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A fully automated process, including a brand-new artificial intelligence (AI) tool, has successfully detected, identified, and classified its first supernova without human intervention. Developed by an international collaboration led by Northwestern University, the new system automates the entire search for new supernovae across the night sky — effectively removing humans from the process. Not only does this rapidly accelerate the process of analyzing and classifying new supernova candidates, it also bypasses human error.

Sixty-five years ago, in 1958, several government programs in the US that had been pursuing spaceflight combined to form NASA. At the time, Stephen G. Alexander, now Associate Professor of Physics at Miami University in Ohio was only 3 years old. As a professor for nearly 30 years, he now realizes that, like countless others who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, NASA’s missions have had a profound impact on his life and career path. From John Glenn’s first flight into orbit to the Hubble telescope, the agency’s legacy has inspired generations of scientists. This is his reflection on NASA's legacy.

Welcome to the night sky report for October 2023 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. The crisp, clear October nights are full of celestial showpieces for the deep sky gazer. Find Pegasus, the flying horse of Greek myth, to pinpoint dense globular star clusters and galaxies. Look for M15, NGC 7331, and M31 - the Andromeda Galaxy. A "Ring of Fire" solar eclipse across the Americas on October 14th is this month's top highlight. Plus the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus strike some lovely poses for stargazers and planet watchers to enjoy. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

For decades, what researchers knew about planet formation was based primarily on our own Solar System. It is widely agreed that Earth and the other rocky planets accreted from the disk of dust and gas that surrounded our Sun in its youth. However, the explosion of exoplanet research over the past decade has offered new and different approaches to modeling the Earth’s embryonic state. Using a newly developed model, researchers were able to demonstrate that early in Earth’s existence, our planet’s water could have originated from interactions between the hydrogen-rich atmospheres and magma oceans of the planetary embryos that comprised Earth’s formative years. Their findings could explain not only the abundance of Earth’s water, but also its current overall oxidized state.

Nuclear reactions in the Sun and in nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now, using Einstein’s famous E = mc² equation in reverse, scientists have converted light energy directly into matter. Scientists used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, to create matter directly from collisions of light. Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler predicted this process in 1934, but it has never been achieved in a single direct step. The researchers accelerated two beams of heavy gold ions to close to the speed of light in opposite directions. At such speeds, each gold ion is surrounded by packets of light (that is, real photons) generated by the ion’s perpendicular magnetic and electric fields. When the ions graze past one another without colliding, the photons interact to produce electrons (matter) and positrons (antimatter). The momentum and angular distributions of the resulting electron-positron pairs indicate, within the high-precision limits of the experiment, that these particles come from real photons. This makes the experiment a direct demonstration of the Breit-Wheeler effect.

Welcome to the night sky report for September 2023 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. This September, Venus returns to the early morning skies as a bright beacon in the east, the full moon at the end of the month is a Harvest Moon, and if you have access to dark skies away from urban light pollution, you might be able to glimpse the faint, glowing pillar of the zodiacal light. Pegasus becomes increasingly prominent in the southeastern sky, allowing stargazers to locate globular clusters M2 (NGC 7089), M30 (NGC 7099), as well as a nearby double star, Alpha Capricorni, which is an optical double (but not a binary pair). The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

Since the 17th century, when Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens first debated the nature of light, scientists have been puzzling over whether light is best viewed as a wave or a particle — or perhaps, at the quantum level, even both at once. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey have revealed a new connection between the two perspectives, using a 350-year-old mechanical theorem — ordinarily used to describe the movement of large, physical objects like pendulums and planets — to explain some of the most complex behaviors of light waves.

A new study of the orbital motions of long-period, widely separated, binary stars (referred to as wide binaries) provides conclusive evidence that standard Newtonian gravity breaks down at extremely low acceleration. The study carried out by Kyu-Hyun Chae, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Sejong University in Seoul, used data collected from 26,500 wide binary star systems within 650 light years, as observed by the European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia Space Telescope. Why study wide binaries? Because galactic disks and wide binaries share some similarities in their orbits, though wide binaries follow highly elongated orbits while hydrogen gas particles in a galactic disk follow nearly circular orbits. The clincher, however, is this -- Unlike galactic rotation curves, which can in principle be attributed to either dark matter or modified gravity, wide binary dynamics cannot be affected by dark matter, even if it existed. All the observed effects can only be explained by modified gravity. If these results can be confirmed as a breakdown of Newtonian Dynamics by independent analyses, and in time with even better and more precise data, then indeed we will be able to conclude that gravitation is Milgromian rather than Newtonian and there will be no further need for the fabricated concept of dark matter. The implications for astrophysics, cosmology, and for fundamental physics will be immense.

