How the trade war endangers national security
Almost all of this material comes from China. The country accounts for nearly all of the world's processing of heavy rare earths — whose critical magnetic and optical properties are vital for defense systems. It also produces about 90 percent of rare earth magnets, used in everything from electric motors to turbines and electronics, for civilian and military use.
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Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
This supermassive black hole is eating way too quickly — and 'burping' at near-light speeds
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Astronomers have witnessed a distant supermassive black hole devouring its surrounding matter so rapidly that it is "burping" out excess mass at nearly a third of the speed of light. The discovery was made when researchers studied the supermassive-black-hole-powered Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) of a Seyfert galaxy located about 1.2 billion light-years away. The black hole, designated PG1211+143, has a mass around 40 million times that of the sun and powers a bright quasar. This made it a prime target for astronomers seeking to understand how supermassive black holes grow by feeding on, or "accreting," matter. The team examined the black hole using the European Space Agency (ESA) X-ray spacecraft XMM-Newton, finding an influx of matter equivalent to the mass of 10 Earths flowing to the object over a period of just five weeks. The matter falling around the black hole settles into a flattened cloud of gas and dust called an accretion disk, from which material is fed to the central black hole. But even this monstrous black hole can't stomach so much matter, leading to some serious indigestion in the form of outflows travelling at around 0.27 times the speed of light. That's about 181 million miles per hour, or 100,000 times the top speed of a Lockheed Martin F-16 jet fighter. These outflows followed the black hole's inflow of matter with a delay of a few days, heating matter around the AGN to temperatures of several million degrees. This generated radiation pressure that pushed excess matter away from the central region of PG1211+143. Because stars form in galaxies from excesses of cold, dense gas, these high-speed outflows could be starving PG1211+143's surrounding space of the building blocks for new stars, both by heating gas and dust and by pushing that material away. That means studying these high-speed outflows from this black hole could help scientists to discover how black hole eruptions transform galaxies from hubs of star birth to a more quiescent existence. Related Stories: — Scientist image 3-million-light-year-long 'cosmic web' ensnaring 2 galaxies for 1st time — 'Superhighways' connecting the cosmic web could unlock secrets about dark matter — How does the Cosmic Web connect Taylor Swift and the last line of your 'celestial address?'years "Establishing the direct causal link between massive, transient inflow and the resulting outflow offers the fascinating prospect of watching a supermassive black hole grow by regular monitoring of the hot, relativistic winds associated with the accretion of new matter," team leader Ken Pounds from the University of Leicester said in a team's research was published on June 10 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS)
Yahoo
20 hours ago
- Yahoo
Astronomers see the 1st stars dispel darkness 13 billion years ago at 'Cosmic Dawn'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Astronomers have used ground-based telescopes for the first time to peer back 13 billion years in time to observe the universe when the first stars first lifted the cosmic darkness. This period, around 800 million years after the Big Bang, is known as "Cosmic Dawn," and it remains one of the most mysterious and important periods in the evolution of the universe. This new glimpse of Cosmic Dawn comes courtesy of the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS), an array of telescopes located high in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile. The primary mission of CLASS is to observe the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), a cosmic fossil left over from an event just after the Big Bang. "People thought this couldn't be done from the ground. Astronomy is a technology-limited field, and microwave signals from the Cosmic Dawn are famously difficult to measure," team leader and Johns Hopkins professor of physics and astronomy, Tobias Marriage, said in a statement. "Ground-based observations face additional challenges compared to space. Overcoming those obstacles makes this measurement a significant achievement." Prior to around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the infant universe would have seemed like a pretty dull place, visually at least. That is because during this period, light was unable to travel freely due to the fact that photons were endlessly scattered by free electrons. This situation changed when the universe had expanded and cooled enough to allow electrons to bond with protons and create the first neutral atoms of hydrogen. Suddenly, photons were free to travel unimpeded through the cosmos as the universe instantly went from transparent to opaque. This "first light" is seen today as the CMB. When the first stars formed, their intense radiation ripped electrons from neutral hydrogen once again, an event called "reionization," turning the universe dark again during an epoch known as the "Cosmic Dark Ages." The signal from Cosmic Dawn hunted by CLASS comes from the fingerprint of the universe's first stars within the CMB. This comes in the form of polarized microwave light around a million times fainter than standard cosmic microwaves. As you may imagine, after travelling to us for 13 billion years and more, the light from Cosmic Dawn is extremely faint. Trying to detect this polarized microwave light from Earth is extremely difficult because it is drowned