Topological quantum materials combine unusual electronic states with properties such as magnetism or superconductivity, offering possibilities for future electronics and quantum technologies. Researchers at Tohoku University have now shown that changing the number of layers in a crystal can provide a systematic way to design topological magnets. The work is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Topological quantum materials combine unusual electronic states with properties such as magnetism or superconductivity, offering possibilities for future electronics and quantum technologies. Researchers at Tohoku University have now shown that changing the number of layers in a crystal can provide a systematic way to design topological magnets. The work is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Material properties such as sound insulation, resistance to extreme heat and thermal expansion originate from how the zillions of microscopic building blocks (nuclei and electrons) interact at equilibrium and respond to perturbations. Atoms are typically about one ten-billionth of a meter across, so there can be a lot of parts to keep track of—a task that is complicated at the quantum-mechanical level, where particles are neither here nor there until observed.

Material properties such as sound insulation, resistance to extreme heat and thermal expansion originate from how the zillions of microscopic building blocks (nuclei and electrons) interact at equilibrium and respond to perturbations. Atoms are typically about one ten-billionth of a meter across, so there can be a lot of parts to keep track of—a task that is complicated at the quantum-mechanical level, where particles are neither here nor there until observed.

Physicists around the world remain deeply divided on key mysteries of the universe, from dark matter to quantum gravity. The standard cosmological model failed to gain majority support, and no leading theory dominated the survey results. The largest survey ever conducted among physicists worldwide reveals surprisingly little agreement on some of the field’s biggest mysteries, [...]

In a promising advancement in the search for dark matter, scientists have transformed a tiny magnet into a detector that can sense some of nature’s faintest forces—with a little help from levitation.

The research could help researchers detect some of the heaviest particles that are believed to have ever inhabited the universe, according to physicists.

Led by Rice University physicist Christopher Tunnell, the achievement was made using a tiny permanent magnet—one around the size of a grain of sand—which they levitated over a superconductor that was chilled to freezing cold temperatures just above absolute zero.

Since the magnet floats without encountering any surfaces, this dramatically reduces friction, allowing the Rice team to carefully monitor its movements, some of which are as small as around one-hundredth of a single atom. Such subtleties of its motion offer a novel possibility: that the magnet’s faint movements could serve as an effective signal if a massive dark matter particle passed through the detector.

Unusual Candidates for Dark Matter Particles

“Dark matter could be hiding at masses that our traditional experiments were never built to reach,” Tunnell said in a recent statement, noting that by leveraging the team’s novel detector, “we can begin searching a part of the dark matter landscape that has largely been out of experimental reach despite being the focus of extensive theoretical study by my Rice cosmology colleague Andrew Long.”

Among the most mysterious phenomena in the universe, dark matter is believed to comprise most of the matter that populates the cosmos and exerts gravitational effects that influence the formation and behavior of galaxies. Despite this, scientists have remained unsuccessful in detecting it or even determining what it is comprised of.

There are several experiments that hunt for hypothetical dark matter particles, which scientists believe have masses that are similar to those of atoms or subatomic particles. Still, there are some theoretical models which suggest much heavier particles could also qualify—some approaching sizes as large as a human cell.

A Novel Means of Detecting Dark Matter

Detecting something so large would require a very different kind of dark matter detector. To search for the kinds of interactions that smaller particles would be expected to generate, the Rice researchers instead looked for an impulse—one more likely to result from such an “ultraheavy” dark matter particle as it interacted with the detector.

“Instead of looking for a steady signal, we are waiting for very small knocks,” explained Rice postdoctoral researcher Juehang Qin.

Over the course of one month, the team collected observations that focused mainly on quiet overnight periods when vibrations and other environmental disturbances were minimized. Unfortunately, no promising detections were made during this time.

Still, important results can also be derived from a lack of any definitive discoveries, especially when it comes to a field like particle physics. In this case, that’s because the absence of a signal allowed the researchers to place a few constraints on the combinations of dark matter masses and interaction strengths that should have been expected to produce detectable effects.

Altogether, the team’s experiment looked at nine orders of magnitude in its search for possible dark matter particle passes, which included searches for particles as much as 10 million times heavier than those investigated in past similar experiments.

Next Steps

Going forward, the next step would be to increase the experiment’s sensitivity by cooling the magnet even further, observing for longer periods, and eventually successfully levitating several magnets simultaneously. Multiple detectors could also help scientists determine whether real interactions involving dark matter are occurring, as opposed to false positives that might arise from vibrations or other kinds of interference.

