Science

1283 Articles

Citizen Scientists Spot Super Fast Moving Object In NASA Data

August 22, 2024 by 18 Comments

When you were five, you probably spotted your best friend running at “a million miles an hour” when they beat everybody at the local athletics meet. You probably haven’t seen anything that fast snice. According to NASA, though, a group of citizen scientists spotted a celestial object doing just that!

The group of citizen scientists were involved in a NASA program called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. They were working on images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Explorer mission. Scanning through stored images, Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden identified a curiously speedy object termed CWISE J124909.08+362116.0. There are lots of fast-moving objects out in space, but few quite as fast as this one. It’s quite literally zooming through the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour.

It’s unclear exactly what the object is. It appears light enough to be a low-mass star, or potentially a brown dwarf—somewhere in between the classification of gas giant and star. It also has suspiciously low iron and metallic content. The leading hypothesis is that CWISE J1249 might have been ejected from a supernova, or that it got flung around a pair of black holes.

For now, it remains a mystery. It’s a grand discovery that really highlights the value of citizen science. If you’ve been doing your own rigorous scientific work—on NASA’s data or your own—do let us know!

WOW! It Wasn’t Aliens After All!

August 20, 2024 by 21 Comments

There may not be many radio astronomy printouts that have achieved universal fame, but the one from Ohio State University’s Big Ear telescope upon which astronomer [Jerry R. Ehman] wrote “WOW!” is definitely one of them. It showed an intense one-off burst that defied attempts to find others like it, prompting those who want to believe to speculate that it might have been the product of an extraterrestrial civilization. Sadly for them the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo has provided an explanation by examining historical data from the Arecibo telescope.

The radio signal in question lay on the hydrogen line frequency at 1420 MHz, and by looking at weaker emissions from cold hydrogen clouds they suggest that the WOW! signal may have come from a very unusual stimulation of one of these clouds. A magnetar is a type of neutron star which can create an intense magnetic field, and their suggestion is that Big Ear was in the lucky position of being in the right place at the right time to see one of these through a hydrogen cloud. The field would excite the hydrogen atoms to maser-like emission of radiation, leading to the unexpected blip on that printout.

There’s a question as to whether speculation about aliens is helpful to the cause of science, but in answer to that we’d like to remind readers that we wouldn’t be talking about magnetars now without it, and that the WOW! signal was in fact part of an early SETI experiment. Better keep on searching then!

Meanwhile readers with long memories will recollect us looking at the WOW! signal before.

Pulling Hydrogen Out Of The Water

August 20, 2024 by 23 Comments

In theory, water and electric current will cause electrolysis and produce oxygen and hydrogen as the water breaks apart. In practice, doing it well can be tricky. [Relic] shows an efficient way to produce an electrolysis cell using a few plastic peanut butter jars and some hardware.

The only tricky point is that you need hardware made of steel and not zinc or other materials. Well, that and the fact that the gasses you produce are relatively dangerous.

Continue reading “Pulling Hydrogen Out Of The Water” →

Quantum Sensor Uses Synthetic Diamond

August 18, 2024 by 3 Comments

Diamonds are nearly perfect crystals, but not totally perfect. The defects in these crystals give the stones their characteristic colors. But one type of defect, the NV — nitrogen-vacancy — center, can hold a particular spin, and you can change that spin with the correct application of energy. [Asianometry] explains why this is important in the video below.

Interestingly, even at room temperature, an NV center stays stable for a long time. Even more importantly, you can measure the spin nondestructively by detecting light emissions from the center.

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The experimental setup for entanglement-distribution experiments. (Credit: Craddock et al., PRX Quantum, 2024)

Entangled Photons Maintained Using Existing Fiber Under NYC’s Streets

August 14, 2024 by 12 Comments

Entangled photons are an ideal choice for large-scale networks employing quantum encryption or similar, as photons can use fiber-optical cables to transmit them. One issue with using existing commercial fiber-optic lines for this purpose is that these have imperfections which can disrupt photon entanglement. This can be worked around by delaying one member of the pair slightly, but this makes using the pairs harder. Instead, a team at New York-based startup Qunnect used polarization entanglement to successfully transmit and maintain thousands of photons over the course of weeks through a section of existing commercial fiber, as detailed in the recently published paper by [Alexander N. Craddock] et al. in PRX Quantum (with accompanying press release).

