Droning On

Someone thinks it's a great idea to fly 500 drones over New York City to create a huge ad in the sky on Thursday evening. Because New Yorkers certainly don't have any historical reason to mistrust unknown aircraft over their skyline, right?

As Gothamist reports, the drone swarm is part of a "surreal takeover of New York City’s skyline" on behalf of — we shit you not — the mobile game Candy Crush.

Fernanda Romano, Candy Crush's chief marketing officer, told Gothamist that the stunt will "turn the sky into the largest screen on the planet" using the small, light-up drones.

Though this is not the first time the Manhattan skyline has been used as ad space — that distinction goes to the National Basketball Association and State Farm, which did a similar stunt this summer during the NBA draft — local lawmakers are ticked off about it nonetheless.

"I think it’s outrageous to be spoiling our city’s skyline for private profit," Brad Hoylman, a state senator that represents Manhattan's West Side in the NY Legislature, told the local news site. "It’s offensive to New Yorkers, to our local laws, to public safety, and to wildlife."

Freak Out

Indeed, as the NYC Audubon Society noted in a tweet, the Candy Crush crapshoot "could disrupt the flight patterns of thousands of birds flying through NYC, leading to collisions with buildings" as they migrate.

Beyond the harm this will do to birds and the annoyance it will undoubtedly cause the famously-grumpy people of New York, this stunt is also going down with very little warning, considering that Gothamist is one of the only news outlets even reporting on it ahead of time.

While most viewers will hopefully be able to figure out what's going on pretty quickly, the concept of seeing unknown aircraft above the skyline is a little too reminiscent of 9/11 for comfort — and if Candy Crush took that into consideration, they haven't let on.

So here's hoping this event shocks and awes Thursday night city-goers in a good way, and not in the way that makes them panic.

More drone warfare: Russia Accused of Pelting Ukraine Capital With "Kamikaze" Drones

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Huge Drone Swarm to Form Giant Advertisement Over NYC Skyline

Spaceplane Buddy

After launching into orbit roughly three months ago, China's top-secret spaceplane has released a mysterious object, which is now circling the Earth behind it, SpaceNews reports.

There's very little we know about China's "reusable experimental spacecraft," except that it launched atop a Long March 2F rocket back in August. We don't know its purpose, what it looks like, or what cargo it was carrying during launch — but it's an intriguing development, nonetheless, for China's reusable launch platform.

Mysterious Object

The object was released between October 24 and October 31, according to tracking data being analyzed by the US Space Force's 18th pace Defense Squadron.

We can only hazard a guess as to what the mysterious object's purpose is. According to Harvard astronomer and space tracker Jonathan McDowell, it "may be a service module, possibly indicating an upcoming deorbit burn."

Based on the size and weight of payloads Long March rockets usually carry, China's mysterious spaceplane is likely similar to the Air Force's X-37B spaceplane, which is similarly shrouded in mystery and currently on its sixth mission.

We also don't know when the Chinese model will make its return back to Earth, but given recent activity at the Lop Nur base in Xinjiang suggests, it may land there in the near future, according to the report.

It's a puzzling new development for China's secretive spacecraft — but it does raise the possibility of a renewed interest in spaceplanes, a potentially affordable and reusable way to launch payloads into orbit.

More on the spaceplane: China Launches Mysterious "Reusable Test" Spacecraft

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Chinese Spaceplane Releases Mystery Object Into Orbit

Observatory Offline

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) Observatory in Chile has been hit with a cyberattack that has taken its website offline and forced it to suspend all observations, authorities there said.

Even email services were limited in the aftermath, illustrating the broad impact of the hack.

Nested high up on a plateau in the Chilean Andes at over 16,000 feet above sea level, ALMA is one of the most powerful and advanced radio telescopes in the world. Notably, ALMA helped take the first image of a black hole in 2019, in a collaborative effort that linked radio observatories worldwide into forming the Event Horizon Telescope.

Thankfully, ALMA's impressive arsenal of 66 high-precision antennas, each nearly 40 feet in diameter, was not compromised, the observatory said, nor was any of the scientific data those instruments collected.

In High Places

What makes ALMA so invaluable is its specialty in observing the light of the cooler substances of the cosmos, namely gas and dust. That makes ALMA a prime candidate for documenting the fascinating formations of planets and stars when they first emerge amidst clouds of gas.

Since going fully operational in 2013, it's become the largest ground-based astronomical project in the world, according to the European Southern Observatory, ALMA's primary operators.

So ALMA going offline is a distressing development, especially to the thousands of astronomers worldwide that rely on its observations and the some 300 experts working onsite. Getting it up and running is obviously a top priority, but the observatory said in a followup tweet that "it is not yet possible to estimate a date for a return to regular activities."

As of now, there's no information available on who the hackers were, or exactly how they conducted the attack. Their motivations, too, remain a mystery.

More on ALMA: Astronomers Think They Found the Youngest Planet in the Galaxy

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Hackers Just Took Down One of the World's Most Advanced Telescopes

Latest Feud

Another day, another Elon Musk feud on Twitter — except now, he's the owner of the social network, and he's beefing with a sitting member of Congress.

The whole thing started innocently enough earlier this week, when firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY, and better known by her initials, "AOC") subtweeted the website's new owner.

"Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that 'free speech' is actually a $8/mo subscription plan," the New York Democratic Socialist tweeted in a post that, upon Futurism's perusal, appeared to load only half the time.

Sweat Equity

Not one to be shown up, Musk later posted a screenshot of an AOC-branded sweatshirt from the congressperson's website, with its $58 price tag circled and an emoji belying the billionaire's alleged affront at the price.

In response, Ocasio-Cortez said she was proud her sweatshirts were made by union labor, and that the proceeds from their sales were going to fund educational support for needy kids. She later dug in further, noting that her account was "conveniently" not working and joking that Musk couldn't buy his way "out of insecurity."

Yo @elonmusk while I have your attention, why should people pay $8 just for their app to get bricked when they say something you don’t like?

This is what my app has looked like ever since my tweet upset you yesterday. What’s good? Doesn’t seem very free speechy to me pic.twitter.com/e3hcZ7T9up

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 3, 2022

Bricked

To be clear, any suggestion that Musk personally had anything to do with any Twitter glitches on AOC's part would seem ludicrously petty. But then again, this is a guy who once hired a private detective to investigate a random critic.

Occam's razor, though, suggests that it was probably AOC's mega-viral tweet that broke the site's notoriously dodgy infrastructure. Of course, that's not a ringing endorsement of the site that Musk just acquired for the colossal sum of $44 billion.

More on Twitter: Twitter Working on Plan to Charge Users to Watch Videos

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AOC Says Her Twitter Account Broke After She Made Fun of Elon Musk

Jeff Bezos' former housekeeper is suing the Amazon founder for workplace discrimination that she says forced her to literally climb out out the window of his house to use the bathroom.

In the suit, filed this week in a Washington state court, the former housekeeper claimed that she and Bezos' other household staff were not provided with legally-mandated eating or restroom breaks, and that because there was no "readily accessible bathroom" for them to use, they had to clamber out a laundry room window to get to one.

In the complaint, lawyers for the ex-housekeeper, who is described as having worked for wealthy families for nearly 20 years, wrote that household staff were initially allowed to use a small bathroom in the security room of Bezos' main house, but "this soon stopped... because it was decided that housekeepers using the bathroom was a breach of security protocol."

The suit also alleges that housekeepers in the billionaire's employ "frequently developed Urinary Tract Infections" that they believed was related to not being able to use the bathroom when they needed to at work.

"There was no breakroom for the housekeepers," the complaint adds. "Even though Plaintiff worked 10, 12, and sometimes 14 hours a day, there was no designated area for her to sit down and rest."

The housekeeper — who, like almost all of her coworkers, is Latino — was allegedly not aware that she was entitled to breaks for lunch or rest, and was only able to have a lunch break when Bezos or his family were not on the premises, the lawsuit alleges.

The Washington Post owner has denied his former housekeeper's claims of discrimination through an attorney.

"We have investigated the claims, and they lack merit," Harry Korrell, a Bezos attorney, told Insider of the suit. "[The former employee] made over six figures annually and was the lead housekeeper."

He added that the former housekeeper "was responsible for her own break and meal times, and there were several bathrooms and breakrooms available to her and other staff."

"The evidence will show that [the former housekeeper] was terminated for performance reasons," he continued. "She initially demanded over $9M, and when the company refused, she decided to file this suit."

As the suit was just filed and may well end in a settlement, it'll likely be a long time, if ever, before we find out what really happened at Bezos' house — but if we do, it'll be a fascinating peek behind the curtain at the home life of one of the world's most powerful and wealthy men.

More on billionaires: Tesla Morale Low As Workers Still Don't Have Desks, Face Increased Attendance Surveillance

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Jeff Bezos' Housekeeper Says She Had to Climb Out the Window to Use the Bathroom

You know that "research" going around saying humans are going to evolve to have hunchbacks and claws because of the way we use our smartphones? Though our posture could certainly use some work, you'll be glad to know that it's just lazy spam intended to juice search engine results.

Let's back up. Today the Daily Mail published a viral story about "how humans may look in the year 3000." Among its predictions: hunched backs, clawed hands, a second eyelid, a thicker skull and a smaller brain.

