- Pressure mounts on Biden to break his silence as ‘people are freaked out’ over objects shot from sky CNN
- Rep. Jim Himes says he has ‘real concerns’ about Biden administration’s transparency on flying objects Yahoo News
- Curtis says Biden, defense secretary should give ‘public address’ over objects in airspace KUTV 2News
- A trio of new intrusions leaves America’s leaders grasping for explanations CNN
- ‘Nothing short of craziness’: Republicans and Democrats press Biden for answers on shot-down objects The Independent
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FTX founder Bankman-Fried objects to tighter bail, says prosecutors ‘sandbagged’ him
NEW YORK, Jan 28 (Reuters) – Lawyers for Sam Bankman-Fried on Saturday urged a U.S. judge not to ban the indicted FTX cryptocurrency executive from communicating with former colleagues as part of his bail, saying prosecutors “sandbagged” the process to put their client in the “worst possible light.”
The lawyers were responding to a Friday night request by federal prosecutors that Bankman-Fried not be allowed to talk with most employees of FTX or his Alameda Research hedge fund without lawyers present, or use the encrypted messaging apps Signal or Slack and potentially delete messages automatically.
Bankman-Fried, 30, has been free on $250 million bond since pleading not guilty to charges of fraud in the looting of billions of dollars from the now-bankrupt FTX.
Prosecutors said their request was in response to Bankman-Fried’s recent effort to contact a potential witness against him, the general counsel of an FTX affiliate, and was needed to prevent witness tampering and other obstruction of justice.
But in a letter to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan, Bankman-Fried’s lawyers said prosecutors sprung the “overbroad” bail conditions without revealing that both sides had been discussing bail over the last week.
“Rather than wait for any response from the defense, the government sandbagged the process, filing this letter at 6:00 p.m. on Friday evening,” Bankman-Fried’s lawyers wrote. “The government apparently believes that a one-sided presentation – spun to put our client in the worst possible light – is the best way to get the outcome it seeks.”
Bankman-Fried’s lawyers also said their client’s efforts to contact the general counsel and John Ray, installed as FTX’s chief executive during the bankruptcy, were attempts to offer “assistance” and not to interfere.
A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in Manhattan declined to comment.
Bankman-Fried’s lawyers proposed that their client have access to some colleagues, including his therapist, but not be allowed to talk with Caroline Ellison and Zixiao “Gary” Wang, who have pleaded guilty and are cooperating with prosecutors.
They said a Signal ban isn’t necessary because Bankman-Fried is not using the auto-delete feature, and concern he might is “unfounded.”
The lawyers also asked to remove a bail condition preventing Bankman-Fried from accessing FTX, Alameda or cryptocurrency assets, saying there was “no evidence” he was responsible for earlier alleged unauthorized transactions.
In an order on Saturday, Kaplan gave prosecutors until Monday to address Bankman-Fried’s concerns.
“The court expects all counsel to abstain from pejorative characterizations of the actions and motives of their adversaries,” the judge added.
Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Andrea Ricci
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
NASA Webb Telescope Zooms in on One of Solar System’s Oddest Objects
Scientists using NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope say they’ve been able to get a closer look at an asteroid that also hosts just the fifth ring system to be discovered in our solar system (the others circle Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune).
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This artist’s impression shows how the rings might look from close to the surface of Chariklo. NASA/JPL
Astronomers initially discovered the rings in 2013 while watching Chariklo occult, or pass in front of, a distant star. To their surprise, two other smaller objects also appeared to pass in front of the background star for an instant. These turned out to be two thin rings around Chariklo.
In October 2022, Pablo Santos-Sanz, from Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain, used Webb to watch Chariklo occult a star once again.
The above video of the observations shows the star Gaia DR3 6873519665992128512 at the center and Chariklo passing in front of it as mere pixels, but NASA says a careful analysis of dips in the star’s brightness shows the rings were clearly detected once again.
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“As we delve deeper into the data… we also will explore the rings’ thickness, the sizes and colors of the ring particles and more,” Santos-Sanz explained in a statement.