The entangled photons were created via spontaneous four-wave mixing in a warm rubidium vapor. This creates a photon with a wavelength of 795 nm and one with 1324 nm. The latter of which is compatible with the fiber network and is thus transmitted over the 34 kilometers. To measure the shift in polarization of the transmitted photos, non-entangled photons with a known polarization were transmitted along with the entangled ones. This then allowed for polarization compensation for the entangled photos by measuring the shift on the single photons. Overall, the team reported an uptime of nearly 100% with about 20,000 entangled photons transmitted per second.

As a proof of concept it shows that existing fiber-optical lines could in the future conceivably be used for quantum computing and encryption without upgrades.

Wacky Science: Using Mayonnaise To Study Rayleigh-Taylor Instability

August 14, 2024 by 11 Comments

Sometimes a paper in a scientific journal pops up that makes you do a triple-take, case in point being a recent paper by [Aren Boyaci] and [Arindam Banerjee] in Physical Review E titled “Transition to plastic regime for Rayleigh-Taylor instability in soft solids”. The title doesn’t quite do their methodology justice — as the paper describes zipping a container filled with mayonnaise along a figure-eight track to look at the surface transitions. With the paper paywalled and no preprint available, we have to mostly rely the Lehigh University press releases pertaining to the original 2019 paper and this follow-up 2024 one.

Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI) is an instability of an interface between two fluids of different densities when the less dense fluid acts up on the more dense fluid. An example of this is water suspended above oil, as well as the expanding mushroom cloud during a explosion or eruption. It also plays a major role in plasma physics, especially as it pertains to nuclear fusion. In the case of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) the rapidly laser-heated pellet of deuterium-tritium fuel will expand, with the boundary interface with the expanding D-T fuel subject to RTI, negatively affecting the ignition efficiency and fusion rate. A simulation of this can be found in a January 2024 research paper by [Y. Y. Lei] et al.

As a fairly chaotic process, RTI is hard to simulate, making a physical model a more ideal research subject. Mayonnaise is definitely among the whackiest ideas here, with other researchers like [Samar Alqatari] et al. as published in Science Advances opting to use a Hele-Shaw cell with dyed glycerol-water mixtures for a less messy and mechanically convoluted experimental contraption.

What’s notable here is that the Lehigh University studies were funded by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which explains the focus on ICF, as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is based there.

This also makes the breathless hype about ‘mayo enabling fusion power’ somewhat silly, as ICF is even less likely to lead to net power production, far behind even Z-pinch fusion. That said, a better understanding of RTI is always welcome, even if one has to question the practical benefit of studying it in a container of mayonnaise.

Hydrogen Generation With Seawater, Aluminum, And… Coffee?

August 12, 2024 by 57 Comments

A team at MIT led by [Professor Douglas Hart] has discovered a new, potentially revelatory method for the generation of hydrogen. Using seawater, pure aluminum, and components from coffee grounds, the team was able to generate hydrogen at a not insignificant rate, getting the vast majority of the theoretical yield of hydrogen from the seawater/aluminum mixture. Though the process does use indium and gallium, rare and expensive materials, the process is so far able to recover 90% of the indium-gallium used which can then be recycled into the next batch. Aluminum holds twice as much energy as diesel, and 40x that of Li-Ion batteries. So finding a way to harness that energy could have a huge impact on the amount of fossil fuels burned by humans!

Pure, unoxidized aluminum reacts directly with water to create hydrogen, as well as aluminum oxyhydroxide and aluminum hydroxide. However, any aluminum that has had contact with atmospheric air immediately gets a coating of hard, unreactive aluminum oxide, which does not react in the same way. Another issue is that seawater significantly slows the reaction with pure aluminum. The researchers found that the indium-gallium mix was able to not only allow the reaction to proceed by creating an interface for the water and pure aluminum to react but also coating the aluminum pellets to prevent further oxidization. This worked well, but the resulting reaction was very slow.

Apparently “on a lark” they added coffee grounds. Caffeine had already been known to act as a chelating agent for both aluminum and gallium, and the addition of coffee grounds increased the reaction rate by a huge margin, to the point where it matched the reaction rate of pure aluminum in deionized, pure water. Even with wildly varying concentrations of caffeine, the reaction rate stayed high, and the researchers wanted to find out specifically which part of the caffeine molecule was responsible. It turned out to be imidazole, which is a readily available organic compound. The issue was balancing the amount of caffeine or imidazole added versus the gallium-indium recovery rate — too much caffeine or imidazole would drastically reduce the recoverable amount of gallium-indium.

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