Sure, that's fascinating! The only problem? The Mail's only source is a post published a year ago by the renowned scientists at... uh... TollFreeForwarding.com, a site that sells, as its name suggests, virtual phone numbers.

If the idea that phone salespeople are purporting to be making predictions about human evolution didn't tip you off, this "research" doesn't seem very scientific at all. Instead, it more closely resembles what it actually is — a blog post written by some poor grunt, intended to get backlinks from sites like the Mail that'll juice TollFreeForwarding's position in search engine results.

To get those delicious backlinks, the top minds at TollFreeForwarding leveraged renders of a "future human" by a 3D model artist. The result of these efforts is "Mindy," a creepy-looking hunchback in black skinny jeans (which is how you can tell she's from a different era).

Grotesque model reveals what humans could look like in the year 3000 due to our reliance on technology

Full story: https://t.co/vQzyMZPNBv pic.twitter.com/vqBuYOBrcg

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) November 3, 2022

"To fully realize the impact everyday tech has on us, we sourced scientific research and expert opinion on the subject," the TollFreeForwarding post reads, "before working with a 3D designer to create a future human whose body has physically changed due to consistent use of smartphones, laptops, and other tech."

Its sources, though, are dubious. Its authority on spinal development, for instance, is a "health and wellness expert" at a site that sells massage lotion. His highest academic achievement? A business degree.

We could go on and on about TollFreeForwarding's dismal sourcing — some of which looks suspiciously like even more SEO spam for entirely different clients — but you get the idea.

It's probably not surprising that the this gambit for clicks took off among dingbats on Twitter. What is somewhat disappointing is that it ended up on StudyFinds, a generally reliable blog about academic research. This time, though, for inscrutable reasons it treated this egregious SEO spam as a legitimate scientific study.

The site's readers, though, were quick to call it out, leading to a comically enormous editor's note appended to the story.

"Our content is intended to stir debate and conversation, and we always encourage our readers to discuss why or why not they agree with the findings," it reads in part. "If you heavily disagree with a report — please debunk to your delight in the comments below."

You heard them! Get debunking, people.

More conspiracy theories: If You Think Joe Rogan Is Credible, This Bizarre Clip of Him Yelling at a Scientist Will Probably Change Your Mind

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That "Research" About How Smartphones Are Causing Deformed Human Bodies Is SEO Spam, You Idiots

Giving

Capitalizing on our dynamic location, intellectual capital and the inextinguishable desire to effect real change, UCLA is a catalyst for innovation and economic growth. The impact UCLA has in just a single year is enormous.

The Astronomy Division needs your support. While UCLA is a public University, state funding has steadily decreased.

Private giving can help us educate promising young scientists who will make the discoveries of tomorrow.

Giving to the Astronomy Division

Groundbreaking research, cutting-edge technology, award-winning faculty UCLAs Division of Astronomy & Astrophysics offers a rewarding environment to pursue higher education and topical research. All members of the Division carry out active research programs that garner widespread international recognition. Doctoral students can participate in a variety of research projects, which frequently incorporate observations with the worlds largest ground-based telescopes, orbiting observatories, and other astronomical facilities.

Our PhD recipients go on to highly productive careers in academia, government, industry and business. Many have obtained prestigious postdoctoral fellowships from entities such as the National Research Council, Hubble, NSF, Caltech Millikan, and Princeton Russell. UCLA faculty have access to numerous observational facilities, including the 10-m telescopes of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Division has strong bonds with Physics, and with Earth, Planetary and Space Science.

Learn about our faculty

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UCLA Division of Astronomy & Astrophysics

Deep below the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Sanford Underground Research Facility (Sanford Lab) is hosting an innovative and uniquely sensitive dark matter detectorthe LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) and to which physicists at UMass Amherst contributed. The LZ experiment has passed a check-out phase of startup operations and delivered first results, the very first step in helping to determine one of the fundamental mysteries of the universe.

No one has ever seen dark matter. It does not emit, absorb or scatter light, and yet it is estimated that about 85% of the total mass of the universe comes from the substance.

Dark matter is the main source of the gravity we see in astrophysics. We need dark matter. But no one has seen a dark matter particle.

Scott Hertel, professor of physics at UMass Amherst

There are lots of problems in astrophysics which are solved by dark matter, says Scott Hertel, a professor of physics at UMass Amherst and whose team designed some of the techniques and equipment to calibrate the LZ detector. There is more dark matter in the universe than normal matter. It tells us how galaxies form, how stars orbit and how things worked in the early universe, which was hot and dense. Dark matter is the main source of the gravity we see in astrophysics. We need dark matter. But no one has seen a dark matter particle. We have no idea what the particle is.

That might soon change, thanks to the LZ experiment, which has just released results from its first 60 live days of testing, long enough to confirm that all aspects of the detector were functioning well. In a paper recently posted online, LZ researchers report that with the initial run, LZ is already the worlds most sensitive dark matter detector.

LZ Spokesperson Hugh Lippincott of the University of California Santa Barbara said, We plan to collect about 20 times more data in the coming years, so were only getting started. Theres a lot of science to do and its very exciting!

The heart of the LZ dark matter detector is buried nearly a mile underground in the Sanford Lab in Lead, S.D. The detector itself is comprised of two nested titanium tanks filled with ten metric tonnes of very pure liquid xenon and viewed by two arrays of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) able to detect faint sources of light. LZ is designed to capture dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). The experiment is underground to protect it from cosmic radiation at the surface that could drown out dark matter signals.

Were hoping to see one atom of xenon get kicked by one galactic WIMP particle, which will produce a brief and tiny signal: several electrons and several photons of light, says Hertel.

Particle collisions in the xenon produce visible scintillation or flashes of light, which are recorded by the PMTs, explained Aaron Manalaysay from Berkeley Lab who, as Physics Coordinator, led the collaborations efforts to produce these first physics results. The collaboration worked well together to calibrate and to understand the detector response, Manalaysay said.

The design, manufacturing, and installation phases of the LZ detector were led by Berkeley Lab project director Gil Gilchriese in conjunction with an international team of 250 scientists and engineers from over 35 institutions from the U.S., U.K., Portugal and South Korea. The LZ Operations Manager is Berkeley Labs Simon Fiorucci. Together, the collaboration is hoping to use the instrument to record the first direct evidence of dark matter, the so-called missing mass of the cosmos.

Chris Nedlik spent the entirety of his UMass Amherst physics Ph.D. research working with Hertel on the LZ detectors calibration system.

I was a graduate student at a really fortunate time, he says, because I got to see it all come together, and then got to spend a few months underground in South Dakota at the end.

Because the LZ detector is so sensitiveHertel says that if one innocent object that has normal background radiation, like a banana, is around the detector, it could kill the experimentfiguring out how to calibrate it without destroying it was no small feat. So, the team build a scale model replica of the detector here at UMass and practiced calibrating it so that when they arrived in South Dakota, and confronted the real thing, they could perform their tasks flawlessly.

It was quite the experience for Nedlik. It was a huge transition working in an underground lab, he says. You ride the lift down through pitch-black darkness for ten minutes and then arrive in a laboratory space that is fully finished. You wouldnt even know youre underground.

One of the reasons that I chose to get my Ph.D. at UMass, Nedlik continues, is that I knew the department had many opportunities for world-class research. I didnt exactly know what I wanted to do in physics, but over the course of the time working on LZ, I was constantly in disbelief that I got to contribute to a project like this and meet such incredible colleagues.

The take-home message from this successful startup: Were ready and everythings looking good, said Berkeley Lab Senior Physicist and past LZ Spokesperson Kevin Lesko. Its a complex detector with many parts to it and they are all functioning well within expectations, he said.

Mike Headley, executive director of Sanford Lab, said, The entire Sanford Lab team congratulates the LZ Collaboration in reaching this major milestone. The LZ team has been a wonderful partner and were proud to host them at Sanford Lab.

One of the reasons that I chose to get my Ph.D. at UMass is that I knew the department had many opportunities for world-class research. I didnt exactly know what I wanted to do in physics, but over the course of the time working on LZ, I was constantly in disbelief that I got to contribute to a project like this and meet such incredible colleagues.

Chris Nedlik, UMass Amherst physics Ph.D. candidate

LZ is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility. LZ is also supported by the Science & Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology; and the Institute for Basic Science, Korea. Over 35 institutions of higher education and advanced research provided support to LZ. The LZ collaboration acknowledges the assistance of the Sanford Underground Research Facility.

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A Mile Underground in The Quest for Dark Matter - UMass News and Media Relations

James Bardeen, who helped elucidate the properties and behavior of black holes, setting the stage for what has been called the golden age of black hole astrophysics, died on June 20 in Seattle. He was 83.

His son William said the cause was cancer. Dr. Bardeen, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Washington, had been living in a retirement home in Seattle.

Dr. Bardeen was a scion of a renowned family of physicists. His father, John, twice won the Nobel Prize in Physics, for the invention of the transistor and the theory of superconductivity; his brother, William, is an expert on quantum theory at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

Dr. Bardeen was an expert on unraveling the equations of Einsteins theory of general relativity. That theory ascribes what we call gravity to the bending of spacetime by matter and energy. Its most mysterious and disturbing consequence was the possibility of black holes, places so dense that they became bottomless one-way exit ramps out of the universe, swallowing even light and time.

Dr. Bardeen would find his lifes work investigating those mysteries, as well as related mysteries about the evolution of the universe.