So far, data suggests the rings could be made up of ice and other dark debris, probably the remnants of some ancient cosmic collision with the asteroid.
“Spectra from ground-based telescopes had hinted at this ice, but the exquisite quality of the Webb spectrum revealed the clear signature of crystalline ice for the first time,” Noemí Pinilla-Alonso, who led Webb’s spectroscopic observations of Chariklo, added.
Chariklo is a large asteroid at about 188 miles (302 kilometers) across, but it orbits the sun in the outer solar system, between Saturn and Uranus. Even with its size, it’s too far away for Webb to directly image the rings, making occultations the best way to study them for now.
Santos-Sanz is excited to see Webb’s advanced ability to study even small, distant objects in detail. Next up, he hopes to determine exactly how large the rings are and what they’re made up of.
“We hope to gain insight into why this small body even has rings at all,” he said, “and perhaps detect new fainter rings.”
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The Latest Milky Way Survey Shows Off an Incredible 3.32 Billion Celestial Objects : ScienceAlert
If you check in regularly to ScienceAlert, you’ll be familiar with quite a few stunning space images, but a newly published picture has to be one of the best yet: 2 years in the making, 10 terabytes worth of data, 21,400 individual exposures combined, and a final image showing a huge 3.32 billion celestial objects.
We have the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to thank for this beautiful shot of space, part of the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), some 2,200 meters (7,218 feet) above sea level in Chile.
The image was issued as part of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2), and it gives us more detail than ever before of this part of space – it accounts for around 6.5 percent of the entire night sky, focusing on the galactic plane of the Milky Way where the bulk of the galaxy’s mass is located.
“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we simply pointed at a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear nearly on top of each other,” says astronomer Andrew Saydjari from Harvard University in Massachusetts.
“Doing so allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”
That high density brings with it a few issues: The vast swaths of space dust and the glow from brighter stars can block out the light from dimmer objects entirely. By measuring both optical and near-infrared wavelengths, DECam overcomes these problems.
The team also used a special data processing technique to better estimate how the background of each star should look, enabling more stars to be observed with greater clarity, and improving the overall accuracy of the picture.
When combined with other sky surveys – like the Pan-STARRS project – the latest telescope technology provides us an unprecedented look at the Universe outside of our planet, which of course, gives us clues as to how it came into being.
“When combined with images from Pan-STARRS 1, DECaPS2 completes a 360-degree panoramic view of the Milky Way’s disk and additionally reaches much fainter stars,” says astronomer Edward Schlafly from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland.
“With this new survey, we can map the three-dimensional structure of the Milky Way’s stars and dust in unprecedented detail.”
The results are simply fantastic and very much worth the two-year wait. The data collected in the survey is freely available for other researchers and the wider public to make use of.
DECam was built initially to carry out a Dark Energy Survey and to better understand this mysterious force that is thought to be driving the Universe. It continues to produce amazingly detailed pictures of deep space, and there will be plenty more to come.
“This is quite a technical feat,” says astronomer Debra Fischer from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US, who wasn’t directly involved in the research. “Imagine a group photo of over three billion people, and every single individual is recognizable!”
“Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come. This is a fantastic example of what partnerships across federal agencies can achieve.”
The research has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.
Dark Energy Camera Unveils Billions of Celestial Objects in Unprecedented Survey of the Milky Way
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
NSF’s NOIRLab releases colossal astronomical data tapestry displaying the majesty of our Milky Way in unprecedented detail.
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the 
The Milky Way Galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, glimmering star-forming regions, and towering dark clouds of dust and gas. Imaging and cataloging these objects for study is a herculean task, but a newly released astronomical dataset known as the second data release of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) reveals a staggering number of these objects in unprecedented detail. The DECaPS2 survey, which took two years to complete and produced more than 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures, identified approximately 3.32 billion objects — arguably the largest such catalog compiled to date. Astronomers and the public can explore the dataset here.
This unprecedented collection was captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) instrument on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. CTIO is a constellation of international astronomical telescopes perched atop Cerro Tololo in Chile at an altitude of 2200 meters (7200 feet). CTIO’s lofty vantage point gives astronomers an unrivaled view of the southern celestial hemisphere, which allowed DECam to capture the southern Galactic plane in such detail.
