Astronomers have spotted a monstrous stellar flare coming from a baby star 685 light-years away that’s estimated to be 10,000 times larger than any such event emitted by our sun.
Experts say the stellar ‘tantrum’ could provide a window into the birth of potentially habitable exoplanets, revealing how huge events shake up the material orbiting distant stars.
The M-type star is just 2 million years old, meaning it has yet to reach the size at which it will remain for most of its life.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3Kc9xzuWP5Q
Keeping passengers in a vehicle from hearing the noise of a busy road is a problem that many auto manufacturers have attempted to solve over the years. Noise dampening materials can only do so much, but Ford is now working with noise cancelling technologies that aim to actively combat road sounds by cancelling them out.
The company recently applied its new noise-cancelling know-how to a project that has nothing to do with vehicles, but instead focuses on man’s best friend. Ford Europe built a new kind of doghouse that allows canines to rest without worry of loud noises, like fireworks, disturbing them.
Scientists have long known that synthetic materials—called metamaterials—can manipulate electromagnetic waves such as visible light to make them behave in ways that cannot be found in nature. That has led to breakthroughs such as super-high resolution imaging. Now, UMass Lowell is part of a research team that is taking the technology of manipulating light in a new direction.
But researchers have a new way to keep the materials and their associated circuitry, including electrodes, intact as they’re moved to curved or other smooth surfaces.
The results of their work appear in the journal ACS Nano.
Most of us think we have a pretty solid grasp on basic physics, and one of the assumptions we’ve come to form is that any material gets thinner as it’s stretched. It makes sense, since the same amount of material spread over a larger area would have to mean that there’s less of it in any one spot, right?
Not so fast. Researchers led by Dr. Devesh Mistry of the University of Leeds invented a new synthetic material that gets thicker as it’s being stretched. The material, which is described in detail in a new paper published in Nature Communications, is one of few that exhibit “auxetic” properties, which means they expand instead of contracting when tugged on from different directions.