Jim was part of the generation where the best and brightest went to work on general relativity, said Michael Turner, a cosmologist and emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, who described Dr. Bardeen as a gentle giant.

James Maxwell Bardeen was born in Minneapolis on May 9, 1939. His mother, Jane Maxwell Bardeen, was a zoologist and a high school teacher. Following his fathers work, the family moved to Washington, D.C.; to Summit, N.J.; and then to Champaign-Urbana, Ill., where he graduated from the University of Illinois Laboratory High School.

He attended Harvard and graduated with a physics degree in 1960, despite his fathers advice that biology was the wave of the future. Everybody knew who my father was, he said in an oral history interview recorded in 2020 by the Federal University of Par in Brazil, adding that he had not felt the need to compete with him. It was impossible, anyway, he said.

Working under the physicist Richard Feynman and the astrophysicist William A. Fowler (who would both become Nobel laureates), Dr. Bardeen obtained his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1965. His thesis was about the structure of supermassive stars millions of times the mass of the sun; astronomers were beginning to suspect that they were the source of the prodigious energies of the quasars being discovered in the nuclei of distant galaxies.

After holding postdoctoral positions at Caltech and the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the astronomy department at the University of Washington in 1967. An avid hiker and mountain climber, he was drawn to the school by its easy access to the outdoors.

By then, what the Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, refers to as the golden age of black hole research was well underway, and Dr. Bardeen was swept up in international meetings. At one, in Paris in 1967, he met Nancy Thomas, a junior high school teacher in Connecticut who was trying to brush up on her French. They were married in 1968.

In addition to his son William, a senior vice president and the chief strategy officer of The New York Times Company, and his brother, William, Dr. Bardeens wife survives him, along with another son, David, and two grandchildren. A sister, Elizabeth Greytak, died in 2000.

Dr. Bardeen was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, as is his brother and as was his father.

Although he was speedy at math, Dr. Bardeen didnt write any faster than he spoke. William Press, a former student of Dr. Thornes now at the University of Texas, recalled being sent to Seattle to finish a paper that Dr. Bardeen and he were supposed to be writing. Nothing had been written. Dr. Bardeens wife then commanded the two to sit on opposite ends of a couch with a pad of paper. Dr. Bardeen would write a sentence and pass the pad to Dr. Press, who would either reject or approve it and then pass the pad back. Each sentence, Dr. Press said, took a few minutes. It took them three days, but the paper got written.

One of the epochal moments of those years was a monthlong summer school in Les Houches, France, in 1972 featuring all the leading black hole scholars. Dr. Bardeen was one of a half-dozen invited speakers. It was during that meeting that he, Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University and Brandon Carter, now of the Paris Observatory, wrote a landmark paper entitled The Four Laws of Black Hole Mechanics, which became a springboard for future work, including Dr. Hawkings surprise calculation that black holes could leak and eventually explode.

In another famous calculation the same year, Dr. Bardeen deduced the shape and size of a black holes shadow as seen against a field of distant stars a doughnut of light surrounding dark space.

That shape was made famous, Dr. Thorne said, by the Event Horizon Telescopes observations of black holes in the galaxy M87 and in the center of the Milky Way, and by visualizations in the movie Interstellar.

Another of Dr. Bardeens passions was cosmology. In a 1982 paper, he, Dr. Turner and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton described how submicroscopic fluctuations in the density of matter and energy in the early universe would grow and give rise to the pattern of galaxies we see in the sky today.

Jim was delighted that we used his formalism, Dr. Turner said, and was sure we got it right.

Dr. Bardeen moved to Yale in 1972. Four years later, unhappy with the academic bureaucracy in the East and yearning for the outdoors again, he moved back to the University of Washington. He retired in 2006.

But he never stopped working. Dr. Thorne recounted a recent telephone conversation in which they reminisced about the hiking and camping trips they used to take with their families. In the same conversation, Dr. Bardeen described recent ideas he had about what happens as a black hole evaporates, suggesting that it might change into a white hole.

That was one aspect of Jim in a nutshell, Dr. Thorne wrote in an email, thinking deeply about physics in creative new ways right up to the end of his life.

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James Bardeen, an Expert on Unraveling Einsteins Equations, Dies at 83 - The New York Times

The luminosity of a star is a measure of its energy output, and therefore a measure of how rapidly it is using up its fuel supply. The lifetime of a star would be simply proportional to the mass of fuel available divided by the luminosity if the luminosity were constant. Beyond these statements, one must rely on the empirical data collected and models of that data to estimate the lifetime of a given star.

One useful step toward modeling stellar lifetimes is the empirical mass-luminosity relationship.

Since the mass of the star is the fuel for the nuclear fusion processes, one could then presume that the lifetime on the main sequence is proportional to the stellar mass divided by the luminosity. It depends upon the fraction of mass that is actually available as nuclear fuel, and considerable effort has gone into modeling that fraction for the Sun to yield a solar lifetime of 10 x 109 years. Using that projected lifetime, the stellar lifetime can then be expressed as

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Stellar Lifetimes - Georgia State University

Though sci-fi movies would have us believe that space is incredibly cold even freezing space itself isnt exactly cold. In fact, it doesnt actually have a temperature at all.

Temperature is a measurement of the speed at which particles are moving, and heat is how much energy the particles of an object have. So in a truly empty region space, there would be no particles and radiation, meaning theres also no temperature.

Of course, space is full of particles and radiation to produce heat and a temperature. So how cold is space, is there any region that is truly empty, and is there anywhere that the temperature drops to absolute zero?

Related: What is the coldest place in the universe?

The hottest regions of space are immediately around stars, which contain all the conditions to kick start nuclear fusion.

Things really warm up when radiation from a star reaches a spot in space with a lot of particles. This gives the radiation from stars like the sun something to actually act upon.

Thats why Earth is a lot warmer than the region between our planet and its star. The heat comes from particles in our atmosphere vibrating with solar energy and then bumping into each other distributing this energy.

Proximity to our star and possessing particles are no guarantee of warmth, though. Mercury closest to the sun is blisteringly hot during the day and frigidly cold at night. Its temperatures drop to a low of 95 Kelvins (-288 Fahrenheit/-178 Celsius ).

Temperatures dip to -371 F (-224 C) on Uranus, making it even colder than on the furthest planet from the sun, Neptune, which has a still incredibly cold surface temperature of -353 F (-214 C ).

This is a result of a collision with an Earth-sized object early in its existence causing Uranus to orbit the sun on an extreme tilt, making it unable to hang on to its interior heat.

Far away from stars particles are so spread out that heat transfer via anything but radiation is impossible, meaning temperatures radically drop. This region is called the interstellar medium.

The coldest and densest molecular gas clouds in the interstellar medium can have temperatures of 10 K (-505 F/-263 C or ) while less dense clouds can have temperatures as high as 100 K (-279 F/-173 C).

The universe is so vast and filled with such a multitude of objects, some blisteringly hot, others unimaginably frigid, that it should be impossible to give space a single temperature.

Yet, there is something that permeates the entirety of our universe with a temperature that is uniform to 1 part in 100,000. In fact, the difference is so insignificant that the change between a hot spot and a cold spot is just 0.000018 K.

This is known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and it has a uniform temperature of 2.7 K (-45F/-270C). As 0 K is absolute zero this is a temperature just 2.725 degrees above absolute zero.

The CMB is a remnant leftover from an event that occurred just 400,000 after the Big Bang called the last scattering. This was the point when the universe ceased to be opaque after electrons bonded to protons forming hydrogen atoms, which stopped electrons from endlessly scattering light and enabling photons to freely travel.

As such this fossil relic "frozen in" to the universe represents the last point when matter and photons were aligned in terms of temperature.

The photons that make up the CMB weren't always so cold, taking around 13.8 billion years to reach us, the expansion of the Universe has redshifted these photons to lower energy levels.

Originating when the universe was much denser and hotter than it is now, the starting temperature of the radiation that makes up the CMB is estimated to have been around 3,000 K (5,000 F/2,726C).

As the universe continues to expand, that means space is colder now than it's ever been and it's getting colder.

If an astronaut were left to drift alone in space then exposure to the near-vacuum of space couldnt freeze an astronaut as often depicted in science fiction.

There are three ways for heat to transfer, conduction, which occurs through touch, convection which happens when fluids transfer heat, and radiative which occurs via radiation.

Conduction and convection can't happen in empty space due to the lack of matter and heat transfer occurs slowly by radiative processes alone. This means that heat doesnt transfer quickly in space.

As freezing requires heat transfer, an exposed astronaut losing heat via radiative processes alone would die of decompression due to the lack of atmosphere much more rapidly than they freeze to death.

For more information about the properties of space, check out "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (opens in new tab)" by Neil deGrasse Tyson and "Origins of the Universe: The Cosmic Microwave Background and the Search for Quantum Gravity (opens in new tab)" by Keith Cooper.

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How cold is space? Physics behind the temperature of the universe - Space.com

The National Science Foundation has recognized a record nine University of Florida faculty members from a wide variety of academic disciplines with 2022 Early Career Development Awards, one of its most prestigious honors.

The award recognizes junior faculty who possess the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. The impact of these awards is crucial to both the standing of UF faculty in the academy and their effect as a force multiplier for research funding.