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab. The survey is here reproduced in 4000-pixels resolution to be accessible on smaller devices. Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
DECaPS2 is a survey of the plane of the Milky Way as seen from the southern sky taken at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. The first trove of data from DECaPS was released in 2017, and with the addition of the new data release, the survey now covers 6.5% of the night sky and spans a staggering 130 degrees in length. While it might sound modest, this equates to 13,000 times the angular area of the full Moon.
The DECaPS2 dataset is available to the entire scientific community and is hosted by NOIRLab’s Astro Data Lab, which is part of the Community Science and Data Center. Interactive access to the imaging with panning/zooming inside of a web-browser is available from the Legacy Survey Viewer, the World Wide Telescope, and Aladin.
Most of the stars and dust in the Milky Way are located in its disk — the bright band stretching across this image — in which the spiral arms lie. While this profusion of stars and dust makes for beautiful images, it also makes the Galactic plane challenging to observe. The dark tendrils of dust seen threading through this image absorb starlight and blot out fainter stars entirely, and the light from diffuse nebulae interferes with any attempts to measure the brightness of individual objects. Another challenge arises from the sheer number of stars, which can overlap in the image and make it difficult to disentangle individual stars from their neighbors.
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab. For reference, a low-resolution image of the DECaPS2 data is overlaid on an image showing the full sky. The callout box is a full-resolution view of a small portion of the DECaPS2 data. Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/E. Slawik, Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
Despite the challenges, astronomers delved into the Galactic plane to gain a better understanding of our Milky Way. By observing at near-infrared wavelengths, they were able to peer past much of the light-absorbing dust. The researchers also used an innovative data-processing approach, which allowed them to better predict the background behind each star. This helped to mitigate the effects of nebulae and crowded star fields on such large astronomical images, ensuring that the final catalog of processed data is more accurate.
“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we simply pointed at a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear nearly on top of each other,” said Andrew Saydjari, a graduate student at Harvard University, researcher at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and lead author of the paper. “Doing so allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”
“When combined with images from Pan-STARRS 1, DECaPS2 completes a 360-degree panoramic view of the Milky Way’s disk and additionally reaches much fainter stars,” said Edward Schlafly, a researcher at the AURA-managed Space Telescope Science Institute and a co-author of the paper describing DECaPS2 published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement. “With this new survey, we can map the three-dimensional structure of the Milky Way’s stars and dust in unprecedented detail.”
This image, which is brimming with stars and dark dust clouds, is a small extract — a mere pinprick — of the full Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab. Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
“Since my work on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey two decades ago, I have been looking for a way to make better measurements on top of complex backgrounds,” said Douglas Finkbeiner, a professor at the Center for Astrophysics, co-author of the paper, and principal investigator behind the project. “This work has achieved that and more!”
“This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable!” says Debra Fischer, division director of Astronomical Sciences at NSF. “Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come. This is a fantastic example of what partnerships across federal agencies can achieve.”
DECam was originally built to carry out the Dark Energy Survey, which was conducted by the Department of Energy and the US National Science Foundation between 2013 and 2019.
More information
This dataset was presented in the paper “The Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey 2 (DECaPS2): More Sky, Less Bias, and Better Uncertainties” to appear in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
Reference: “The Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey 2 (DECaPS2): More Sky, Less Bias, and Better Uncertainties” by Andrew K. Saydjari, Edward F. Schlafly, Dustin Lang, Aaron M. Meisner, Gregory M. Green, Catherine Zucker, Ioana Zelko, Joshua S. Speagle, Tansu Daylan, Albert Lee, Francisco Valdes, David Schlegel and Douglas P. Finkbeiner, 18 January 2023, Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4365/aca594
The DECaPS2 team is composed of A. K. Saydjari (Harvard University and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian), E. F. Schlafly (Space Telescope Science Institute), D. Lang (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and
Billions of celestial objects captured in new survey of the Milky Way
Astronomers have released a new survey of the Milky Way that includes 3.3 billion celestial objects. (NOIRLab)
Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
ATLANTA — A new survey of the Milky Way galaxy has unveiled 3.3 billion celestial objects.