Although the Rice team’s work is only a first step, their experiments with a tiny levitating magnet mark a promising pathway toward future potential detections, which may finally unlock new clues to the universe’s mysterious dark matter landscape.

The team’s research was detailed at the 2026 International Conference on Particle Physics and Cosmology, and additional details can be found here.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

Researchers at Nagoya University have built a graphene nanoribbon that can switch which way it twists using a natural solvent. Graphene nanoribbons are thin ribbon-shaped structures made of fused carbon rings. Twisted or helical versions of these ribbons show promise for advanced light and electronic devices. However, no graphene nanoribbon could switch that twist on demand, until now.

Scientists have worked out how to switch between a right-handed and left-handed twist (chirality) by changing the solvent around it. The discovery ¹ opens opportunities for new optical switches, chemical sensors, and spintronic components that adapt to changing environments.

Tomoyuki Ikai, lead author and professor at Nagoya University’s Graduate School of Engineering, is a polymer chemist inspired by natural helical structures such as DNA and proteins. Polymers are large molecules built from many small, repeating units linked together in a chain. Ikai had been working on ladder polymers, where each repeating unit is locked into place and cannot freely rotate around the bond connecting to its neighbor (unlike a typical flexible linear polymer).

In 2019, Ikai and his collaborators built the first rigid, helix-shaped polymer. In 2021, they perfected a chemical method to fuse these building blocks together without flaws. This method is what let them build the new graphene nanoribbon.

“We used the same fusion approach already used to make predictable helical ladder polymers. But instead of a stable building block, such as [6]helicene, we used [4]helicene, a 4-ring unit written off as too unstable to be useful,” Ikai said.

Soak, twist, repeat

These units are difficult to control on their own because they switch their chirality too fast to hold one handedness. The team’s method fuses these small, restless units into one long chain. Once joined, they found that a neighbor effect took hold: each unit’s twist began to match its neighbors, and long stretches of the ribbon settled into a single, shared spiral.

To lock it in one overall direction, the researchers dissolved the ribbon in a natural chiral liquid, a liquid made of molecules that come in two mirror-image versions. They tested six candidates before they found the right one: beta-pinene, a compound found in pine trees and citrus peel.

Because beta-pinene molecules can be arranged in left- and right-hand mirror-images, these two versions each push the ribbon toward the opposite spiral. This also changed the twist direction of light the ribbon gave off, a property called circularly polarized luminescence, and is the first graphene nanoribbon shown to switch its light this way.

The switching induced a remarkably high degree of helical bias, with almost all of the helicene units aligning in the same direction. The switching effect is strongest at –90°C and grows weaker as the temperature rises toward room temperature.

“For a long time, people saw [4]helicene as unsuitable for chiral materials, because it could not be controlled,” Ikai said. “In this paper, we show that once you link enough of these units together, the instability itself becomes the useful part.”

A chiral solvent’s nudge toward one handedness is usually very weak on its own. Here, the ribbon’s own structure, with each unit mechanically linked to its neighbors, amplifies that weak nudge into a strong, nearly one-handed result.

An adaptive material

The researchers point to several possible future uses: The switchable light could serve optical devices. The ribbon’s chemical sensitivity to beta-pinene suggests it may work as a chiral sensor, and a similar design could one day help detect hazardous or unstable chemicals. Because graphene conducts electricity well, the ribbon may also suit electronic sensors.

The molecule’s twisted shape connects to spintronics, a field that uses the spin of electrons rather than just their charge. Ikai noted that a right-handed or left-handed structure can, in principle, let electrons of one spin pass through more easily than the other, a property helical structures are known for in physics literature.

The current design only holds its twist while it stays in the chiral liquid. If the solvent is removed, the ribbon drifts back to a mixed, unstable state. Ikai’s next goal is a form of “chiral memory,” a way for the ribbon to lock in its twist even after the solvent is gone. This next step builds on memory techniques the researchers have explored in other helical systems and is now applied to graphene for the first time.

The post First switchable graphene nanoribbon that twists on demand appeared first on Mapping Ignorance.

Dark matter, the invisible substance thought to make up around 85 percent of all mass in the universe, forms an essential part of the standard cosmological model, providing the gravitational glue that holds together entire galaxies. What it actually is, though — and even if it truly exists — remains one of the great mysteries of science.

