observations of distant galaxies with radio telescopes are equally crucial to this task.

Reference: Observational Evidence for the Origin of High-energy Neutrinos in Parsec-scale Nuclei of Radio-bright Active Galaxies by Alexander Plavin, Yuri Y. Kovalev, Yuri A. Kovalev and Sergey Troitsky, 12 May 2020, The Astrophysical Journal.DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab86bdarXiv: 2001.00930

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Russian Astrophysicists Trace Neutrinos Mysterious Ghost Particles From Where No One Had Expected - SciTechDaily

The Universe contains unimaginably many objects. Cosmologists are trying to weigh them all. ESO/T. Preibisc

Results from physicists in Bochum have challenged the Standard Model of Cosmology. Infrared data, which have recently been included in the analysis, could be decisive.

Bochum cosmologists headed by Professor Hendrik Hildebrandt have gained new insights into the density and structure of matter in the Universe. Several years ago, Hildebrandt had already been involved in a research consortium that had pointed out discrepancies in the data between different groups. The values determined for matter density and structure differed depending on the measurement method. A new analysis, which included additional infrared data, made the differences stand out even more. They could indicate that this is the flaw in the Standard Model of Cosmology.

Rubin, the science magazine of Ruhr-Universitt Bochum, has published a report on Hendrik Hildebrandts research. The latest analysis of the research consortium, called Kilo-Degree Survey, was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics in January 2020.

Cosmologist Hendrik Hildebrandt is looking for answers to fundamental questions about the Universe, for example how great the density of matter is in space. Credit: Roberto Schirdewahn

Research teams can calculate the density and structure of matter based on the cosmic microwave background, a radiation that was emitted shortly after the Big Bang and can still be measured today. This is the method used by the Planck Research Consortium.

The Kilo-Degree Survey team, as well as several other groups, determined the density and structure of matter using the gravitational lensing effect: as high-mass objects deflect light from galaxies, these galaxies appear in a distorted form in a different location than they actually are when viewed from Earth. Based on these distortions, cosmologists can deduce the mass of the deflecting objects and thus the total mass of the Universe. In order to do so, however, they need to know the distances between the light source, the deflecting object and the observer, among other things. The researchers determine these distances with the help of redshift, which means that the light of distant galaxies arrives on Earth shifted into the red range.

In order to determine the density of matter in the universe using the gravitational lensing effect, cosmologists look at distant galaxies, which usually appear in the shape of an ellipse. These ellipses are randomly oriented in the sky.On its way to Earth, the light from the galaxies passes high-mass objects, such as clusters of galaxies that contain large quantities of invisible dark matter. As a result light is deflected, and the galaxies appear distorted when viewed from Earth.Since the light travels a long way, it is repeatedly deflected by high-mass objects. Light from galaxies that are close to each other mostly passes the same objects and is thus deflected in a similar way.Neighboring galaxies therefore tend to be distorted in a similar way and point in the same direction, although the effect is exaggerated here. Researchers explore this tendency in order to deduce the mass of the deflecting objects.Credit: Agentur der RUB

To determine distances, cosmologists therefore take images of galaxies at different wavelengths, for example one in the blue, one in the green and one in the red range; they then determine the brightness of the galaxies in the individual images. Hendrik Hildebrandt and his team also include several images from the infrared range in order to determine the distance more precisely.

Previous analyses had already shown that the microwave background data from the Planck Consortium systematically deviate from the gravitational lensing effect data. Depending on the data set, the deviation was more or less pronounced; it was most pronounced in the Kilo-Degree Survey. Our data set is the only one based on the gravitational lensing effect and calibrated with additional infrared data, says Hendrik Hildebrandt, Heisenberg professor and head of the RUB research group Observational Cosmology in Bochum. This could be the reason for the greater deviation from the Planck data.

To verify this discrepancy, the group evaluated the data set of another research consortium, the Dark Energy Survey, using a similar calibration. As a result, these values also deviated even more strongly from the Planck values.

High-mass objects in the Universe are not perfect lenses. As they deflect light, they create distortions. The resulting images appear like looking through the foot of a wine glass. Credit: Roberto Schirdewahn

Scientists are currently debating whether the discrepancy between the data sets is actually an indication that the Standard Model of Cosmology is wrong or not. The Kilo-Degree Survey team is already working on a new analysis of a more comprehensive data set that could provide further insights. It is expected to provide even more precise data on matter density and structure in spring 2020.

Reference: KiDS+VIKING-450: Cosmic shear tomography with optical and infrared data by H. Hildebrandt, F. Khlinger, J. L. van den Busch, B. Joachimi, C. Heymans, A. Kannawadi, A. H. Wright, M. Asgari, C. Blake, H. Hoekstra, S. Joudaki, K. Kuijken, L. Miller, C. B. Morrison, T. Trster, A. Amon, M. Archidiacono, S. Brieden, A. Choi, J. T. A. de Jong, T. Erben, B. Giblin, A. Mead, J. A. Peacock, M. Radovich, P. Schneider, C. Sifn and M. Tewes, 13 January 2020, Astronomy & Astrophysics.DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201834878

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The Weight of the Universe Physicists Challenge the Standard Model of Cosmology - SciTechDaily

An international team of astronomers has discovered a close-in super-Earth exoplanet in the HD 164922 planetary system.

An artists impression of the super-Earth exoplanet HD 164922d. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

HD 164922 is a bright G9-type star located approximately 72 light-years away in the constellation of Hercules.

Also known as Gliese 9613 or LHS 3353, the star is slightly smaller and less massive than the Sun and is 9.6 billion years old.

HD 164922 is known to host two massive planets: the temperate sub-Neptune HD 164922c and the Saturn-mass planet HD 164922b in a wide orbit.

The sub-Neptune is 12.9 times more massive than Earth, and orbits the parent star once every 75.8 days at a distance of 0.35 AU (astronomical units).

The Saturn-like planet has a mass 0.3 times that of Jupiter and an orbital period of 1,201 days at a distance of 2.2 AU.

In a new study, Dr. Serena Benatti from the INAF Astronomical Observatory of Palermo and colleagues searched for additional low-mass planets in the inner region of the HD 164922 system.

The astronomers analyzed 314 spectra of the host star collected by HARPS-N (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher for the Northern hemisphere), a spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain.

We monitored this target in the framework of the Global Architecture of Planetary Systems (GAPS) project focused on finding close-in low-mass companions in systems with outer giant planets, they said.

The team detected an additional inner super-Earth with a minimum mass of 4 times that of the Earth.

Named HD 164922d, the planet orbits the star once every 12.5 days at a distance of 0.1 AU.

This target will not be observed with NASAs Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite (TESS), at least in Cycle 2, to verify if it transits, the researchers said.

Dedicated observations with ESAs CHarachterizing ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) could be proposed, but they can be severely affected by the uncertainty on the transit time.

The teams paper will be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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S. Benatti et al. 2020. The GAPS Programme at TNG XXIII. HD 164922 d: a close-in super-Earth discovered with HARPS-N in a system with a long-period Saturn mass companion. A&A, in press; arXiv: 2005.03368

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Hot Super-Earth Discovered Orbiting Ancient Star | Astronomy - Sci-News.com