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Showing posts with the label Powerful

Look! This distant galaxy hosted the most powerful explosion since the Big Bang

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the little one The dim, red dot in the center of the newly released image of a distant galaxy indicates the galaxy underwent one of the most powerful explosions since the Big Bang. Astronomer Brendan O’Connor and his colleagues recently discovered this as-yet-unnamed galaxy 9 billion light-years away in data from the Gemini North Telescope in Hawai’i, and they say it is the source of a brilliant, bright beam of gamma radiation. brief dazzling NASA. Swift Observatory in late 2015. Imagine an explosion releasing as much energy as our Sun would in 10 billion years – compressed into an explosion in less than two seconds. Astronomers call this almost unimaginable catastrophe a short gamma-ray burst, and the universe hasn’t seen a brighter or more powerful explosion since the Big Bang. What could cause such an event? The answer appears to involve two colliding neutron stars. Binary star systems are not very rare in the universe; one of our closest neighbors, Alpha Centauri, is actually

Smaller and more powerful magnets can enhance devices that harness the fusion power of the sun and stars

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PPPL main engineer Yuhu Zhai with high temperature superconducting magnet drawing, which can improve the performance of spherical tokamak fusion device. Credit: Kiran Sudarsanan / PPPL Transportation Service Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have found a way to build powerful magnets that are smaller than ever, helping design and construct machines that can help the world harness the power of the sun to create electricity. without producing the greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. Scientists have found a way to build high-temperature superconducting magnets made of materials that conduct electricity with little or no resistance at warmer temperatures than before. Such a powerful magnet would fit more easily into the tight spaces inside the spherical tokamak, which is shaped more like a nucleated apple than a conventional donut tokamak, and is being explored as