Now, a bizarre event that occurred nearly a mile underground at the world’s largest dark matter detector in South Dakota, the LZ detector, could be the first direct evidence of the substance. Or it could be something else entirely. Either way, it has scientists mystified and excited.

In a new paper published Tuesday and has been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters, physicists running the LZ Dark Matter Experiment say that their detector recorded a stunning subatomic interaction that doesn’t fit anything else ever documented in physics.

Again, it’s not necessarily a dark matter discovery — but it’s so unusual that it warranted sharing.

“How do you even make sense of one event?” Tom Shutt, a particle astrophysicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and cofounder of the LZ project, told Science magazine. “We just decided we should publish and think really, really, really hard about what that event could be.”

Dark matter is a sort of ghost haunting the cosmos. We can’t see it because it doesn’t emit, absorb, or reflect light, or otherwise interact with any ordinary matter — except through gravity. 

We see the fingerprints of its gravitational pull all around the universe, in fact. Galaxies aren’t massive enough to hold themselves together with their own gravity, so without the invisible presence of something with incredible mass, the very realms that define the universe, and which we call home, would fly apart.

There are countless candidates for what dark matter is, but the prevailing theory is that it’s made up of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. As their feeble acronym suggests, WIMPs are thought to be a hundred times as massive as a proton, but have such a weak nuclear force that they don’t interact with ordinary particles. 

Because of their mass, they move much slower than ordinary particles, too, allowing them to clump together and form giant “halos” that provide the gravitational pull for galaxies to form in. There is no single agreed-upon definition of a WIMP, though, and it’s possible that WIMPs could be a whole family of particles, rather than just one.

If these theories are correct, then every once in a while, errant WIMPs can bump into the nucleus of an unsuspecting atom and create a trace amount of energy.

This is what the LZ detector is built to find. It’s essentially a tank filled with seven tons of liquid xenon, placed 1,480 meters underground in a former gold mine. At such a depth, the preponderance of xenon is shielded from the space radiation that our planet is routinely bombarded with (though there is a still a background level of other interactions that scientists can’t control, but can account for.) Anything that causes a a big enough stir in this controlled, quiet environment would be significant.

After spending years poring over the data the detector has collected so far, the physicists found a striking interaction that took place in 2023. Something, we don’t know what, smashed into a xenon particle, and produced a flash of light. If it was dark matter, it produced more energy than traditional WIMP models predict.

The scientists say that the detection has about a one in 400 chance of being a fluke. Scientific discoveries, though, need to meet at least a five sigma threshold, meaning that there should be only as roughly one in 3.5 million that it’s a fluke.

Still, physicists are absolutely thrilled. Even if this event isn’t a smoking gun by itself, there are other, larger dark matter detectors coming online, such as China’s PandaX experiment and Italy’s XENONnT, that should be able to hunt for the same high energy type of event.

“We can perform this study independently with a blind analysis to validate or invalidate LZ’s claim,” Elena Aprile, a physicist at Columbia University and spokesperson for the XENON experiment, told Science.

More on dark matter: Physicist Proposes Dark Matter Is Made of Black Holes That Survived Dead Universes

The post Something Strange Just Happened With the World’s Largest Dark Matter Detector appeared first on Futurism.

The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment in South Dakota recorded an unexplained flash of light in 2023, suggesting a potential dark matter particle interaction. While the statistical significance of 2.6-sigma indicates low odds of error, much more evidence is needed before confirming a dark matter discovery, which remains elusive despite ongoing research.

Physicists using the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter detector deep underground in a former South Dakota gold mine say they’ve recorded a single particle interaction that they can’t easily explain, but they’re a long way from claiming a discovery.

The post Physicists Spot Curious Signal in Hunt for Elusive Dark Matter Particles appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Dark matter may finally be coming into focus thanks to a recent LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, which detected a particle interaction that is difficult to explain as arising from ordinary matter.

Physicists believe that 85% of the matter in the universe is dark matter rather than ordinary matter, but because it neither emits nor reflects light, the mysterious substance effectively remains invisible.

The new findings, described in a recent paper submitted to Physical Review Letters and in a talk at Japan’s 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference, detail the work of dozens of researchers that may constitute an intriguing hint in advance of a confirmed dark matter detection.