The CAREER Award is the National Science Foundations most prestigious grant in support of early career faculty, reserved for those who show the potential not only to lead their respective fields in discovery, but also to serve as academic role models in research and education, said UF Vice President for research David Norton. To have nine UF faculty members honored with CAREER Awards in a single year is testament to the current quality of our faculty across the university and to a promising future for UF research.

The CAREER Award recipients for 2022 are:

Navid Asadi, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Navid Asadis project Backside Protection Against Contactless Optical Attacks on Integrated Circuits in Advanced Technology Nodes will assess the security vulnerabilities of modern Integrated Circuits (ICs) against contactless optical attacks from backside and to provide a framework to develop proper countermeasures. The project will leverage access to state-of-the-art equipment and expertise available at the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity (FICS) Researchs SCAN Lab, home to more than $10 million of advanced imaging equipment for electronics physical assurance.

An educational component of the project will provide students training in advanced instrumentations, and new educational materials on optical attacks and countermeasures will be developed.

Dr. Asadi received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from K.N. Toosi University of Technology, his M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Amir Kabir University of Technology, and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Connecticut. He serves as co-director of the SCAN Lab at the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity (FICS) Research and associate director of the Micro-Electronics Security Training (MEST) Center.

Read more about Dr. Asadis award here. (https://news.ece.ufl.edu/2022/06/03/asadi-receives-nsf-career-award/)

Dana Bartosova, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics

Dana Bartosovas project aims to further her study of abstract topological dynamics. Topology, a branch of mathematics where the relationships between shapes are studied, has applications ranging from string theory in physics to differential equations. Dr. Bartosovas research lies at the intersection of a variety of fields, studying the connections between topological dynamics, set theory and model theory applying logic to the study of structures in mathematics. The project also includes an expansion of Math Parents Coffee, a community to support parents as they identify and face obstacles in academia.

Dr. Bartosova received her Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Toronto. Her expertise and research interests include topological dynamics, Ramsey theory, model theory, set theory, abstract harmonic analysis and ergodic theory.

Read more about Dr. Bartosovas award here. (https://news.clas.ufl.edu/clas-professors-receive-nsf-career-awards/)

Jie Fu, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Jie Fus project Formal Synthesis of Provably Correct Cyber-Physical Defense with Asymmetric Information will work to enhance the security and performance of cyber-physical systems, specifically autonomous robotic systems in dynamic, uncertain environments. The project continues progress made by Dr. Fu in her research areaintegrated formal methods, learning, control, and game theory.

Dr. Fu received her M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Automation from Beijing Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Delaware. She was also a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

Read more about Dr. Fus project here. (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2144113&HistoricalAwards=false)

Adam Ginsburg, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Astronomy

Adam Ginsburgs project will expand his groups observations of forming stars, searching for gas that is orbiting massive, young stars those much bigger than our Sun in dusty disks. These disks are the potential birth sites of planetary systems, providing clues to what our solar system might have looked like when planets were forming.

Dr. Ginsburg received his B.S. in Astrophysics from Rice University, and his M.S. and doctorate degree in Astrophysics from the University of Colorado. He is a Jansky Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico.

Read more about Dr. Ginsburgs award here. (https://news.clas.ufl.edu/clas-professors-receive-nsf-career-awards/)

Amanda Krause, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Amanda Krauses project will help uncover the underlying mechanism for grain growth in ceramic materials to guide new processing methods for achieving their optimal performance.Dr. Krause and her team will conduct grain growth studies using a new 3D microscopy tool that uses X-rays to characterize the internal structure of the ceramics non-destructively. This tool allows her to collect 4D data (3D plus time) to measure individual grain boundary velocities and correlate them to local features, something conventional microscopy techniques cannot deliver.

The project will also help train the next generation of ceramic engineers with the necessary skills for similar research, with a ceramic-processing kit currently under development for implementation in K-12 schools.

Dr. Krause received her Ph.D. from Brown University. She is director of the Krause Lab, which creates and studies structural ceramics for high temperature and extreme environments, engineering grain boundaries and other interfaces to have superior properties.

Read more about Dr. Krauses award here. (https://mse.ufl.edu/need-krause-nsf-career-awards/)

Jeongim Kim, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Horticultural Sciences at UF/IFAS

Jeongim Kims five-year project will study mechanisms that control plant growth, specifically, to identify molecular mechanisms linking plant-growth regulation and stress responses, helping them deal with adverse environmental conditions such as pathogen attacks. The study will reveal how the growth control and defense mechanisms are linked, indicating to scientists whether its feasible to breed andgenerate stress-tolerant crops without sacrificing their yield. This project also includes a K-12 educational activity called Phyto-Detective, which will develop a series of videos aimed to raise awareness of phytochemicals for a young student audience.

Dr. Kim received her Ph.D. in Horticulture from Purdue University, where she also received her postdoctoral training.

Read more about Dr. Kims research here. (https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2142898&HistoricalAwards=false)

Ryan Need, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Ryan Needs project will create new measurement capabilities and knowledge in the field of nanoscale ion diffusion. Dr. Need and their team will engineer the vacancies in the atomic structure of transition metal oxides, e.g., iron oxide or cobalt oxide, as a pathway for oxygen ions to move between materials, hoping to span the gaps between the existing ionic and electronic technologies to create greater energy efficiency, longer information storage lifetimes and the ability to support new computing paradigms like quantum computing.

The award also supports an educational outreach component to provide low-cost activity kits and free training videos to help K-12 teachers introduce students to materials science concepts. Free, online videos will complement these kits to reinforce the concepts learned and connect them back to the ongoing research.

Dr. Need received their Ph.D. from the University of California Santa Barbara. Their research interests include Thin Film Deposition, Interface and Defect Engineering, Emergent Phenomena, Quantum Materials, Nanoionics, Magnetism, X-Ray and Neutron Scattering

Read more about Dr. Needs award here. (https://mse.ufl.edu/need-krause-nsf-career-awards/)

Kathe Todd-Brown, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Engineering School of Sustainable Infrastructure and Environment

Kathe Todd-Browns project will improve the predictive understanding of soil carbon dynamics by connecting different theories with diverse measurements. She will study the decay rate of soil by connecting observed decay trends with the theoretical understanding of the underlying processes through a new multi-scale modeling framework. Currently, soil decay rates are difficult to predict, and this has an impact on how well we can predict atmospheric greenhouse gas levels and set emissions targets. This new research will help improve predictions by linking the decay rates to soil properties processes through a new multi-scale modeling framework.

The project will also build a data-centered community to co-develop a standardized vocabulary for soil measurements.

Dr. Todd-Brown is a computational biogeochemist who uses mathematics and computers to understand how soil breathes. She received her B.S. in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College and earned her Ph.D. in Earth System Science from the University of California Irvine.

Read more about Dr. Todd-Browns award here. (https://www.essie.ufl.edu/todd-brown-receives-nsf-career-award-to-predict-soil-carbon-dynamics/)

Xiao-Xiao Zhang, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Physics

Xiao-Xiaos project will investigate a quasiparticle called exciton, which is created when light is absorbed by a solid. Her study focuses on the interactions between light and matter in two-dimensional quantum materials and the coupling between electron spin and photons, useful for quantum information processing, which holds the key to the future design of quantum devices, like computers and lasers. Her project will also promote participation of women and youth in STEM.

Dr. Zhang received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her research interest involves probing the light-matter interaction and transient dynamics in nanoscale materials, fabricating novel functional 2D material platforms, such as monolayer semiconductors, magnetic materials and superconductors.

Read more about Dr. Zhangs award here. (https://news.clas.ufl.edu/clas-professors-receive-nsf-career-awards/)

Aside from funding, emerging scholar-researchers also face the challenge of lacking sufficient know-how in navigating funding and resource opportunities, in addition to writing effective proposals.

Forrest Masters, associate dean for research and facilities in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, said university leaders have been working hard to help junior faculty navigate funding and resource opportunities and write effective proposals.

In addition to offering workshops that present high-level overviews of the award space, we have created departmental-led teams to help junior faculty hone their proposal-development skills and increase their chances of earning that NSF CAREER award, Masters said. Faculty like me would not be where we are without the support and mentorship of our colleagues, particularly at the start of our careers. Providing vital proposal feedback to junior faculty members and seeing that come to fruition is a fantastic way to pay it forward.

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Record number of UF faculty earn National Science Foundation awards - University of Florida

Scientists can finally explain why some massive stars appear to dance around in the sky even though they are not actually moving: The stars have unusually bubbly guts that cause their surfaces to wobble, thus changing the amount of light they give off, according to a new study.

The dancing stars are known as red supergiants, enormous stellar objects that have swelled up and cooled down as they've neared the end of their lives. These stars are about eight times more massive than the sun and can have a diameter up to 700 times that of the sun, which would be the equivalent of the sun's surface reaching beyond the orbit of Mars (engulfing Mercury, Venus, Earth and the Red Planet in the process). However, despite their colossal stature, these slowly dying behemoths can be extremely challenging to locate with precision.

Astronomers can typically determine the near-exact location of a star by identifying its photo-center, or the point at the center of the light it emits, which usually lines up perfectly with its barycenter, or gravitational center. In most stars, photo-centers occupy fixed positions. But in red supergiants, this point appears to wobble across the star, moving slightly from side to side over time. That motion makes it hard to pinpoint the stars' barycenters, which provide stars' exact cosmic addresses and don't move around like the jiggling photo-centers do.

