Astronomers have found strong evidence that 21 Sun-like stars orbit neutron stars without losing any mass to their binary companions.  Led by Kareem El-Badry at the California Institute of Technology, the international team spotted the binary systems in data taken by ESA’s Gaia satellite. The research offers new insights into how binary systems evolve after massive stars explode as supernovae. And like many unexpected discoveries, the observations raise new questions for astronomers. Neutron stars are created when massive stars reach the end of their lives and explode in dramatic supernov ..read more

When the gravitational wave detectors LIGO and VIRGO observed signals from merging black holes with masses much higher than those of black holes that form from the collapse of stars, scientists were intrigued. Had these unusually massive black holes formed when the universe was very young? And might they contain large amounts of dark matter? According to new analyses of 20 years of data from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) survey, the answer to the second question is a firm “no”. At most, members of the survey say that these cosmological structures contain only few percent ..read more

Hubble zooms in A wide view of Omega Centauri reveals a dense collection of stars (left). The middle image shows a closer view of the central region of the cluster. The image on the right shows the location of the IMBH candidate in the cluster. (Courtesy: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M Häberle (MPIA)) The best evidence yet for an intermediate-mass black hole has been claimed by an international team of astronomers. Maximillian Häberle at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and colleagues saw the gravitational effects of the black hole in long-term observations of the stellar cluster ..read more

NASA has cancelled a major Moon mission despite spending almost half a billion dollars on it. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) project was originally planned to launch late last year, but in 2022 NASA delayed it until late 2024 with further issues putting the launch date back until 2025. NASA now plans to disassemble VIPER and reuse the craft’s instruments and components on future Moon missions. VIPER, about the size of a golf cart, would have prospected the lunar south pole for water ice in the soil with the aim of creating resource maps for future missions to the M ..read more

What made you decide to write this book? I wanted to share something I find very exciting, but also [show] how we do science and the fun in doing it. I think we are all scientists in that we can all explore and understand. Most of all, I wanted to connect with people who don’t realize how much they have it in themselves, in their curiosity, to address some of the questions we all ask. That they are part of this human endeavour, this human journey of pushing the frontiers of knowledge. Why did you call it The Beauty of Falling? The book explains how our understanding of gravity evolved – how Ei ..read more

Claudia de Rham decided early in life she wanted to be an astronaut. Her peripatetic childhood meant she spoke several languages, but imperfectly, and was drawn to science as a universal language – a more reliable base from which to understand the world. As her ambition to go into space developed, she learned to scuba dive and to fly planes, having heard these are desirable skills for astronauts. Years of intense training appeared to pay off when, in 2009, de Rahm made it to the final round of astronaut selection for the European Space Agency. In the end, she passed every test except the medic ..read more

Producing plasma: A proton (far left) from the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator at CERN impinges on carbon nuclei (small grey spheres). This produces a shower of various elementary particles, including a large number of neutral pions (orange spheres). As the unstable neutral pions decay, they emit two high-energy gamma rays (yellow squiggly arrows). These gamma rays then interact with the electric field of tantalum nuclei (large grey spheres), generating electron and positron pairs and resulting in the novel electron-positron fireball plasma. Because of these cascade effects, a singl ..read more

When a space-walking astronaut needs to relieve themselves they often have to do so in adult-style nappies inside their spacesuits. This is not only uncomfortable and unhygienic, but also wasteful too. Researchers at Cornell University have now created a prototype urine collection and filtration system that allows astronauts to recycle their urine into, er, drinkable water (Frontiers in Space Technology doi:10.3389/frspt.2024.1391200). The system can collect and purify about 500 ml of urine in five minutes. The urine is first collected via a collection cup made from moulded silicone that is li ..read more

All in a spin: Two indistinguishable photons (red lines) are incident on a beamsplitter cube and become entangled. The two photons are then coupled into an optical fibre-based interferometer, which is sensitive enough to detect the rotation of the Earth as experienced at the interferometer’s location in Vienna, Austria. (Courtesy: Marco Di Vita) A new experiment has measured the effect of Earth’s rotation on entangled states of light. The experiment, which features an optical fibre-based device called a Sagnac interferometer that its developers describe as the most sensitive ever built, paves ..read more

The thermoelectric effect is much stronger at the interface of two liquid metals than it is in solid–solid or solid–liquid systems. This discovery, from researchers at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris, France, could lead to improvements in batteries that contain liquid–metal interfaces, and might even enhance our understanding of Jupiter’s magnetic field. In thermoelectric materials, the flow of heat from a cooler area to a warmer one can be harnessed to generate electricity via the thermoelectric effect, which converts temperature differences into an electric voltage. The effect is ..read more