LUX-ZEPLIN

A massive international team of 250 scientists and engineers across 39 institutions makes up the LZ project, which conducts its experiment at a facility in South Dakota, almost a mile below ground. This facility, the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), houses the detector, which is optimized to search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS), one of the primary candidates for dark matter.

It does so using ten metric tons of ultrapure liquid xenon in a cylindrical detector. Layers surrounding the chamber block or detect background particles during the dark matter search. If WIMPs collide with xenon atoms, they should produce tiny flashes of light and electrons that can be detected within the chamber.

The nearly mile of rock above the facility helps prevent cosmic rays and other surface radiation from interfering with the experiments. A water tank and outer detectors help shield the central detector from background neutrons, while computational tools separate particle interactions to identify events that may mimic a dark matter observation.

Dark Matter Data

“This was a detailed study in a region we hadn’t explored within this dataset, and we spent months of additional effort to understand all the possible causes of background events,” said lead author Sam Eriksen, a senior research associate at the University of Bristol in the UK.

“We understand our detector and the backgrounds so well that even a single outstanding event, like the one we found, is important. We expect dark-matter events to be extremely rare, so only a handful could mark the first detection of WIMP dark matter,” Eriksen added.

Measurements used in the study were collected between March 2023 and April 2024, totaling 220 live days. The new work wasn’t the first pass on this dataset, as researchers had previously searched it for faint signals from the simplest kinds of WIMP interactions. This time, the team expanded its search to a broader range of possible interactions that could deposit more energy in the detector.

A Possible Dark Matter Detection

“We’re very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up and the competing backgrounds are very low,” said LZ spokesperson Rick Gaitskell, a professor at Brown University. “With only one event, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input.”

According to researchers, the event was an outlier from other LZ measurements and is consistent with one of the dark matter models the team explored. However, increasingly sensitive technology can ironically reveal previously unseen background processes alongside potentially interesting new signals. The sensitivity of the detectors used at LZ may therefore be measuring a background that earlier instruments missed rather than dark matter.

This detection is rated at 2.6 sigma, about half of the 5-sigma threshold needed to ensure the signal is not background noise. Further observations will be needed to push certainty toward that 5-sigma goal, but this could be a major step in that direction.

The paper, “Search for Dark Matter Particle Interactions in an Extended Nuclear Recoil Energy Window with the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment,” is currently available on the LUX-ZEPLIN website.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

Water droplets sliding across solid surfaces can acquire electric potentials of thousands of volts and thereby corrode non-conductive surfaces on metals when they discharge. That is the conclusion of researchers in Germany who say that the poorly-understood phenomenon warrants further investigation to help prevent corrosion of vulnerable outdoor equipment and cultural heritage sites.

Metal corrosion by water droplets is a serious economic and safety issue, and prevention begins with the proper understanding of the relevant processes. Conventional wisdom is that most corrosion is caused by a combination of physical abrasion by the motion of the droplets and chemical degradation from natural acids and anthropogenic pollutants in the water. The notion that electrochemistry might play a significant role in corrosion had not been seriously considered, says physical chemist Hans-Jürgen Butt of the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz.

Part of the reason, he believes, is that, until relatively recently, it was thought that the triboelectric effect (electrically charging objects by rubbing them together) did not work in liquids. “If you have a solid and you rub another insulating solid against it you get electron transfer – I think this has been known for more than 2500 years” he says. However, this relies on atomic-scale roughness of the surface to concentrate charge at specific points where bonds can be broken – and fluids cannot, by definition, be rough.

“If you take a water droplet and let it slide there is some mechanical force from surface tension, but that’s much too low,” says Butt. “There is no way you could generate enough energy locally to pick up an electron or to put an electron or an ion from the water onto the surface.” In the past 10 years, however, it has become increasingly clear that sliding droplets do become highly charged.

Sloping surfaces

In their present work Butt and colleagues deposited water droplets onto copper surfaces covered with 60 nm of Teflon.  When they dropped droplets straight onto the surface, they observed no corrosion. They then deposited droplets first onto a variety of other sloped insulating surfaces such as plant leaves, PVC construction boards and the perfluorooctadecyltrichlorosilane (PFOTS) hydrophobic coating often used on window glass. The droplets ran down these surfaces and then fell onto the Teflon-coated copper. After around 3000 droplet impacts, atomic force microscopy and confocal microscopy revealed evidence that the droplets had corroded both the coating and the underlying copper.