In the new study, researchers compared the dancing red supergiants to smaller main sequence stars, or stars in the stable portions of their lifetimes. The scientists looked at stars in the Perseus stellar cluster a region with a high concentration of stars, particularly red supergiants, located around 7,500 light-years from the solar system using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory.

Related: Newly discovered 'micronovae' shoot out of the magnetic poles of cannibalistic stars

"We found that the position uncertainties of red supergiants are much larger than for other stars," study co-author Rolf Kudritzki, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii and director of the Munich Institute for Astro-, Particle and BioPhysics in Germany, said in a statement (opens in new tab).

To get to the bottom of why these stars are so wobbly, the team created intensity maps of red supergiants' surfaces, calculating radiation measurements and using hydrodynamic simulations to show changes in the stars' 3D skins.

The maps revealed that the surfaces of red supergiants are very dynamic, with lumpy gaseous structures that wax and wane over time, radiating more intense bursts of energy than other surface regions. These ephemeral yet high-intensity structures flare more brightly than the rest of the star's surface, which causes the photo-center to shift; if a bright structure flares up on the left side of a red supergiant, the photo-center also shifts to the left.

The massive size of red supergiants could explain why this might be happening. Most stars' outer shells are made up of thousands of adjacent convective cells elongated pockets of rotating gas, mainly hydrogen and helium, that cycle hotter gas from the star's interior to its outer surface where it cools and sinks back down, somewhat like the bubbles inside a lava lamp.

But because red supergiants are so massive, gravity at their surfaces is much weaker than at their cores. Their convective cells are therefore much larger than in other stars, taking up between 20% and 30% of a red supergiant's substantial radius, or between 40% and 60% of its diameter. Bigger convective cells can transport more gas to the star's surface, which is what creates the intensely bright structures responsible for their shifting photo-centers, according to the study.

The team's data show that these surface structures can range in size, which determines how long they stick around. "The largest structures evolve on timescales of months or even years, while smaller structures evolve over the course of several weeks," lead study author Andrea Chiavassa, an astronomer at the Lagrange Laboratory in Nice, France, and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPIA) in Munich, said in the statement. This means that the location of the stars' photo-centers is constantly in flux, he added.

Astronomers suspect that red supergiants play an important role in the evolution of galaxies; the enormous stellar bodies spit out large amounts of gas and heavy elements that are important in birthing new stars and exoplanets. The supergiants' bright and massive surface structures likely play a part in ejecting these vital materials, and future studies of the stars' wobbling could help resolve exactly how that happens.

"The dancing pattern of red supergiants in the sky could teach us more about their boiling envelopes," study co-author and MPIA Director Selma de Mink said in the statement. "We will be able to extract important information about the stellar dynamics and better understand the physical processes that cause the vigorous convection in these stars."

The study was published May 6 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics (opens in new tab).

Originally published on Live Science.

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Red supergiant stars 'dance' because they have too much gas - Livescience.com

Whenever you take a look out at the Universe and record what you see, youre engaging in one of the oldest sciences there is: astronomy. Similarly, whenever you investigate how a physical phenomenon in the Universe works on quantum, classical, or cosmic scales including by puzzling out or applying the laws that govern it, youre engaging in the science of physics. Each of these fields, thousands of years old in their own right, were long thought to be independent of one another. While physics applied only to the mundane observations and experiments we can perform on Earth, astronomy instead explored the realm of the heavenly.

Today, however, we generally recognize that the rules governing the Universe dont change from one location to another; theyre the same on Earth as they are everywhere, as well as every when, in the Universe. In every way that weve measured them, the laws of nature appear to be identical at all points in time and in space, and do not appear to change.

Astrophysics, then, is the overlap of astronomy with physics: where we study the entire Universe, and everything within it, with the full power of the laws of physics applied to them. In a sense, its the primary way that we creatures that came to life within this Universe are able to study and know about where we all came from. Heres the story of what astrophysics is all about.

For millennia, humans had been watching the skies, attempting to track the various objects, their daily and annual (and beyond) motions, all while looking for patterns that they might fit into. However, there was no connection to the physical laws we were discovering here on Earth, from the Babylonians to the ancient Greeks to the Persians, Romans, Ottomans, and beyond. Even Galileo, famed for both his physics experiments and his astronomical observations, never managed to link the two together. When it came to the motions of heavenly objects, it was largely regarded as a philosophical, theological, or ideological concern, rather than a scientific one.

Johannes Kepler came close, as he arrived at the most precise and accurate description of the motion of bodies within our Solar System. Keplers three laws, that:

were empirically derived, meaning that they were arrived at based on observations alone, rather than having a deeper meaning behind them. Despite their success in describing planetary motion, Keplers advances werent rooted in the physical laws that govern the Universe.

It wasnt until Isaac Newton came along that astrophysics, as a science, was born. The motion of objects on Earth, under the influence of our planets acceleration-causing gravity, had been studied for around a century by the time Newton rose to prominence. The tremendous advance that Newton made, however, remarkably distinguished him from all of his contemporaries and predecessors: the rule that he formulated for how objects attracted one another Newtons law of universal gravitation didnt simply apply to objects on Earth. Rather, they applied to all objects, regardless of the objects properties, universally.

When Edmond Halley approached Newton and inquired about the type of orbit that would be traced out by an object that obeyed an inverse-square force law, he was shocked to find that Newton knew the answer an ellipse off of the top of his head. Newton had methodically and painstakingly derived the answer over the course of multiple years, inventing calculus along the way as a mathematical tool to aid in problem-solving. His results led Halley to understand the periodic nature of comets, enabling him to predict their return. The science of astrophysics had never seemed so promising.

Two scientists who were contemporaneous with Newton, Christiaan Huygens and Ole Rmer, helped showcase the early power of applying the laws of physics to the greater Universe. Huygens, curious about the distance to the stars, made an assumption that others before him had made: that the stars in the sky were similar to our own Sun, but were simply very far away. Huygens, who was famed for both his clockmaking prowess and his experiments with light and waves, knew that if a light source was placed at double the distance it was previously at, it would only appear one-quarter as bright.

Huygens attempted to discover the distance to the stars by drilling a series of holes in a brass disk and holding the disk up to the Sun during the day. If he reduced the brightness significantly enough, he reasoned, the light that was allowed through would only be as bright as a star in the sky. Yet no matter how small he drilled his holes, the tiny pinprick of sunlight that came through vastly outshone even the brightest star. It wasnt until he inserted a light-blocking glass bead into the smallest of the drilled holes that he could match the Suns reduced brightness to the night skys brightest star: Sirius. It required a total reduction in the Suns brightness of a factor of 800 million to reproduce what he saw when he looked at Sirius.

The Sun, he concluded, if it were placed ~28,000 times farther away than it presently is (about half a light-year), would appear as bright as Sirius. Hundreds of years later, we now know that Sirius is about ~20 times farther than that, but also that Sirius is about ~25 times intrinsically brighter than the Sun. Huygens, who had no way of knowing that, had truly achieved something remarkable.

Ole Rmer, meanwhile, recognized that he could use the great distances between the Sun, the planets, and their moons to measure the speed of light. As the Galilean moons of Jupiter circled behind the giant planet, they passed into and out of Jupiters shadow. Because Earth makes its own orbit, we can see those moons either entering or exiting Jupiters shadow at various times during the year. By measuring the changes in the amount of time it takes the light to travel:

Rmer was able, to the best accuracy of his measurements, to infer the speed of light for the first time. Astrophysics isnt exclusively about applying the laws of nature that we discover on Earth to the greater Universe at large, but also is about using the observations available to us in the laboratory of the Universe to teach us about the very laws and properties of nature itself.

Yet it would take centuries for astrophysics to advance beyond the ideas of the late 1600s. Indeed, these ideas and applications encapsulated the entirety of astrophysics for the next 200 years, up through the middle of the 19th century. At that point, two additional advances occurred: the discovery of an astronomical parallax, giving us the distance to a star beyond the Sun, and the discovery of an astronomical paradox, indicating a problem with the age of the Sun and the Earth.

The idea of a parallax is simple: as the Earth moves through its orbit around the Sun, the closest objects to us will appear to shift, with time, relative to the background, more distant objects. When you hold your thumb out at arms length and close one eye, you see your thumb in a certain position relative to objects in the background. When you then open that eye and close the other one, your thumb appears to shift. Parallax is precisely the same concept, except:

Its only because theres such a great distance to the stars best measured in light-years that it was so difficult to observationally discover this phenomenon.

But it was actually a paradox that truly opened the door to modern astrophysics. In the late 1800s, the age of the Earth was estimated to be at least hundreds of millions of years old, and more likely, billions of years old, to account for various geological formations and the evolution and diversity of life on Earth. For example, Charles Darwin, himself more of a naturalist than what wed consider a modern biologist, calculated that the weathering of the Weald, a two-sided chalk deposit in southern England, required at least 300 million years for the process of erosion, alone, to occur.

However, a physicist named William Thomson, who would later become known by his titular name, Lord Kelvin, declared Darwins conclusions to be absurd. After all, we now knew the mass of the Sun from orbital mechanics, and we could measure the Suns energy output. Assuming the Suns energy output was a constant over the history of the Earth, Kelvin calculated the various ways that the Sun could have produced energy. He considered combustion of fuel; he considered feeding off of comets and asteroids; he considered gravitational contraction. But even with that last option, the longest lifetime for the Sun he could fathom was only 20-to-40 million years.

