Category: 7. Science

Video Transcript

A micron is known by measurement to be a thousandth of a millimeter. Better yet, that makes up a millionth of a meter. Keeping that in mind, physicists at Loughborough University in the UK have developed a violin measuring 13 microns wide by 35 microns long.

To compare even further, a human hair usually measures anywhere from 17 to 180 microns in diameter.

Made out of platinum, the violin was created to demonstrate Loughborough University’s new nanolithography system. The system, through advanced technology, allows researchers to build at nanoscale. The process supports a variety of projects to identify new materials for computer devices.

The nanotechnology system takes up an entire lab space due to its complexity. The system includes a NanoFrazor sculpting machine and a thermal scanning lithography probe.

To create the violin, researchers used a coated chip under the NanoFrazor, etching out a design after two layers of resist material were applied.

Burning the pattern in, the resist dissolves, leaving a cavity behind. After a thin platinum layer was deposited to the chip, a final rinse revealed the finished violin through the remaining materials.

All in all, it takes about 3 hours to make the violin, though researchers took multiple months as they utilized different techniques.

Moving forward from the violin, two projects are in the works at Loughborough, investigating magnetic data storage and heat usage for energy-efficient processing.

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A molecule, or any object, is said to be chiral if it cannot be superimposed on its mirror image by any combination of rotations, translations and geometric changes. This is similar to our two hands, which appear identical but cannot be superimposed, whether viewed from the back or the palm. This universal molecular asymmetry requires chemists to design chiral molecules capable of interacting precisely with living systems.

Within a molecule, chirality often arises from the presence of one or more asymmetry centers, known as stereogenic centers. These are often made up of a central carbon atom, itself linked to four different groups or chains of atoms, usually carbon as well. The group led by Jérôme Lacour, Full Professor in the Department of Organic Chemistry, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UNIGE Faculty of Science, has created a new type of stereogenic center. This time, the central carbon atom is not surrounded by carbon chains, but only by oxygen and nitrogen atoms. A first in the field of chemistry.

”Molecules with this new type of stereogenic center had never before been isolated in a stable form. Their synthesis and characterization mark a major conceptual and experimental breakthrough,” explains Jérôme Lacour.

Outstanding stability

The stability of chiral molecules is a particularly important parameter. Mirror molecule pairs are structurally very close, and in many cases spontaneous switching from one to the other is possible, for example under the effect of temperature. As if a left hand were suddenly transformed into a right hand. In this way, we could switch from a drug to an inactive or even toxic molecule! The new molecular structures developed by the UNIGE team feature exceptional chiral stability, meaning that the switch from one molecule to its mirror sister is particularly unlikely.

Olivier Viudes, PhD student and first author of the study explains: “Using dynamic chromatography techniques and quantum chemistry calculations, we have shown that, for the first molecule developed, it would take 84,000 years at room temperature for half a sample to transform into its mirror molecule.” For a drug, such stability guarantees safe storage, without the need for specific conditions. For the second molecule, this time has been estimated at 227 days at 25°C.

The new stereogenic centers developed by the Geneva team should enable the design of stable, controlled, three-dimensional chiral molecules. These structures open up new possibilities for drug design and the creation of new materials. ”These novel stereogenic centers offer a new way of organizing molecular space. They open up a whole new degree of freedom and imagination in chemical synthesis,” concludes Gennaro Pescitelli, professor at the University of Pisa and co-principal investigator of the article.

When Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, the spacecraft detected a surprisingly low level of internal heat from the planet. Since then, scientists believed Uranus to be the odd one out in our solar system’s family of giant planets—the others being Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune—who all tend to emit more heat than they absorb from sunlight.

Now, a new study suggests that scientists may have had the wrong idea about Voyager 2’s data: Uranus does have an internal heat source similar to its planetary siblings. For the study, published Monday in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers analyzed decades of archival data available on the ice giant, finding that Uranus emits 12.5% more internal heat than it absorbs from the Sun. 

That’s still considerably less heat than the other three giant planets, which emit more than 100% of the solar energy they receive. Nevertheless, the study demonstrates that Uranus doesn’t stray too far from scientists’ general understanding of how giant planets form and evolve. 

To reach this conclusion, the researchers analyzed data on Uranus’s global energy balance across one full orbit of the Sun, which takes 84 years. The team took this observational data and combined it with computational models, finding big seasonal swings driven by the planet’s wild changes in sunlight exposure. The new findings are consistent with an earlier paper about Uranus’s energy balance, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in May.

That said, neither study offers a clear answer as to why Uranus’s internal heat is much lower than the other gas and ice giants. Uranus may have had a “different interior structure or evolutionary history compared to the other giant planets,” the researchers noted in a statement. The study also found that Uranus’s energy levels change according to its 20-year-long seasons. These fluctuations, along with the planet’s heat budget, “provide observational constraints that can be used to develop theories of planetary formation for giant planets,” the study states. 

