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Zeta Ophiuchi’s multi-wavelength view. Credits: X-Rays: NASA/CXC/Dublin Inst. Advanced Studies/S. Green et al.; Infrared: NASA/JPL/Spitzer Zeta Ophiuchi has an interesting life. It started out as a typical massive star about twenty times as massive as the sun. It spent its days happily orbiting a large companion star until its companion exploded as a supernova about a million years ago. The explosion took out Zeta Ophiuchi, so now he was speeding through interstellar space. Of course, supernovae also eject the outer layers of companion stars, so instead of empty space, our intrepid star is also traveling through the rest of the gas. As they say on Facebook, it’s complicated. And that’s great news for astronomers, as a recent study shows. Zeta Ophiuchi is most famous for the beautiful pictures above. By plowing through interstellar gas, the star has created heat shockwaves that shine in everything from infrared to X-rays. The

Not all stars enjoy just wandering around, orbiting the galactic center with all the other stars. Some stars go rogue, crossing the Milky Way with significant force. It is a runaway star, and we can trace its trajectory to understand the violent events that could occur in the Universe. One such star, and one of the more famous ones, is Zeta Ophiuchi. Located about 440 light-years from Earth in the equatorial constellation Ophiuchus, it is also one of the strangest stars in the sky. Not only is it incredibly fast, at about 30 to 40 kilometers (roughly 20 to 25 miles) per second, but it’s a strange type of star to see roaring in space. Zeta Ophiuchi is the main sequence star; that is, one that still combines hydrogen into helium in its core. And it’s a hot, massive O-type star: about 20 times the mass of the Sun, glowing blue with intense heat. Such stars also have relatively short lives; Zeta Ophiuchi is about half way past the main sequence’s projected age of 8 million years. Tha

Melbourne-based research has led to the creation of a self-calibrated photonic chip. Research led by Monash University and RMIT in Melbourne has found a way to replace bulky 3D optics with silicon chips. “We have demonstrated a self-calibrating self-programmable photonic filter chip featuring a signal processing core and an integrated reference path for self-calibration,” explains Monash University’s ARC-winning lead researcher Professor Arthur Lowery. “Self-calibration is very important because it makes tunable photonic integrated circuits useful in the real world; applications include optical communication systems that redirect signals to destinations based on their color, very fast similarity calculations (correlators), scientific instrumentation for chemical or biological analysis, and even astronomy. “Electronics saw a similar improvement in radio filter stability using digital techniques, which led to many phones being able to share the same slice of spectrum: our optical chips h