Our galaxy is brimming with hundreds of billions of stars, dark pillars of dust and gas, and gleaming stellar nurseries where stars are born. Now, astronomers have documented those wonders in unprecedented detail during the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey, which captured 21,400 individual exposures over two years.
The survey, which marks the second data release from the program since 2017, is the largest catalog of Milky Way objects to date. The Dark Energy Camera, located on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, captured the data for the survey.
The telescopes there sit at an altitude of about 7,200 feet and can observe the southern sky in great detail across visible and near-infrared wavelengths of light. The two data releases from the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey cover 6.5% of the night sky. Astronomers will be able to use the data release to better map the 3D structure of the galaxy’s dust and stars.
“This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable,” said Debra Fischer, division director of astronomical sciences at the National Science Foundation, in a statement.
“Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come. This is a fantastic example of what partnerships across federal agencies can achieve.”
A new image showcasing the celestial objects captured by the survey was released on Wednesday, which includes stars and dust across the Milky Way’s bright galactic disk. The galaxy’s spiral arms also lie in this plane. Together, such bright features make observing the Milky Way’s galactic plane — where most of its disk-shaped mass lies — a difficult task.
Dark streaks of dust seen in the image obscure starlight, while the glow from star-forming regions make it hard to spot the individual brightness of celestial objects.
By using the Dark Energy Camera, astronomers were able to peer through the dust of the galactic plane using near-infrared light and used a data-processing method to mitigate the obscuring effects of the star-forming regions.
The data set was shared in a study published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we simply pointed at a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear nearly on top of each other,” said lead study author Andrew Saydjari, a doctoral student at Harvard University and researcher at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a statement.
“Doing so allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”
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‘Galactic Panorama’ of Milky Way Details 3.3 Billion Celestial Objects
Astronomers have identified 3.32 billion celestial objects in the Milky Way in unprecedented detail.
The galactic panorama of stars, gas, dust and a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* was captured by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Dark Energy Camera on a 4-meter telescope. It’s housed at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in northern Chile, which sits at an altitude of 7,200 feet, allowing for one of the clearest views of the night sky.
“This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable,” said
Debra Fischer,
division director of astronomical sciences at the National Science Foundation. “Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come,” she said.
Gathering the latest batch of data from the project, known as the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey, took over two years. It involved around 260 hours of observation with 21,000 exposures, resulting in more than 10 terabytes of data. Along with an earlier data release in 2017, the project has now covered 6.5% of the night sky.
Researchers pointed the telescope at a region of the Milky Way with “an extraordinarily high density of stars,” said
Andrew Saydjari,
a graduate student at Harvard University who worked on the project. “Doing so allowed us to produce the largest catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed,” he said.
Images released in the survey show part of the Milky Way’s spiral disk, where most of the stars and dust are located.
The team targeted a region of the Milky Way with ‘an extraordinarily high density of stars,’ a researcher said.
Photo:
DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/E. Slawik Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
One small portion of the broader panoramic image is entirely filled with celestial objects, illustrating the challenges researchers faced identifying individual stars due to the sheer number that overlap one another.
“By observing at near-infrared wavelengths, they were able to peer past much of the light-absorbing dust,” according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which is affiliated with the project.
The survey data was published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
Write to Talal Ansari at talal.ansari@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Billions of celestial objects revealed in gargantuan survey of the Milky Way
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects—arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the Dark Energy Camera, built by the US Department of Energy, at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.
The Milky Way Galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, glimmering star-forming regions, and towering dark clouds of dust and gas. Imaging and cataloging these objects for study is a herculean task, but a newly released astronomical dataset known as the second data release of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) reveals a staggering number of these objects in unprecedented detail. The DECaPS2 survey, which took two years to complete and produced more than 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures, identified approximately 3.32 billion objects—arguably the largest such catalog compiled to date. Astronomers and the public can explore the dataset here.