Welcome to the night sky report for August 2023 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. Saturn reaches opposition this month, meaning it's at its biggest and brightest for the year, and visible all night. The "shooting stars" of the annual Perseid meteors are a must-see overnight on August 12th. And this month brings two full moons – the second of which is a "Super Blue Moon." In August, a number of star-studded figures soar overhead. Look for the constellation Lyra, shaped as a small parallelogram, which points to Epsilon Lyrae and the Ring Nebula. You can also spot three bright summer stars: Vega, Deneb, and Altair, which form the Summer Triangle. And August is a great month to learn an easy-to-spot constellation – Cygnus the swan. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

An international team led by astronomers from Curtin University in Australia and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) has discovered a new type of stellar object, the ultra-long period magnetar - a rare type of star with extremely strong magnetic fields that can produce powerful bursts of energy. The discovery has important implications for our understanding of the physics of neutron stars and the behavior of magnetic fields in extreme environments. It also raises new questions about the formation and evolution of magnetars and could shed light on the origin of mysterious phenomena such as fast radio bursts.

From our cosmic backyard in the solar system to distant galaxies near the dawn of time, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has delivered on its promise of revealing the universe like never before in its first year of science operations. “In just one year, the James Webb Space Telescope has transformed humanity’s view of the cosmos, peering into dust clouds and seeing light from faraway corners of the universe for the very first time. Every new image is a new discovery, empowering scientists around the globe to ask and answer questions they once could never dream of.” -- NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. NASA has selected an ambitious set of observations for year two as the James Webb Telescope begins its second operational orbit around the Sun.

Welcome to the night sky report for July 2023 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. In July, Mars and Venus go their separate ways, Saturn cruises with Fomalhaut -- a dusty young star, and it's prime time to view the Milky Way in all its glory. Find the constellation Scorpius to identify the reddish supergiant star Antares, which will lead you to the globular star cluster M4 (NGC 6121). M22 (NGC 6656), in the constellation Sagitarius, another globular cluster, is one of the brightest clusters in the sky and is visible with the naked eye. Keep observing around the group of stars commonly known as the Teapot and you’ll be looking toward the center of the Milky Way. In that direction, you can see the Lagoon Nebula (M8, NGC 6523), the Omega Nebula (M17, NGC 6618), and the Trifid Nebula (M20, NGC 6514). Next, if you're feeling the July heat, note the origin of the phrase "the dog days" of summer, which is a reference to the bright star Sirius, also known as the “Dog Star.” The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

The NANOGrav collaboration, a group of more than 190 scientists from the US and Canada who use pulsars to search for gravitational waves, detected evidence that our Earth and the Universe around us is awash in a vast background of gravitational waves that oscillate very slowly over years and even decades. These spacetime undulations are thought to originate primarily from pairs of supermassive black holes as they leisurely spiral together before merging. The NANOGrav Collaboration found the first evidence that these low-frequency gravitational waves permeate the cosmos by essentially using the Milky Way as a gigantic galaxy-sized gravitational-wave detector. The findings were made possible through 15 years of very precise pulsar observations.

A rare type of white dwarf pulsar has been found for only the second time in history in research led by the University of Warwick in the UK and independently by the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) in Germany. To the great surprise of the scientific community, this odd pulsar phenomenon in a white dwarf was only observed for the first time in 2016. Only 773 light years away from Earth and spinning 300 times faster than our planet, the white dwarf pulsar has a size similar to the Earth, but a mass at least as large as the Sun. This means that a teaspoon of white dwarf material would weigh around 15 tons. A white dwarf pulsar consists of a rapidly spinning, burnt-out stellar remnant that lashes its neighbor – a red dwarf – with powerful beams of electrical particles and radiation, causing the entire system to brighten and fade dramatically over regular intervals. This is due to strong magnetic fields, but scientists are unsure what causes them.

Sally Kristen Ride was finishing her Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University in 1977 when she saw an article in the student newspaper saying that NASA was looking for astronaut candidates and that for the first time, women could apply. When she blasted off aboard the space shuttle Challenger 40 years ago on June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman—and, at 32, the youngest American—in space. Sally's historic flight made her a symbol of the ability of women to break barriers and a hero to generations of adventurous young girls. She flew on Challenger again in 1984 and later was the only person to serve on both panels investigating the nation's space shuttle disasters—the Challenger explosion in 1986 and the breakup of the shuttle Columbia on reentry in 2003. Sadly, Sally Ride died on July 23, 2012, after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer.