- 2959 - PHYSICS - stories from year 2020.
-------------------- Before we get started with physics history let’s loosen up with an exercise routine. I am starting this exercise routine as my resolution in 2021.
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- Here, follow along, you can try my routine. I begin by standing on a comfortable surface, where I have plenty of room at each side.
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- With a 5-lb potato sack in each hand, you extend your arms straight out from your sides and hold them there as long as you can. Try to reach a full minute, and then relax. Each day you'll find that you can hold this position for just a bit longer.
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- After a couple of days, move up to 10-lb potato sacks. Then try 50-lb potato sacks and then eventually try to get to where you can lift a 100-lb potato sack in each hand and hold your arms straight for more than a full minute. (I'm at this level.)
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- After you feel confident at that level, put a potato in each of the sacks and repeat the routine.
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----------------------------- 2959 - PHYSICS - stories from year 2020.
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---------------------- EXPLODING BLACKHOLE:
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- Scientists have spotted an extremely powerful explosion in the “Ophiuchus galaxy cluster“, which is located about 390 million light years from Earth. What might have been the universe's most powerful known explosion was detected back in 2016, but, it really happened over 390 million years ago.
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- While the first four-legged critters crawled onto land, a supermassive blackhole in the “Ophiuchus cluster” launched a jet that blew a gargantuan cavity in the surrounding gas. In 2020, astronomers revisited the old data and realized just how powerful that explosion was: five times 10^54 joules of energy. That's enough energy to literally rip apart all 300 billion stars in the Milky Way and a hundred more galaxies. Be thankful that star did not explode in our galaxy.
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--------------------- MAPPING THE UNIVERSE:
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- If you want to navigate among the stars, you're going to need a map. And that's exactly what the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory created, using data on over 1.8 billion cosmic objects. The haul includes stars near and far, asteroids, comets and more.
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- Want to know the position, velocity, spectrum and more for 0.5% of the population of our galaxy? Over 1,600 papers have already been published with Gaia data, and astronomers will be sure to mine the database for years to come. And here's the best part: There's even more data to come.
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---------------------- LIFE ON VENUS?
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-We found life on Venus, and then we didn't. It was too good to be true: claims of solid evidence for life in the cloud tops of Venus, an otherwise hellhole of a world. The reasoning was based on phosphine, a peculiar (and stinky) chemical emitted on Earth by anaerobic bacteria.
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- To get as much phosphine in the atmosphere as was claimed, scientists proposed, Venus would need a large population of airborne microbes. Further analysis reduced the observed amount of the stinky stuff (to levels barely considered noteworthy, let alone a sign for life), and in some analyses, removed it altogether as just another noisy signal.
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--------------------- MAGNETARS RADIO BURSTS:
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- Everyone loves a good fast radio burst (FRB), right? The source of these enigmatic, energetic signals has been an annoying puzzle to astronomers for more than a decade. FRBs are fast, high-powered, frequency-hopping radio signals coming from all over the sky, which makes it hard to pinpoint their origin.
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- But finally, in 2020, astronomers got lucky: They found an FRB source in our own cosmic backyard. Follow-up observations revealed the culprit: an exotic star known as a magnetar (a super- magnetized dead stellar core). Apparently, magnetars sometimes burp out a tremendous amount of pent-up energy, which appears to Earthbound observers as a quick blast of radio emission.
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--------------------- WATER ON MARS?
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- Wet Mars after all. Mars has liquid water. No, it's bone-dry. No, wait; it sometimes has water. No, nope, never mind. The Red Planet has been teasing astronomers for decades on the vital question of whether it's home to any liquid water at all.
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- Astronomers care because, where there's water, there's a potential home for life. Earlier this year, astronomers claimed that there isn't just one, but four lakes of liquid water on Mars. The catch? They're incredibly salty, more like a briny sludge than something to take a dip in, and buried under a mile of frozen carbon dioxide at the southern polar cap.
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---------------------- SAMPLE AN ASTEROID?
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- 2020 was surely the year of the solar system. Three independent spacecraft have successfully acquired samples and sent them on their way back to Earth. NASA launched its OSIRIS-REx mission to the asteroid Bennu, which collected so much material that its sample container leaked.
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- The Japanese Hayabusa2 mission took a poke at the asteroid Ryugu and landed the material safely back to Earth.
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- And the Chinese Chang'e 5 lander went on a mission to the moon, managing to launch a sample back to Earth before the lander broke down.
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--------------------- GRAVITATIONAL WAVES?
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- Astronomers have used gravitational waves (ripples in the fabric of space-time) to observe so many black hole collisions that by now, it's hardly newsworthy. But in 2020, astronomers announced the discovery of the biggest collision yet: a titanic merger of an 85-solar-mass black hole and a 66-solar-mass black hole. Post-merger, the resulting black hole tipped the scales at 142 times the mass of the sun. (About nine suns' worth of mass was converted into pure energy.)
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--------------------- SUPERCONDUCTORS CREATED ?
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- Currently, extreme cold is required to achieve superconductivity. Superconductors are super-neat. Due to the weirdness of quantum mechanics, under very special conditions, electrons can buddy up, with the pairs traveling together without losing energy.
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- That means a game-changing technology where electricity can flow forever without resistance. Unfortunately, to make superconductors work, physicists have had to make everything super-cold.
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- But in 2020, researchers announced the discovery of a superconductor at nearly room temperature, just 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius). The catch? You need to re-create the pressures found in Earth's center.
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--------------------- COVID 19 ATOMIC MAP
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- Scientists produced a 3D atomic scale map, or molecular structure, of the SARS-2-CoV protein "spike" which the virus uses to invade human cells. The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has devastated humanity, reaching pandemic levels in only a couple of months and washing across the globe.
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- The current vaccines target a very specific part of the virus, a "spike" protein that it uses to invade our cells. One of the first steps in the war against COVID was to identify and map that protein, which researchers accomplished earlier this year, using a physics-based technique called cryogenic electron microscopy.
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- Using this map, drugmakers could target this feature of the virus for vaccines to mimic, giving our immune systems a fighting chance. I will take my vaccination as soon as it is offered to me, after all the politicians, of course.
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January 1, 2020 PHYSICS - stories from year 2020. 2959
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--------------------------- Monday, January 4, 2021 ------------------------------
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