This unprecedented collection was captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) instrument on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. CTIO is a constellation of international astronomical telescopes perched atop Cerro Tololo in Chile at an altitude of 2200 meters (7200 feet). CTIO’s lofty vantage point gives astronomers an unrivaled view of the southern celestial hemisphere, which allowed DECam to capture the southern Galactic plane in such detail.
DECaPS2 is a survey of the plane of the Milky Way as seen from the southern sky taken at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. The first trove of data from DECaPS was released in 2017, and with the addition of the new data release, the survey now covers 6.5% of the night sky and spans a staggering 130 degrees in length. While it might sound modest, this equates to 13,000 times the angular area of the full moon.
The DECaPS2 dataset is available to the entire scientific community and is hosted by NOIRLab’s Astro Data Lab, which is part of the Community Science and Data Center. Interactive access to the imaging with panning/zooming inside of a web-browser is available from the Legacy Survey Viewer, the World Wide Telescope and Aladin.
Most of the stars and dust in the Milky Way are located in its disk—the bright band stretching across this image—in which the spiral arms lie. While this profusion of stars and dust makes for beautiful images, it also makes the Galactic plane challenging to observe. The dark tendrils of dust seen threading through this image absorb starlight and blot out fainter stars entirely, and the light from diffuse nebulae interferes with any attempts to measure the brightness of individual objects. Another challenge arises from the sheer number of stars, which can overlap in the image and make it difficult to disentangle individual stars from their neighbors.
Despite the challenges, astronomers delved into the Galactic plane to gain a better understanding of our Milky Way. By observing at near-infrared wavelengths, they were able to peer past much of the light-absorbing dust. The researchers also used an innovative data-processing approach, which allowed them to better predict the background behind each star. This helped to mitigate the effects of nebulae and crowded star fields on such large astronomical images, ensuring that the final catalog of processed data is more accurate.
“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we simply pointed at a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear nearly on top of each other,” said Andrew Saydjari, a graduate student at Harvard University, researcher at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, and lead author of the paper. “Doing so allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”
“When combined with images from Pan-STARRS 1, DECaPS2 completes a 360-degree panoramic view of the Milky Way’s disk and additionally reaches much fainter stars,” said Edward Schlafly, a researcher at the AURA-managed Space Telescope Science Institute and a co-author of the paper describing DECaPS2 published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement. “With this new survey, we can map the three-dimensional structure of the Milky Way’s stars and dust in unprecedented detail.”
“Since my work on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey two decades ago, I have been looking for a way to make better measurements on top of complex backgrounds,” said Douglas Finkbeiner, a professor at the Center for Astrophysics, co-author of the paper, and principal investigator behind the project. “This work has achieved that and more.”
“This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable,” says Debra Fischer, division director of Astronomical Sciences at NSF. “Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come. This is a fantastic example of what partnerships across federal agencies can achieve.”
More information:
Andrew K. Saydjari et al, The Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey 2 (DECaPS2): More Sky, Less Bias, and Better Uncertainties, The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series (2023). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4365/aca594
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Physicists Discover a New Way to ‘See’ Objects Without Looking at Them : ScienceAlert
Ordinarily, to measure an object we must interact with it in some way. Whether it’s by a prod or a poke, an echo of sound waves, or a shower of light, it’s near impossible to look without touching.
In the world of quantum physics, there are some exceptions to this rule.
Researchers from Aalto University in Finland propose a way to ‘see’ a microwave pulse without the absorption and re-emission of any light waves. It’s an example of a special interaction-free measurement, where something is observed without being rattled by a mediating particle.
The fundamental concept of ‘looking without touching’ isn’t new. Physicists have shown it’s possible to use the wave-like nature of light to explore spaces without evoking its particle-like behavior by splitting neatly aligned waves of light through different paths and then comparing their journeys.
Instead of lasers and mirrors, the team used microwaves and semiconductors, making it a separate achievement. The setup used what’s known as a transmon device to detect an electromagnetic wave pulsed into a chamber.
While relatively large by quantum standards, these devices mimic the quantum behavior of individual particles on multiple levels using a superconducting circuit.
“The interaction-free measurement is a fundamental quantum effect whereby the presence of a photosensitive object is determined without irreversible photon absorption,” write the researchers in their published paper.
