A new Keck Observatory study indicates that giant planets can spin faster than more massive brown dwarfs, revealing important clues about how planetary systems form and evolve. Astronomers have long suspected that a planet’s mass may be linked to how quickly it spins. In our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn rotate especially fast, each completing [...]

NASA’s Roman Telescope could reveal 100,000 hidden worlds and rewrite what we know about planets across the Milky Way. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is expected to dramatically expand humanity’s catalog of worlds beyond our solar system. Known as exoplanets, these distant planets number nearly 6,300 discoveries so far through NASA missions and other [...]

A star caught feeding on its companion has finally revealed the source of some of the galaxy’s most mysterious repeating signals. An international research team led by scientists at the University of Sydney has uncovered the strongest evidence yet explaining the origin of a puzzling type of cosmic signal. Their work has also revealed a [...]

With dozens of companies, from small startups to tech giants, pursuing quantum computing, there's a steady flow of results as they try to find a path to utility. We typically focus on new technologies and major landmarks, which can obscure the fact that any big success will inevitably have been built on a lot of incremental progress.

The past few weeks have seen two companies release progress reports on how they're trying to get the technologies closer to general use. None of these represents a major breakthrough, but all are absolutely necessary for the technology to advance. The idea here is to convey the hard work required to move us closer to something useful.

Microsoft does material science

Microsoft is one of the few companies working on topological qubits, based on the distinct physics that occurs when particles are confined. Microsoft's system relies on a thin superconducting wire placed on top of a semiconductor. In superconductors, groups of two electrons form Cooper pairs. But if the wire contains an odd number of conducting electrons—meaning there's a single unpaired electron—it will end up delocalized to both ends of the wire. (Because quantum mechanics is weird.)

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© John Brecher for Microsoft