out by natural events such as atmospheric changes and temperature fluctuations, as well as being obscured by human-made signals like radio waves, radar and satellite signals. Thus, this cosmic radiation is usually only hunted from space by satellites like NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the European Space Agency's Planck space telescope. That was until CLASS. The team behind this new research compared data from CLASS with observations from Planck and WMAP. This allowed them to identify sources of interference and hone in on a signal from polarized microwave light in the CMB. Polarization describes what happens when waves are oriented in the same direction. This can happen when light hits an object and scatters off it. "When light hits the hood of your car and you see a glare, that's polarization. To see clearly, you can put on polarized glasses to take away glare," said team member Yunyang Li, who was a PhD student at Johns Hopkins and then a fellow at the University of Chicago while this research was being conducted. "Using the new common signal, we can determine how much of what we're seeing is cosmic glare from light bouncing off the hood of the Cosmic Dawn, so to speak." What this team specifically aims to measure with CLASS is the probability of a photon from the CMB encountering an electron ripped free of neutral hydrogen by the universe's first stars and being scattered. Doing this should help scientists better define signals from the CMB and the initial glow of the Big Bang, thus enabling them to paint a clear picture of the infant cosmos. "Measuring this reionization signal more precisely is an important frontier of cosmic microwave background research," WMAP space mission team leader Charles Bennett said. "For us, the universe is like a physics lab. Better measurements of the universe help to refine our understanding of dark matter and neutrinos, abundant but elusive particles that fill the universe. "By analyzing additional CLASS data going forward, we hope to reach the highest possible precision that's achievable." Related Stories: — How dark energy could relieve 'Hubble tension' and galaxy headaches — Hubble trouble or Superbubble? Astronomers need to escape the 'supervoid' to solve cosmology crisis — 'Our understanding of the universe may be incomplete': James Webb Space Telescope data suggests we need a 'new cosmic feature' to explain it all This new research is built upon earlier work that saw CLASS map 75% of the night sky over Earth as it makes precise measurements of the polarization of the CMB. "No other ground-based experiment can do what CLASS is doing," said Nigel Sharp, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Astronomical Sciences, supporter of CLASS since 2010. "The CLASS team has greatly improved measurement of the cosmic microwave polarization signal, and this impressive leap forward is a testament to the scientific value produced by NSF's long-term support."The team's research was published on Wednesday (June 2) in The Astrophysical Journal.
CNN
2 days ago
- CNN
Google just bought 200 megawatts of fusion energy that doesn't even exist yet
Tech giant Google is investing money into a futuristic nuclear fusion plant that hasn't been built yet but someday will replicate the energy of the stars. It's a sign of how hungry big tech companies are for a virtually unlimited source of clean power that is still years away. Google and Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced a deal Monday in which the tech company bought 200 megawatts of power from Commonwealth's first commercial fusion plant, the same amount of energy that could power roughly 200,000 average American homes. The plant isn't going to be built until the early 2030s in Virginia. When it starts generating usable fusion energy is still TBD. Google is also investing a second round of money into Commonwealth to spur development of its demonstration tokamak – a donut-shaped machine that uses massive magnets and molten plasma to force two atoms to merge, thereby creating the energy of the sun. Google and Commonwealth did not disclose how much money is being invested, but both touted the announcement as a major step toward fusion commercialization. 'We're using this purchasing power that we have to send a demand signal to the market for fusion energy and hopefully move (the) technology forward,' said Michael Terrell, senior director of energy and climate at Google. Commonwealth is currently building its demonstration plant in Massachusetts, known as SPARC. It's the tokamak the company says could forever change where the world gets its power from, generating 10 million times more energy than coal or natural gas while producing no planet-warming pollution. Fuel for fusion is abundant, derived from a form of hydrogen found in seawater and tritium extracted from lithium. And unlike nuclear fission, there is no radioactive waste involved. The big challenge is that no one has yet built a machine powerful and precise enough to get more energy out of the reaction than they put into it. Still, fusion is especially appealing to big tech companies like Google because it delivers a steady supply of baseload electricity for power-hungry data centers and AI. Google has also invested in geothermal energy and small nuclear reactor projects, which can also provide baseload power with no carbon emissions. Commonwealth CEO Bob Mumgaard called the agreement the 'largest offtake agreement for fusion' and said Google's funding investment would allow his company to take necessary research and development steps to work towards developing its commercial fusion plant in Virginia at the same time it finishes its demonstration plant in Massachusetts and starts working towards ignition there. 'It's hard to say exactly how much it accelerates it, but it definitely puts it in a category where now we can start to work more and more on ARC (the future Virginia plant) while we finish SPARC, instead of doing them very sequentially,' Mumgaard said.