“Here we propose the concept of coherent interaction-free detection and demonstrate it experimentally using a three-level superconducting transmon circuit.”
The team relied on the quantum coherence produced by their bespoke system – the ability for objects to occupy two different states at the same time, like Schrödinger’s cat – in order to make the complex setup successful.
“We had to adapt the concept to the different experimental tools available for superconducting devices,” says quantum physicist Gheorghe Sorin Paraoanu, from Aalto University in Finland.
“Because of that, we also had to change the standard interaction-free protocol in a crucial way: we added another layer of quantumness by using a higher energy level of the transmon. Then, we used the quantum coherence of the resulting three-level system as a resource.”
The experiments run by the team were backed up with theoretical models confirming the results. It’s an example of what scientists call the quantum advantage, the ability for quantum devices to go beyond what’s possible with classical devices.
In the delicate landscape of quantum physics, touching things is akin to breaking them. Nothing ruins a neat wave of probability like the crunch of reality. For cases where detection needs a more gentle touch, alternative methods of sensing – like this one – could come in handy.
Areas in which this protocol can be applied include quantum computing, optical imaging, noise detection and cryptographic key distribution. In each case, the efficiency of the systems involved would be significantly improved.
“In quantum computing, our method could be applied for diagnosing microwave-photon states in certain memory elements,” says Paraoanu. “This can be regarded as a highly efficient way of extracting information without disturbing the functioning of the quantum processor.”
The research has been published in Nature Communications.
A New Satellite Is One of The Brightest Objects in The Sky, And It’s a Big Problem : ScienceAlert
We’re putting more and more satellites into orbit, and along with all the welcome technological and scientific advances that brings, there are also potential problems.
Intended to be the start of an orbiting communications network that can be accessed by standard smartphones, the recently launched prototype BlueWalker 3 satellite is now one of the brightest objects in the night sky.
For experts and enthusiasts who peer out into space, that’s a major issue. While astronomers have a few telescopes high above, many of our observations on the Universe are logged from Earth’s surface.
All but the brightest stars can now be outshone by the satellite’s glare, according to the International Astronomical Union Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference (IAU CPS).
“BlueWalker 3 is a big shift in the constellation satellite issue and should give us all reason to pause,” says Piero Benvenuti, the Director of the IAU CPS.
“It’s like exactly what astronomers don’t want,” astronomer Meredith Rawls, from the University of Washington in Seattle, told Science. “It’ll show up as a super bright streak in images and potentially saturate camera detectors at observatories.”
BlueWalker 3 is certainly an impressive bit of hardware. Its 693-square-foot (64-square-meter) antenna array is the largest commercial array in low Earth orbit, capable of reflecting much more light than the SpaceX Starlink satellites, for example.
The intention of parent company AST SpaceMobile is to get more than 100 satellites up in the sky by the end of 2024, many potentially even bigger than BlueWalker 3. That’s a significant worry for scientists.
There’s another concern too: BlueWalker 3 is built to act as a cell phone tower in space, which means it uses terrestrial radio frequencies that might interfere with radio telescopes – telescopes that are currently built well away from areas with mobile phone coverage.
“Frequencies allocated to cell phones are already challenging to observe even in radio quiet zones we have created for our facilities,” says Philip Diamond, Director-General at the Square Kilometer Array Observatory, headquartered in the UK.
“New satellites such as BlueWalker 3 have the potential to worsen this situation and compromise our ability to do science if not properly mitigated.”
Representatives from the IAU CPS and its partners are also keen to acknowledge the potential for satellites to improve worldwide communications, but they want more discussions to happen over the “equitable and sustainable use of space”.
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is responsible for regulating communications networks both within the US and internationally. It has announced plans to open an office dedicated to space, but in the meantime conversations between the IAU CPS and AST SpaceMobile have already started.
“We’re eager to use the newest technologies and strategies to mitigate possible impacts to astronomy,” an AST SpaceMobile spokesperson told New Scientist.
“We are actively working with industry experts on the latest innovations, including next-generation anti-reflective materials.”