The science of astrophysics had revealed a paradox: either our ages for cosmic objects were completely wrong, or there was a source to the Suns power that was completely unknown to Kelvin at the time.

Of course, we now know that theres a lot more than gravitation and combustion at play in the Universe. There are nuclear reactions taking place, including fusion and fission events, all across the Universe, including in the cores of stars. There are atomic and even subatomic transitions and interactions that occur in star-forming regions, in interstellar gases and plasmas, and in the protoplanetary disks where stellar systems first assemble. There are electromagnetic phenomena, including net charges, electric currents, and strong magnetic fields, all throughout the depths of space. And under the most extreme conditions, there are even natural lasers and particles accelerated to 99.999999999999%+ the speed of light.

Wherever you have a physical system in space, wherever a physical phenomenon gives rise to a potentially observable signature, or wherever you can make an observation that sheds light on the physical properties of some aspect of the Universe, you have the potential to do astrophysics with it. Not all physics is astrophysics, and not all astronomy is astrophysics, but wherever these two fields intersect the observational science of astronomy and the laboratory science of physics you can do astrophysics with it.

Today, there are four main branches of modern astrophysics, all of which work together, in concert, to teach us fundamental truths about the Universe.

Questions that were once thought to be beyond the realm of scientific investigation have now fallen into the realm of astrophysics, and in many cases, weve even uncovered the answers. For thousands upon thousands of years, our ancestors wondered at the vastness of the Universe, posing puzzles they could not solve.

For generations upon generations of humans, these were questions for philosophers, theologians, and poets; they were ideas to wonder about, with no answers in sight. Today, these questions have all been answered by the science of astrophysics, and have opened up even deeper questions that we hope to answer the only way astrophysicists know how to answer them: by putting the question to the Universe itself. By examining the laboratory of deep space with the right tools and the proper methods, we can, for the first time in history, actually comprehend our place in the cosmos.

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What is astrophysics? - Big Think

Classification: Academic Level ASalary package: $76,271 - $95,732 per annum plus 17% superannuationTerm: Full time, Fixed Term (2 years)Position Description & Selection Criteria:PD and PEWER - Postdoctoral Fellow_updated.pdf

Closing Date: 21 February 2022

The Area

TheANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics(RSAA) operates Australias largest optical observatory and has access to the worlds largest optical telescopes.

Our staff and students have made major contributions to astronomy, mapping the structure and formation of the Milky Way, discovering planets orbiting other stars, measuring dark matter both within our Galaxy and in the wider Universe, and discovering the accelerating expansion of the Universe.

Our astronomers include winners of the Prime Ministers Prize for Science and the Nobel Prize.

At our administrative home at theMount Stromlo Observatorywe host theAdvanced Instrumentation and Technology Centrewhich is a national facility established to support the development of the next generation of instruments for astronomy and space science.

Our research telescopes are situated in the ANUSiding Spring Observatory, located in the Warrumbungle region of New South Wales. The observatory began as a field station for the Mount Stromlo Observatory and has since become Australias premier optical and infrared observatory, housing the state-of-artSkyMappertelescope.

The Position

The Postdoctoral Fellow will join the Astro-Machine-Learning group that specialises in the study of wide range topics (Galactic Archaeology, star formation and cosmology) in big-data astronomy through lens of statistics and machine learning.

The Person

To excel in this role you will have:

The Australian National University is a world-leading institution and provides a range of lifestyle, financial and non-financial rewards and programs to support staff in maintaining a healthy work/life balance whilst encouraging success in reaching their full career potential. For more information, please click here.

To see what the Science at ANU community is like, we invite you to follow us on social media at Instagram and Facebook.

For more information about the position please contact Associate Professor Yuan-Sen Ting on E: yuan-sen.ting@anu.edu.au.

ANU Values diversity and inclusion and is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to those of all backgrounds and identities. People with a disability are encouraged to apply. For more information about staff equity at ANU, click here.

Application information

In order to apply for his role, please make sure that you upload the following documents:

Applications which do not address the selection criteria may not be considered for the position.

The successful candidate will be required to undergo a background check during the recruitment process. An offer of employment is conditional on satisfactory results.

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Postdoctoral Fellow, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics job with AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY (ANU) | 278733 - Times Higher Education...

INSTITUTE COORDINATOR at the Department of Astrophysics

The University of Vienna has about 90,000 students and employs approximately 10,000 people. This makes it one of the largest employers in the region of Vienna and Austria's largest research and education institution.

Reference number: 12532

The Department of Astrophysics, within the Faculty of Earth Sciences, Geography and Astronomy, seeks to fill, as soon as possible, the full-time position of an Institute Coordinator.

What we offer:

The Department of Astrophysics offers a diverse and international working environment with currently about 70 scientific staff and five colleagues in administration and IT. The working languages are English and German. We are the largest astronomy institute in Austria and involved in numerous international collaborations. The working place, the University Observatory, is located in the 18th district of Vienna in the middle of the natural monument Observatory Park.

As Institute Coordinator you will be in charge of all organizational aspects of the department. Within the department you will become the interface between administrative and scientific staff as well as with the head of the department. Furthermore, you will coordinate the cooperation with institutions on faculty level (e.g., with the Dean's Office, the Studies Service Center) as well as on university level (e.g., with service units such as Human Resources and Gender Equality, Accounting and Finance, Facility and Resources Management) in administrative matters.

This position offers you unique opportunities to connect people across different areas within an internationally-orientated environment. You can build on various support structures already in place. You will also have access to a broad range of courses and training provided by the University of Vienna.

What we seek:

The Department of Astrophysics is looking for a competent, motivated, committed and independent Institute Coordinator with experience in management in the university and/or public and/or scientific sector.

Your profile should include:

- Bachelor's degree in a relevant discipline or (subject-specific) A-Levels plus corresponding professional experience and knowledge

- Experience in process management and ability to steer (complex) processes.

- Experience in leadership

- Distinct organizational and coordination skills

- High social and communicative competence

- Ability to work in a team, ability to work under pressure, service orientation, flexibility

- Independent and solution-oriented working style

- High level of written and verbal expression

- Excellent written and spoken German and English skills

- Comprehensive IT user skills (MS Office)

- Willingness for further training

Your application should include a letter of motivation, CV, and a list of reference contacts or letters of recommendation. Please concatenate your application materials into a single PDF file and send it to the University of Vienna's Job Center (jobcenter.univie.ac.at) by 15 February 2022, quoting reference number 12532.

If you have any further questions about this position, please visit the website jobcenter.univie.ac.at or contact Prof. Dr. Glenn van de Ven (glenn.vandeven@univie.ac.at; +43-1-4277-53806).

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Institute Coordinator - Department of Astrophysics job with UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA | 278512 - Times Higher Education (THE)

January 19, 2022

The University of Rochester is the new home of a research center devoted to computer simulations used to advance the understanding of astrophysics, plasma science, high-energy-density physics, and fusion energy.

The Flash Center for Computational Science recently moved from the University of Chicago to the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rochester. Located in the Bausch and Lomb building on the River Campus, the center encompasses numerous cross-disciplinary, computational physics research projects conducted using the FLASH code. The FLASH code is a publicly available multi-physics code that allows researchers to accurately simulate and model many scientific phenomenaincluding plasma physics, computational fluid dynamics, high-energy-density physics (HEDP), and fusion energy researchand inform the design and execution of experiments.

We are thrilled to have the Flash Center and the FLASH code join the University of Rochester research enterprise and family, and we want to thank the University of Chicago for working hand-in-hand with us to facilitate this transfer, says Stephen Dewhurst. Dewhurst, the vice dean for research at the School of Medicine and Dentistry and associate vice president for health sciences research for the University, is currently serving a one-year appointment as interim vice president for research.

Development of the FLASH code began in 1997 when the Flash Center was founded at the University of Chicago. The code, which is continuously updated, is currently used by more than 3,500 scientists across the globe to simulate various physics processes.

The Flash Center fosters joint research projects between national laboratories, industry partners, and academic groups around the world. It also supports training in numerical modeling and code development for graduate students, undergraduate students, and postdoctoral research associates, while continuing to develop and steward the FLASH code itself.

In the last five years FLASH has become the premiere academic code for designing and interpreting experiments at the worlds largest laser facilities, such the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Omega Laser Facility at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE), here at the University of Rochester, says Michael Campbell, the director of the LLE. Having the Flash Center and the FLASH code at Rochester significantly strengthens LLEs position as a unique national resource for research and education in science and technology.

Petros Tzeferacos, an associate professor of physics and astronomy and a senior scientist at the LLE, serves as the centers director. Tzeferacoss research combines theory, numerical modeling with the FLASH code, and laboratory experiments to study fundamental processes in plasma physics and astrophysics, high-energy-density laboratory astrophysics, and fusion energy. Tzeferacos became director of the Flash Center in 2018 after serving for five years as associate director and code group leader, when the center was still housed at the University of Chicago.

The University of Rochester is a unique place where plasma physics, plasma astrophysics, and high-energy-density science are core research efforts, Tzeferacos says. We have in-house computational resources and leverage the high-power computing resources at LLE, the Center for Integrated Research Computing (CIRC), and national supercomputing facilities to perform our numerical studies. We also train the next generation of computational physics and astrophysics scientists in the use and development of simulation codes.