Thus, the paper both answers and raises questions about Uranus, which the researchers cite as a good reason for future NASA missions to investigate the icy planet further. 

“By uncovering how Uranus stores and loses heat, we gain valuable insights into the fundamental processes that shape planetary atmospheres, weather systems, and climate systems,” said Liming Li, study co-author and physicist at the University of Houston, in the release. “These findings help broaden our perspective on Earth’s atmospheric system and the challenges of climate change.”

The radius of a planet is a fundamental parameter that probes its composition and habitability. Precise radius measurements are typically derived from the fraction of starlight blocked when a planet transits its host star. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered hundreds of new exoplanets, but its low angular resolution means that the light from a star hosting a transiting exoplanet can be blended with the light from background stars. If not fully corrected, this extra light can dilute the transit signal and result in a smaller measured planet radius. In an analysis of TESS planet discoveries, astronomers at the University of California, Irvine show that systematically incorrect planet radii are common in the scientific literature.

“We found that hundreds of exoplanets are larger than they appear, and that shifts our understanding of exoplanets on a large scale,” said Te Han, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine.

“This means we may have actually found fewer Earth-like planets so far than we thought.”

Astronomers can’t observe exoplanets directly. They have to wait for a planet to pass in front of its host star, and then they measure the very subtle drop in light emanating from a star.

“We’re basically measuring the shadow of the planet,” said University of California, Irvine’s Professor Paul Robertson.

In their research, the authors studied observations of hundreds of exoplanets observed by TESS.

They found that light from neighboring stars can ‘contaminate’ the light of a star an astronomer is studying.

This can make any planet that’s passing in front of a star appear smaller than it truly is, because smaller planets block less light than bigger planets.

The astronomers assembled hundreds of studies describing exoplanets discovered by TESS.

They sorted the planets according to how various research teams measured the radii of exoplanets so they could estimate with the help of a computer model the degree to which those measurements were biased because of light contamination from neighboring stars.

They used observations from ESA’s Gaia satellite to help them estimate just how much light contamination is affecting TESS’ observations.

“TESS data are contaminated, which the custom model corrects better than anyone else in the field,” Professor Robertson said.

“What we find in this study is that these planets may systematically be larger than we initially thought.”

“It raises the question: Just how common are Earth-sized planets?”

The number of exoplanets thought to be similar in size to Earth was already small.

“Of the single-planet systems discovered by TESS so far, only three were thought to be similar to Earth in their composition,” Han said.

“With this new finding, all of them are actually bigger than we thought.”

That means that, rather than being rocky planets like Earth, the planets are more likely so-called water worlds (planets covered by one giant ocean that tend to be larger than Earth) or even larger, gaseous planets like Uranus or Neptune.

This could impact the search for life on distant planets, because while water worlds may harbor life, they may also lack the same kinds of features that help life flourish on planets like Earth.

“This has important implications for our understanding of exoplanets, including among other things prioritization for follow-up observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, and the controversial existence of a galactic population of water worlds,” Professor Roberston said.

The study was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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Te Han et al. 2025. Hundreds of TESS Exoplanets Might Be Larger than We Thought. ApJL 988, L4; doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/ade794

On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto, revealing unprecedented close-up views of the complex icy world. The iconic mission is still returning data from the far reaches of the solar system, but a lack of funding now threatens to end the mission prematurely.

As NASA celebrates the 10th anniversary of the historic Pluto flyby, the space agency is also bracing for budget cuts that threaten the historic New Horizons probe. The White House’s budget proposal, released in May, reduces NASA’s upcoming budget by $6 billion compared to 2025. Under the proposed budget, NASA’s planetary science budget would drop from $2.7 billion to $1.9 billion. The severe drop in funding would kill dozens of active and planned missions, including New Horizons.

New Horizons launched on January 19, 2006, and traveled 9 billion miles in nine and a half years to become the first spacecraft to reach Pluto. Its journey through the harsh space environment wasn’t the only challenge; members of the space community advocated for nearly 20 years for the approval of the spacecraft, according to The Planetary Society. At the time, NASA missions to Pluto were deemed not worth the cost. As a result, New Horizons was nearly canceled on multiple occasions due to budgeting conflicts. In 2002, the White House tried to kill the mission after NASA had already started developing it, but a massive backlash forced Congress to step in and restore New Horizons’ funding.

Despite its rocky start, New Horizons is now hailed as one of the most successful planetary missions. Following its close encounter with Pluto, the mission revealed that the icy planet and its moons are far more complex than scientists had initially assumed. New Horizons imaged a giant, heart-shaped icy plain on Pluto, which may sit above a subsurface ocean. It also revealed cryovolcanoes, indicating a geologically active body and not a dead, frozen world. The mission also explored Pluto’s icy, chaotic moons, which rotate chaotically.

