Eleven billion miles away—more than four times the distance from us to Pluto—lies the boundary of our solar system's magnetic bubble, the heliopause. Here the Sun's magnetic field, stretching through space like an invisible ...
Astronomy
Apr 16, 2021
3
363
A team of researchers using the ISOLDE nuclear-physics facility at CERN has measured for the first time the so-called electron affinity of the chemical element astatine, the rarest naturally occurring element on Earth. The ...
Condensed Matter
Jul 30, 2020
0
43
A new device that relies on flowing clouds of ultracold atoms promises potential tests of the intersection between the weirdness of the quantum world and the familiarity of the macroscopic world we experience every day. The ...
Quantum Physics
Jul 17, 2020
0
1175
Far beyond the orbits of the planets are the hazy outlines of the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble in space that we call home. This flexible cosmic bubble stretches and shrinks in response to the sun's gasps and sighs.
Astronomy
Jun 12, 2020
1
103
Today, stars fill the night sky. But when the universe was in its infancy, it contained no stars at all. And an international team of scientists is closer than ever to detecting, measuring and studying a signal from this ...
Astronomy
Jun 12, 2020
41
12378
A team of researchers at California Institute of Technology has found that arrays of strontium Rydberg atoms show promise for use in a quantum computer. In their paper published in the journal Nature Physics, the researchers ...
The sparsely distributed hot gas found today between galaxies, the intergalactic medium (IGM), is ionized. The early universe started off hot, but then it rapidly expanded and cooled allowing its main constituent, hydrogen, ...
Astronomy
Apr 27, 2020
2
186
Neutral atoms and charged ions can be cooled down to extremely low temperatures (i.e., to microkelvins, 1 millionth of a degree above absolute zero) using laser techniques. At these low temperatures, the particles have often ...
Roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago, matter (mostly hydrogen) cooled enough for neutral atoms to form, and light was able to traverse space freely. That light, the cosmic microwave background ...
Astronomy
Feb 10, 2020
6
687
Atomic clocks are used around the world to precisely tell time. Each "tick" of the clock depends on atomic vibrations and their effects on surrounding electromagnetic fields. Standard atomic clocks in use today, based on ...
Quantum Physics
Dec 23, 2019
8
87