Research at the Flash Center is funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the US DOE Office of Science Fusion Energy Sciences, the US DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and the LLE.

FLASH is a critically important simulation tool for academic groups engaging with NNSAs academic programs and performing HEDP research on NNSA facilities, says Ann J. Satsangi, federal program manager at the NNSA Office of Experimental Sciences. The Flash Center joining forces with the LLE is a very positive development that promises to significantly contribute to advancing high-energy-density science and the NNSA mission.

Tags: Arts and Sciences, Department of Physics and Astronomy, featured-post, high-energy-density physics, Laboratory for Laser Energetics, Petros Tzeferacos

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Housed at Rochester, the Flash Center advances cutting-edge physics research - University of Rochester

Artists conception of the Milky Way galaxy. Credit: Pablo Carlos Budassi

Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, our Universe was born in a massive explosion that gave rise to the first subatomic particles and the laws of physics as we know them. About 370,000 years later, hydrogen had formed, the building block of stars, which fuse hydrogen and helium in their interiors to create all the heavier elements. While hydrogen remains the most pervasive element in the Universe, it can be difficult to detect individual clouds of hydrogen gas in the interstellar medium (ISM).

This makes it difficult to research the early phases of star formation, which would offer clues about the evolution of galaxies and the cosmos. An international team led by astronomers from the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy (MPIA) recently noticed a massive filament of atomic hydrogen gas in our galaxy. This structure, named Maggie, is located about 55,000 light-years away (on the other side of the Milky Way) and is one of the longest structures ever observed in our galaxy.

The study that describes their findings, which recently appeared in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, was led by Jonas Syed, a Ph.D. student at the MPIA. He was joined by researchers from the University of Vienna, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIFR), the University of Calgary, the Universitt Heidelberg, the Centre for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, the Argelander-Institute for Astronomy, the Indian Institute of Science, and NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The research is based on data obtained by the HI/OH/Recombination line survey of the Milky Way (THOR), an observation program that relies on the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. Using the VLAs centimeter-wave radio dishes, this project studies molecular cloud formation, the conversion of atomic to molecular hydrogen, the galaxys magnetic field, and other questions related to the ISM and star formation.

The ultimate purpose is to determine how the two most-common hydrogen isotopes converge to create dense clouds that rise to new stars. The isotopes include atomic hydrogen (H), composed of one proton, one electron, and no neutrons, and molecular hydrogen (H2) is composed of two hydrogen atoms held together by a covalent bond. Only the latter condenses into relatively compact clouds that will develop frosty regions where new stars eventually emerge.

This image shows a section of the side view of the Milky Way as measured by ESAs Gaia satellite. The dark band consists of gas and dust, which dims the light from the embedded stars. The Galactic Centre of the Milky Way is indicated on the right of the image, shining brightly below the dark zone. The box to the left of the middle marks the location of the Maggie filament. It shows the distribution of atomic hydrogen. The colors indicate different velocities of the gas. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO & T. Mller/J. Syed/MPIA

The process of how atomic hydrogen transitions to molecular hydrogen is still largely unknown, which made this extraordinarily long filament an especially exciting find. Whereas the largest known clouds of molecular gas typically measure around 800 light-years in length, Maggie measures 3,900 light-years long and 130 light-years wide. As Syed explained in a recent MPIA press release:

The location of this filament has contributed to this success. We dont yet know exactly how it got there. But the filament extends about 1600 light-years below the Milky Way plane. The observations also allowed us to determine the velocity of the hydrogen gas. This allowed us to show that the velocities along the filament barely differ.

The teams analysis showed that matter in the filament had a mean velocity of 54 km/s-1, which they determined mainly by measuring it against the rotation of the Milky Way disk. This meant that radiation at a wavelength of 21 cm (aka. the hydrogen line) was visible against the cosmic background, making the structure discernible. The observations also allowed us to determine the velocity of the hydrogen gas, said Henrik Beuther, the head of THOR and a co-author on the study. This allowed us to show that the velocities along the filament barely differ.

This false-color image shows the distribution of atomic hydrogen measured at a wavelength of 21 cm. The red dashed line traces the Maggie filament. Credit: J. Syed/MPIA

From this, the researchers concluded that Maggie is a coherent structure. These findings confirmed observations made a year before by Juan D. Soler, an astrophysicist with the University of Vienna and co-author on the paper. When he observed the filament, he named it after the longest river in his native Colombia: the Ro Magdalena (Anglicized: Margaret, or Maggie). While Maggie was recognizable in Solers earlier evaluation of the THOR data, only the current study proves beyond a doubt that it is a coherent structure.

Based on previously published data, the team also estimated that Maggie contains 8% molecular hydrogen by a mass fraction. On closer inspection, the team noticed that the gas converges at various points along the filament, which led them to conclude that the hydrogen gas accumulates into large clouds at those locations. They further speculate that atomic gas will gradually condense into a molecular form in those environments.

However, many questions remain unanswered, Syed added. Additional data, which we hope will give us more clues about the fraction of molecular gas, are already waiting to be analyzed. Fortunately, several space-based and ground-based observatories will become operational soon, telescopes that will be equipped to study these filaments in the future. These include the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and radio surveys like the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which will allow us to view the very earliest period of the Universe (Cosmic Dawn) and the first stars in our Universe.

Originally published on Universe Today.

For more on this research, see Massive Filament Structure 3900 Light-Years Long Discovered in the Milky Way.

Reference: The Maggie filament: Physical properties of a giant atomic cloud by J. Syed, J. D. Soler, H. Beuther, Y. Wang, S. Suri, J. D. Henshaw, M. Riener, S. Bialy, S. Rezaei Kh., J. M. Stil, P. F. Goldsmith, M. R. Rugel, S. C. O. Glover, R. S. Klessen, J. Kerp, J. S. Urquhart, J. Ott, N. Roy, N. Schneider, R. J. Smith, S. N. Longmore and H. Linz, 20 December 2021, Astronomy & Astrophysics.DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202141265

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Astronomers Find the Biggest Structure in the Milky Way: Filament of Hydrogen 3,900 Light-Years Long - SciTechDaily

From left to right: Chien-Shiung Wu, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin

Whether advancing cancer treatment techniques or helping us land on the Moon, women in science have helped change the course of history. While there is still work to be done in getting more women involved in STEM careers, there are countless examples of incredible female scientists who have worked tirelessly to advance our knowledge of the scientific world. In fact, we can easily name famous female scientists who can truly say that they've made a lasting impact on society.

From well-known legends like Marie Curie to scientists like Alice Ball (whose premature death cut her career short), there are countless women who have contributed to science. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics are just some of the fields where these women have made an impact. Some, like Caroline Herschel struggled to get recognition in a time when earning a wage as a female scientist was unheard of. Others, like Jennifer Doudna, are leading the way into the future by developing new technologies.

Get inspired by some of the incredible women on our list, which includes four Nobel Prize winners.

Caroline Herschels path to astronomy began when she left her native Germany to live with her brother William in England. Though her mother had attempted to stifle her education, Herschel was naturally curious and began to cultivate an interest in astronomy alongside her brother. Though she began by helping him mount telescopes and record his observations, she began her own career in earnest. She discovered many comets and was one of the first women to do so. After sending her findings to the Astronomer Royal, she was asked to correct the official star catalog. Eventually, the Royal Family began paying her a salary for her work as her brother's assistantsomething unheard of for a woman at the time.

In 1835, shealong with Mary Somervillewas named an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society. They were the first two women to become members.

Any list of incredible female scientists would be severely lacking without the inclusion of the iconic Marie Curie. Her achievements as a physicist go well beyond her gender, though she continues to inspire generations of female scientists. Not only did Curie discover two elementsradium and poloniumbut she also coined the word radioactivity. She was the first person to attempt radiation therapy for cancer and championed its use in medicine. Curie also developed mobile X-ray units that were used in World War I to help wounded soldiers get the care that they needed.

In 1903, Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physicsor any Nobel Prize for that matterfor her work on the radiation phenomenon. In 1911, she added another Nobel Prize to her list of honors. This time she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work in isolating radium. To this day, she is the only person to be awarded Nobel Prizes in different scientific categories.

Though Alice Ball only lived to the age of 24, her legacy is enduring. As an undergraduate studying pharmaceutical chemistry, she was already breaking barriers. During that time, she published an article alongside her male professor in a respected scientific journal, which was a rare feat for a woman and an even rarer feat for an African American woman at the time.

Ball would go on to become the first womanand first African Americanto earn a master's degree at the University of Hawaii. She would also become the university's first female and African American chemistry professor. She also did critical work in the fight again leprosy by developing a treatment called the Ball Method, which was the most effective available in the early 20th century.

There was a time when the world wasn't sure what stars were made of. But thanks to the work of Cecilia Payne-Gaposckin, we all know that they are composed of helium and hydrogen. Even more impressive than this discovery is the fact that the British American astrophysicist made the statement when she was just a doctoral student in 1925. Though the claim in her thesis was rejected by the scientific community initially, it was later proved correct through observation.

As if that contribution wasn't enough, her work on variable stars was also groundbreaking. She and her team made over three million observations that helped determine the evolution of stars and laid the foundation for modern astrophysics. She also marks an important milestone for Harvard University, as she was the first person to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College.

