INFORMATION

Why are planets rarely found orbiting a pair of stars? UC Berkeley and American University of Beirut physicists find that general relativity makes the orbit of a tight binary pair precess. As the orbit shrinks because of tidal effects, the precesion increases. Eventually the precession matches the orbital precession of any circumbinary planet, creating a resonance that makes the planet’s orbit wildly eccentric. The planet either gets expelled from the system or is engulfed by one of the stars. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/rvnt89V via IFTTT

To test it, I want you to imagine rolling up a piece of paper into a tight cylinder. Or, if you happen to be near a source of paper, doing it in real life. The analogy works either way. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/Fx8Wp10 via IFTTT

There's been widespread agreement that a supermassive black hole resides in the Milky Way's Center. But that may not be true. Researchers say that a dense clump of fermionic dark matter can also explain the motions of stars and gas clouds in the region. Crucially, it can also explain the famous Event Horizon Telescope image of the SMBH. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/qHwK63T via IFTTT

Origami and space exploration might not seem like they have much in common, but the traditional paper-folding technique solves one massive problem for space exploration missions - volume. Satellites and probes that launch in rocket housings are constrained by very restrictive requirements about their physical size, and options for assembling larger structures in orbit are limited to say the least. Anything that can fold up like an origami structure and then expand out to reach a fully functional size is welcome in the space community, and a new paper published in Communications Engineering by Xin Ning of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and his lab describes a novel use case for the idea - electromagnetic waveguides. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/rueNPYW via IFTTT

A major theme in communist governments is the idea of central planning. Every five years, the central authorities in communist countries lay out their goals for the country over the course of the next five years, which can range from limiting infant mortality to increasing agricultural yield. China, the largest current polity ruled by communists, recently released its fifteenth five-year plan, which lays out its priorities for 2026-2030. This one, accompanied by a press release of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s state-owned giant aerospace corporation, has plenty of ambitious goals for its space sector. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/6ibsLt3 via IFTTT

The problem that large extra dimensions just might solve is called the hierarchy problem, and it’s one of the nastiest outstanding problems in modern physics. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/5jmgK1Q via IFTTT