James' World 2

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Scientists have discovered a class of never-before-seen waves inside the Sun that move in the opposite direction of its rotation and travel so fast that they defy explanation. The “as-yet-undetermined nature of these waves promises novel physics and fresh insight into solar dynamics,” reports a new study.

The waves were serendipitously spotted by Chris Hanson, a research associate at New York University Abu Dhabi, and his colleagues, as the researchers scoured through decades of solar observations. The team was trying to answer a completely different question about the Sun when they noticed swirling patterns on its surface caused by these “high-frequency retrograde (HFR) waves,” according to a study published on Thursday in Nature Astronomy. 

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An artistic impression of the high-frequency retrograde (HFR) vorticity waves. Image: NYU Abu Dhabi

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How to sum up the last fifty years of human space exploration? The International Space Station is an orbital beacon of collaborative research. The Hubble Telescope has transformed how we imagine the cosmos, and the James Webb Space Telescope will take our view to the next level.

It is easy to forget that a mere fifty years ago, a space probe launched and became the first unmanned mission to Jupiter — Pioneer 10. The probe not only provided a first close glimpse at the giant gas planet, but it also paved the way for two crafts that have altered our understanding of the Solar System, the Voyager missions.

The first of its kind, Pioneer 10 shows that, unlike landlines, the space-exploration technology of this bygone era can still go toe-to-toe with state-of-the-art inventions today. Pioneer 10 remains the spacecraft with the cleanest navigation ever used for exploring the outer Solar System, Slava Turyshev tells me. Turyshev is a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. From its initial build to the last signals it beamed back to Earth, Pioneer 10 is a lesson in how great a trail one craft can blaze through the cosmos.

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50 years ago, NASA sent a message to aliens — and sparked a Solar System mystery

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In 2018, astronomers operating an antenna called EDGES in the Australian outback reported that radio waves of a particular frequency were significantly dimmer than other waves coming from the night sky. The finding, published in Nature, was heralded as a groundbreaking signal from the birth of the first stars after the Big Bang — an event dubbed “cosmic dawn,” which should have stamped such a signature in the light.

What’s more, the dip in the radio spectrum observed by EDGES looked strikingly different than cosmologists had predicted. The data suggested that the early universe was surprisingly cold, triggering much theoretical activity and attempts to confirm the signal by other astronomers around the world.

Today, one such team, at the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India, has published the result of its search for the EDGES dip using a radio antenna called SARAS. The astronomers set the antenna afloat on a pair of remote lakes in India in early 2020, cutting their data collection short and returning to Bangalore hours before the first citywide COVID lockdown began. After spending the pandemic analyzing their data, the SARAS team now reports in Nature Astronomy that they found no trace of the dip observed by EDGES.

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Astronomers are looking for a telltale dip in the brightness of radio waves that would mark the universe’s transition from the cosmic dark ages to cosmic dawn.

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In Wednesday’s issue of Nature, a new paper describes a potentially useful way of measuring the interactions between normal matter and exotic particles, like antiprotons and unstable items like kaons or elements containing a strange quark. The work is likely to be useful, as we still don’t understand the asymmetry that has allowed matter to be the dominant form in our Universe.

But the study is probably most notable for the surprising way that it collected measurements. A small research team managed to put an antiproton in orbit around the nucleus of a helium atom that was part of some liquid helium chilled down to where it acted as a superfluid. The researchers then measured the light emitted by the antiproton’s orbital transitions.

Why would anyone want to do this?

There are many reasons you’d want to get precise measurements of this sort of thing. For one, the measurements will be sensitive to the properties of antimatter and strange quarks, which are short-lived and are often created in environments that make precision measurements challenging. In addition, this system involves interactions between antimatter and regular matter, which can be difficult to capture due to their violent ends. Finally, the specific interactions here—between an atomic nucleus and an object in the orbitals that surround it—are sensitive to properties that are fundamental to the Universe.

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The hardware that slows down antiprotons so they can be used in these sorts of experiments.

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