Beyond Pluto, New Horizons continues to explore the outer reaches of the solar system. The spacecraft is shedding light on the mysterious planets and smaller objects of the outer solar system. In January 2019, New Horizons conducted the most distant flyby of a Kuiper Belt object when it explored Arrokoth, a frozen relic in the icy region beyond Neptune. The double-lobed object serves as a relic from the early solar system. The successful Arrokoth flyby earned New Horizons a mission extension, allowing the spacecraft to continue exploring until it exits the Kuiper Belt in 2029.

“The New Horizons mission has a unique position in our solar system to answer important questions about our heliosphere and provide extraordinary opportunities for multidisciplinary science for NASA and the scientific community,” Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement at the time.

New Horizons has enough fuel to carry out another flyby of a Kuiper Belt object, and mission teams are currently searching for its next possible target. If the current budget proposal is approved, New Horizons will be turned off long before its expiration date, which would cost us years of valuable data. After Voyager 1 and 2, the New Horizons spacecraft is the third most distant human-built object from Earth. It would take years for another spacecraft to reach that distance. “We’re the only spacecraft out there,” Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, told The Planetary Society. “There’s nothing else planned to come this way.”

Discoveries keep pouring out of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Researchers observed an unusual cluster, which they dubbed the Infinity Galaxy. It appears to support a leading theory on how some supermassive black holes form.

Although “Infinity Galaxy” sounds like a place Thanos would hang out, it merely describes its appearance. Two compact, red nuclei, each surrounded by a ring, give the cluster the shape of an infinity symbol.

What’s inside is more interesting. (After all, this is a much lower-res image than some of the eye candy the Webb telescope has yielded.) Researchers believe the Infinity Galaxy formed when two spiral galaxies (the nuclei in the image) collided. Between them lies a young supermassive black hole within an enormous cloud of gas.

Supermassive black holes can range from hundreds of thousands of times the size of our sun to millions or billions of times its size. This one is about a million times as big.

The Infinity Galaxy lends weight to the direct collapse theory of black hole formation. As you probably know, most black holes form when massive stars collapse. The presence of supermassive ones is harder to explain.

One theory proposes that smaller black holes merge over time to form a supermassive one. The problem there is that some supermassive black holes formed soon after the Big Bang. So, scientists think some supermassive ones form instead from the collapse of gas clouds, much like the one we see here. The Infinity Galaxy may be the best evidence yet for that direct collapse hypothesis.

One of the paper’s lead authors summarized the findings. “By looking at the data from the Infinity Galaxy, we think we’ve pieced together a story of how a direct collapse could have happened here,” Pieter van Dokkum wrote in a press release. “Two disk galaxies collide, forming the ring structures of stars that we see. During the collision, the gas within these two galaxies shocks and compresses. This compression might just be enough to form a dense knot, which then collapsed into a black hole.”

The team can’t definitively confirm the theory from their current data. “But we can say that these new data strengthen the case that we’re seeing a newborn black hole, while eliminating some of the competing explanations,” van Dokkum added. “We will continue to pore through the data and investigate these possibilities.”

Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNO) are some of our Solar System’s lesser-known objects. They number in the thousands, and they get their name from their orbits. These dwarf planets that orbit the Sun at a greater average distance than Neptune does. Pluto is the group’s most well-known member, having been demoted from planet to TNO in recent years.

TNOs are relics from the early Solar System. They formed in the cold, distant reaches of the protoplanetary disk. Back then, the young Solar System was more chaotic and dynamic, and as the giant planets migrated, gravitational interactions shaped the orbits that TNOs follow.

As a result, many follow eccentric orbits that are somewhat inclined to the planetary plane. They make up what is called the scattered disk. TNOs also have one other unusual feature: a complex color distribution from grey to red as revealed by surveys like the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS) and the Dark Energy Survey. Astronomers think that’s due to the different ices and complex chemicals on their surfaces. Tholins are one of these chemicals, and they’re noteworthy for giving Pluto its reddish hue. (Though Pluto is a TNO, it is not part of the scattered disk.)

It’s notable that the colour distribution isn’t random and suggests a correlation with their orbits. So a TNOs colour is indicative of where in the protoplanetary disk it formed and its subsequent dynamical interactions with other bodies.

New research to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that TNOs unusual orbits and colors are the result of a stellar flyby. It’s titled “TNO colours provide new evidence for a past close flyby of another star to the Solar System,” and the lead author is Prof. Dr. Susanne Pfalzner from the Julich Supercomputing Center in Germany.

“TNOs are remnants of the planets’ formation from a disc of gas and dust, so it is puzzling that they move mostly on eccentric orbits inclined to the planetary plane and show a complex red-to-grey colour distribution,” the paper states. “A close stellar flyby can account for the TNOs’ dynamics but it is unclear if this can also explain the correlation between their colours and orbital characteristics.”

If a flyby occurred, it was likely very early in the Solar System’s history. “The flyby probably took place during the early phases of the Solar System in the Sun’s birth cluster,” the authors write. “In such clusters, the stellar density is about 1,000 to a million times higher than the local stellar density, and therefore, close flybys are much more common.”

To find out if a flyby can explain these TNO features, the researchers turned to supercomputer simulations. They simulated a 0.8 solar mass star performing a flyby of a disk modelled with 10,000 and 50,000 particles. Astronomers don’t know how large the Solar System’s disk was, but observations of other disks range from about 100 au to 500 au. “We model the effect of a flyby up to a radius of 150 au,” the authors write. The simulated perturber star reached a periastron distance of 110 au and was inclined by 70 degrees.

The researchers also used a colour gradient in their simulations to clarify the results. “We assume a colour gradient in the pre-flyby disc and represent it by a rainbow colour spectrum between 30 au and 150 au.”

One of the things the simulation showed was that a stellar flyby shepherded the TNOs into a spiral arm shape. “The perturber significantly alters their orbits, creating visible spiral arms due to the induced sub- and super-Keplerian velocities,” the researchers explain.

(a) shows the pre-flyby colour gradient in the simulated disc depicted by a false colour scheme representing very red to blue-grey TNOs. (b) is a snapshot from the simulation 128 years after periastron. The perturbing star entered from the bottom right and has already departed. Disk matter is transported inwards and outwards along the spiral arms, with a fraction of the test particles injected into the planet region. Image Credit: Pfalzner et al. 2025. The Astrophysical Journal Letters

TNOs are divided into dynamic groups by their orbits and the researchers write that their flyby successfully reproduced these groups, apart from resonant populations that were generated later through interactions with Neptune.

When it comes to colours, the results were similar to previous research showing that colour and orbital inclination are correlated. The authors explain that “red test particles are mainly found at low inclinations and periastron distances, suggesting that they retain more of their original dynamics.” On the other hand, green to blue particles dominate higher orbital inclinations, where red and orange particles are rare. The red test particles correspond to the very red TNOs, and the other colours represent the shades of grey observed for TNOs.

This figure shows scatter plots of the TNOs’ inclination as a function of periastron distance.(a) shows observational data from other research for TNO orbital inclinations by periastron distance. (b) shows the simulation results. Image Credit: Pfalzner et al. 2025. The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The researchers ran the simulation for one billion years, and the simulation showed that the perturber’s effects became negligible by 12,000 years after periastron.

“After 1 Gyr, the overall structure is similar, with very red objects remaining rare among high-inclination and high-eccentricity TNOs,” the researchers write. They also explain that the colour patterns grow less distinct. Eventually, some red particles are ejected from the Solar System and others are shifted to high inclinations. “The distinct differences in the colour distributions between low- and high-inclination, as well as low- and high-eccentricity TNOs, persist,” they explain.

This figure shows the long-term evolution of TNO orbits one billion years after periastron. (a) shows the connection between TNO colours and inclinations. (b) shows eccentricities, while (c) and (d) show the corresponding colour distributions. Image Credit: Pfalzner et al. 2025. The Astrophysical Journal Letters

The effort to understand our Solar System’s Trans-Neptunian Objects and their history will get a boost when the Vera Rubin Observatory begins its ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). It could increase the number of known TNOs by ten times. That data will lead to a deeper, fuller understanding of the TNO population.

One way to verify their simulation’s accuracy is to use it to predict what the LSST will find. “In anticipation of this, we try to predict the colours of these soon-detectable TNOs from a flyby perspective,” the authors write. They focus on distant TNOs in this case, since they’re more likely to be spotted by the LSST. They say that if they’re correct, distant TNOs will be predominantly light red to shades of grey, while there will be a notable lack of bright red objects.

These panels show anticipated results from the LSST. (a) shows inclinations, while (b) shows eccentricities for TNOs with perihelion distances greater than 60 au. Image Credit: Pfalzner et al. 2025. The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The different colours of TNOs indicate the presence of different chemicals. In some cases, these chemicals have been weathered and altered, but the colours still constitute a strong clue about their origins and allow astronomers to track their evolution. This research shows that a stellar flyby can explain how TNOs have been shepherded into their unusual orbits.

“Assuming an initial colour gradient in the Sun’s debris disc, we found that the flyby accounts for the observed colour correlations from the OSSOS and DES surveys,” the researchers explain. “This simultaneous explanation of the TNO dynamics and colours significantly strengthens the argument for a stellar flyby largely determining the structure of the Solar System beyond Neptune,” they conclude.