From cancer research to genetic engineering, the discoveries of American geneticist Barbara McClintock have had far-reaching effects. McClintock studied botany and was fascinated by new discoveries in DNA. She did a deep dive into the genetics of maize and realized that chromosomes were responsible for passing down hereditary traits. She also discovered jumping genes, or the fact that genes can sometimes transpose, causing certain characteristics to turn on and off.

McClintock won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work on transpositions. As of 2021, she is the only woman to win that category on her own.

German American physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer was only the second woman after Marie Curie to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. She took home the award in 1963, along with two male colleagues, for her work on the structure of nuclear shells. For all her talent, Goeppert Mayer often worked unpaid or voluntary positions at universities following her move to the United States in the 1930s. This was partially due to her gender, but also because there was anti-German sentiment throughout World War II. Not until 1941 did she receive her first paid position as a professor when she worked part-time at Sarah Lawrence College.

However, this did not hold her back. Not only did she work on the Manhattan Project, but she also collaborated with Edward Teller on his super bomb. Highly active in the scientific community, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for early-career women physicists was established in her honor in 1986.

In 1953, mathematician Katherine Johnson began her legendary career at NASA as a human computer. As one of the first African American women to work at NASA, she broke barriers while helping the space agency achieve its goals. One of her finest achievements was calculating the flight path of Apollo 11, which allowed it to successfully land on the Moon and make its way back to Earth.

During her 33-year career, she moved from manually calculating complex trajectories to guiding NASA toward the use of computers. In 2016, her work was celebrated in the filmHidden Figures, in which she was portrayed by Taraji P. Henson.

Though today Rosalind Franklin is heralded for her work in understanding the structure of DNA, her work was only fully appreciated after her untimely death. The English chemist worked on X-ray diffraction images of DNA that led to the correct identification of its double helix structure. Unfortunately, Franklin's life was cut short after a battle with ovarian cancer. She died in 1958 at the age of 37. Many felt that she should have been awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work, but this was not common practice at the time.

Since her death, her work has been widely recognized and her colleague Aaron Clug continued her research, winning a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1982. Many feel that, had she been alive, Franklin would have shared in that honor.

Sometimes called the first lady of physics, Chinese American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu made significant contributions to the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu came to the United States in 1936 to earn her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan with the encouragement of her advisor in China. Though she wished to return to China after her studies, World War II changed her plans. She eventually made contributions to the Manhattan Project, but is perhaps best known for the Wu experiment. This 1956 particle and nuclear physics experiment proved that parity is not conserved. The work earned her two male colleagues who proposed the experiment the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics. Wu was eventually acknowledged in 1978 for her work when she was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics.

Wu greatly admired the work of Marie Curie and, interestingly, they are often compared for their work in experimental physics.

Photo: ASCO

Oncologist Jane Cooke Wright was a pioneer in cancer research. Born into a family of doctors, Dr. Wright followed this legacy and forged a name for herself thanks to her innovations in chemotherapy and in finding new drugs to treat breast cancer. She helped make chemotherapy more widely available to the public during her time at the Cancer Research Foundation at Harlem Hospital in the 1950s. Dr. Wright was also the first to identify methotrexate, a drug that is the basis for all modern chemotherapy and is still widely used today.

She also helped found the American Society of Clinical Oncology and was the first female president of the New York Cancer Society. Her interests also carried her abroad, as she traveled to Kenya, Ghana, China, and Eastern Europe to work with other oncologists and treat patients.

When biochemist Jennifer Doudna took home the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistrya prize she shared with Emmanuelle Charpentiershe made history as the first woman to win jointly with another woman. Professor Doudna's work on the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors has revolutionized genetic research by allowing scientists to modify a cell's genes in record time.

Professor Doudna is currently the Chair Professor of the chemistry department at the University of Berkely, California. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Doudna and a group of fellow researchers opened a testing center at the Innovative Genomics Institute and used CRISPR-based technologies to help diagnose the illness.

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11 Trailblazing Female Scientists That You Need to Know - My Modern Met

After years of speculation, quantum computing is heresort of.

Physicists are beginning to consider how quantum computing could provide answers to the deepest questions in the field. But most arent getting caught up in the hype. Instead, they are taking what for them is a familiar tackplanning for a future that is still decades out, while making room for pivots, turns and potential breakthroughs along the way.

When were working on building a new particle collider, that sort of project can take 40 years, says Hank Lamm, an associate scientist at the US Department of Energys Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. This is on the same timeline. I hope to start seeing quantum computing provide big answers for particle physics before I die. But that doesnt mean there isnt interesting physics to do along the way.

Classical computers have been central to physics research for decades, and simulations that run on classical computers have guided many breakthroughs. Fermilab, for example, has used classical computing to simulate lattice quantum chromodynamics. Lattice QCD is a set of equations that describe the interactions of quarks and gluons via the strong force.

Theorists developed lattice QCD in the 1970s. But applying its equations provedextremely difficult. Even back in the 1980s, many people said that even if they had an exascale computer [a computer that can perform a billion billion calculations per second], they still couldnt calculate lattice QCD, Lamm says.

But that turned out not to be true.

Within the past 10 to 15 years, researchers have discovered the algorithms needed to make their calculations more manageable, while learning to understand theoretical errors and how to ameliorate them. These advances have allowed them to use a lattice simulation, a simulation that uses a volume of a specified grid of points in space and time as a substitute for the continuous vastness of reality.

Lattice simulations have allowed physicists to calculate the mass of the protona particle made up of quarks and gluons all interacting via the strong forceand find that the theoretical prediction lines up well with the experimental result. The simulations have also allowed them to accurately predict the temperature at which quarks should detach from one another in a quark-gluon plasma.

The limit of these calculations? Along with being approximate, or based on a confined, hypothetical area of space, only certain properties can be computed efficiently. Try to look at more than that, and even the biggest high-performance computer cannot handle all of the possibilities.

Enter quantum computers.

Quantum computers are all about possibilities. Classical computers dont have the memory to compute the many possible outcomes of lattice QCD problems, but quantum computers take advantage of quantum mechanics to calculate differently.

Quantum computing isnt an easy answer, though. Solving equations on a quantum computer requires completely new ways of thinking about programming and algorithms.

Using a classical computer, when you program code, you can look at its state at all times. You can check a classical computers work before its done and trouble-shoot if things go wrong. But under the laws of quantum mechanics, you cannot observe any intermediate step of a quantum computation without corrupting the computation; you can observe only the final state.

That means you cant store any information in an intermediate state and bring it back later, and you cannot clone information from one set of qubits into another, making error correction difficult.

It can be a nightmare designing an algorithm for quantum computation, says Lamm, who spends his days trying to figure out how to do quantum simulations for high-energy physics. Everything has to be redesigned from the ground up. We are right at the beginning of understanding how to do this.

Quantum computers have already proved useful in basic research. Condensed matter physicistswhose research relates to phases of matterhave spent much more time than particle physicists thinking about how quantum computers and simulators can help them. They have used quantum simulators to explore quantum spin liquid states and to observe a previously unobserved phase of matter called aprethermal time crystal.

The biggest place where quantum simulators will have an impact is in discovery science, in discovering new phenomena like this that exist in nature, says Norman Yao, an assistant professor at University of California Berkeley and co-author on the time crystal paper.

Quantum computers are showing promise in particle physics and astrophysics. Many physics and astrophysics researchers are using quantum computers to simulate toy problemssmall, simple versions of much more complicated problems. They have, for example, used quantum computing to test parts of theories of quantum gravity or create proof-of-principle models, like models of theparton showers that emit from particle colliderssuch as the Large Hadron Collider.

"Physicists are taking on the small problems, ones that they can solve with other ways, to try to understand how quantum computing can have an advantage, says Roni Harnik, a scientist at Fermilab. Learning from this, they can build a ladder of simulations, through trial and error, to more difficult problems.

But just which approaches will succeed, and which will lead to dead ends, remains to be seen. Estimates of how many qubits will be needed to simulate big enough problems in physics to get breakthroughs range from thousands to (more likely) millions. Many in the field expect this to be possible in the 2030s or 2040s.

In high-energy physics, problems like these are clearly a regime in which quantum computers will have an advantage, says Ning Bao, associate computational scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The problem is that quantum computers are still too limited in what they can do.

Some physicists are coming at things from a different perspective: Theyre looking to physics to better understand quantum computing.

John Preskill is a physics professor at Caltech and an early leader in the field of quantum computing. A few years ago, he and Patrick Hayden, professor of physics at Stanford University, showed that if you entangled two photons and threw one into a black hole, decoding the information that eventually came back out via Hawking radiation would be significantly easier than if you had used non-entangled particles. Physicists Beni Yoshida and Alexei Kitaev then came up with an explicit protocol for such decoding, and Yao went a step further, showing that protocol could also be a powerful tool in characterizing quantum computers.

We took something that was thought about in terms of high-energy physics and quantum information science, then thought of it as a tool that could be used in quantum computing, Yao says.

That sort of cross-disciplinary thinking will be key to moving the field forward, physicists say.

Everyone is coming into this field with different expertise, Bao says. From computing, or physics, or quantum information theoryeveryone gets together to bring different perspectives and figure out problems. There are probably many ways of using quantum computing to study physics that we cant predict right now, and it will just be a matter of getting the right two people in a room together.

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Going beyond the exascale | symmetry magazine - Symmetry magazine