WASHINGTON – A U.S. Naval Research Laboratory-built camera mounted on the NASA Parker Solar Probe revealed an asteroid dust trail that has eluded astronomers for decades.
Karl Battams, a computational scientist in NRL’s Space Science Division, discussed the results from the camera called Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) on Dec. 11 during a NASA press conference.
WISPR enabled researchers to identify the dust cloud trailing the orbit of the asteroid 3200 Phaethon.
It could represent “humanity’s first explicit step into interstellar space,” as team member at the Applied Physics Laboratory Pontus Brandt told Wired, years after Voyager 1 became the first-ever human-built spacecraft to reach interstellar space.
Rocket Plan
The basic outline of their proposal, which arose out of a NASA supported interstellar probe study last year, is to launch a spacecraft that weighs less than 1,700 pounds on NASA’s upcoming — but much delayed and over budget — Space Launch System rocket.
Atomic physicists at NASA are working to create an exotic state of matter in space 🤯
Via Seeker
A twisted little neutron star devoured chunks of its stellar twin, revealing a never-before-seen phenomenon to scientists watching on Earth.
Unlike most objects in space (including other neutron stars and planet Earth), neutron star GRO J2058+42 doesn’t have two simple magnetic poles at its north and south ends. Instead, it has a distorted magnetic field, with warped regions of intense magnetism sprinkled across the object’s surface.
Abstract: In the context of warped extra-dimensional models with all fields propagating in the bulk, we address the phenomenology of a bulk scalar Higgs boson, and calculate its production cross section at the LHC as well as its tree-level effects on mediating flavor changing neutral currents. We perform the calculations based on two different approaches. First, we compute our predictions analytically by considering all the degrees of freedom emerging from the dimensional reduction (the infinite tower of Kaluza Klein modes (KK)). In the second approach, we perform our calculations numerically by considering only the effects caused by the first few KK modes, present in the 4-dimensional effective theory. In the case of a Higgs leaking far from the brane, both approaches give the same predictions as the effects of the heavier KK modes decouple. However, as the Higgs boson is pushed towards the TeV brane, the two approaches seem to be equivalent only when one includes heavier and heavier degrees of freedom (which do not seem to decouple). To reconcile these results it is necessary to introduce a type of higher derivative operator which essentially encodes the effects of integrating out the heavy KK modes and dresses the brane Higgs so that it looks just like a bulk Higgs.