New evidence has surfaced suggesting that exoplanet Kepler-186f could have changing seasons and a climate, much like Earth. The discovery is exciting astronomers and leading to calls for newer, more detailed studies of this alien world. If Kepler-186f sounds familiar, that's because it's been in the news before: the Earthlike world has been a subject of scientific inquiry since it was first discovered in April 2014, with the help of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which revealed it to be an Earth-size planet whose orbit is located within a habitable distance from its sun.
Is there a good excuse for laziness? Maybe, if you're in a colony of ants. When they set out to dig a tunnel, only a few of them actually work. The majority just get out of the way.
Once more, this ultrapopular story about School of Physics' Dan Goldman's lazy-ant research has been picked up. Maybe we're just really relieved to find out that laziness has some benefits?
Rovers tend to be designed like little cars, equipped with wheels that spin on fixed axles. But that can leave the vehicles vulnerable to getting stuck, as Spirit infamously did on Mars. That's why School of PhysicsDaniel Goldman's team is finding new ways for rovers to move.
"Knitting is coding," says Elisabetta Matsumoto, assistant professor in the School of Physics. She made this argument during a Boston knitting session she co-hosted in March as part of her five-year, National Science Foundation-funded effort to study the mathematics and physics behind knitting.
The explosions that blew apart the universe’s first stars are shrouded in mystery. These energetic blasts are inherently difficult to recreate in computer simulations, even using modern computing power. “It’s one of the hardest physics problems out there,” says Alexander Ji, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif. Furthermore, he notes that researchers still lack an answer to a simple question: What types of stars do—and do not—explode?
For all science has learned about black holes in the last decade, researchers had only really estabished two different sizes for these celestial phenomena — stellar, or five to 50 times greater than the size of our sun, and supermassive, or a million times greater than our nearby star. Nothing had been found in-between. New research from a team including current and former Georgia Tech scientists could shed new light on intermediate-size black holes.
A new study from Georgia Tech astrophysicists Billy Quarles and Gongjie Li may have you seeing double — as in twin suns hovering over an alien exoplanet landscape. The researchers placed a (theoretical) duplicate of Earth inside so-called binary, or two-star, systems, and ran simulations on planetary axis tilts.
Many things about the animal world fascinate David Hu. He's won awards and gained attention for his studies on everything from mammal urination and defecation, to this research involving fire ants and how they build rafts out of their bodies when floodwaters rise. Hu, an associate professor in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Physics, and his team found different fluid behaviors, such as vortexes, could change the size of the fire ant raft in several ways.