The researchers believe that the droplets become positively charged as they slide down the sloping surface. As they fall onto the coating, the potential difference between the copper and the underlying copper can exceed 1 kV. This is greater than the dielectric breakdown strength of the coating, causing the droplet to discharge. This damages the coating and leaves the underlying metal vulnerable to further oxidation.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers measured charge movement within the copper surface, showing that negative charge flowed towards droplets dripping off insulating surfaces. They also used high-speed cameras to show that, whereas a drop deposited directly retained its spherical shape before impact, a dripping drop was drawn into a cone shape, producing a tip of positive charge that would increase its corrosive capacity.

Uncertain consequences

The practical implications of this are unclear. “Technical coatings on cars, ships etc. are typically 100 microns and thicker, so the process we describe is probably not of direct relevance,”says Butt. However, the phenomenon could be involved in the degradation of monuments and other outdoor historical objects. “We have evidence that surfaces change their properties when you slide charges over them, but the real consequences are not yet known,” explains Butt.

He says his own group is most clearly focused on understanding the fundamental physics involved. “We still don’t know why the heck there is such a charge separation: it’s energetically unfavourable, it should not happen, but it happens.” he says. “The one effect we describe here is, in a way, pretty trivial – everyone knows that if you have a high potential and it’s somehow grounded there is a breakthrough – but what happens at the surface with this deposited charge is not clear.”

Materials scientist Zhong Lin Wang of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta was one of the first researchers to discover the triboelectric effect in liquids, and helped to develop the triboelectric nanogenerator used to quantify it. “The transferred electrons can be kicked back to the water solution, resulting in chemical reaction at the vicinity surface. This process, called contact-electro-catalysis, was first proposed in 2022, and is now an active field of research in chemistry, materials and environmental science.” He says. “[Butt and colleagues] show that the electrons transferred from the water droplet can ‘break’ the surface coating layer and lead to local oxidation. This is an interesting discovery.”

The research is described in Nature.

The post Sliding water droplets corrode Teflon-coated metal appeared first on Physics World.

Welcome to this special edition of The Intelligence Brief… This week, NASA is preparing to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, its next flagship space observatory and a mission poised to transform our understanding of distant worlds and some of the universe’s greatest mysteries. In our analysis, we’ll be looking at 1) how Roman’s powerful Wide Field and Coronagraph instruments will survey the cosmos on an unprecedented scale, 2) how the telescope could discover thousands of new exoplanets—including elusive rogue worlds—and directly image planets around other stars, 3) how Roman will survey more than a billion galaxies in search of new clues about dark matter and dark energy, and 4) why its combination of Hubble-like image quality and an enormously wider field of view could usher in a new era of astronomical discovery.

Quote of the Week

“We are poised at the brink of unfathomable scientific discovery.”

– Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA Goddard

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NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Prepares for Lift-Off

On Sunday morning, NASA will set a new milestone with the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, setting the course for discoveries that may include new insights into some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

As NASA’s next flagship space observatory, this powerful new telescope is designed to discover thousands of distant worlds while also probing the lingering mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy and an early advocate for the efforts that led to the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, the new space observatory bearing her name is poised to offer one of the most detailed views of our universe ever captured.

Scheduled to lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on August 30, 2026, at 7:26 a.m. EDT, the Roman telescope’s mission is comparable in ambition to those of the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, but also very different in many respects. Here’s a look at what to know about this historic mission, what it may help researchers uncover, and why it could set the pace for a range of important scientific advancements in the coming years.

Roman’s Historic Mission to Observe the Cosmos

At the heart of its mission, Roman will offer astronomers a remarkably wide view of the cosmos. Surveying immense portions of the sky, the powerful instruments on board the telescope will capture high-resolution imagery comparable to Hubble at certain optical and infrared wavelengths—imagery that could dramatically reshape scientists’ understanding of both planets and the universe they inhabit.

In terms of the technologies it will carry with it into space, Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will rely on two primary instruments: its Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and Coronagraph Instrument. The WFI is equipped with a 300-megapixel near-infrared camera enabling wide-area imaging and spectroscopy, allowing Roman to conduct large-scale surveys with great precision and sensitivity—all of which make it ideal for use in the hunt for dark energy, exoplanets, and other hard-to-spot cosmic phenomena.

Meanwhile, Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument is designed specifically for imaging and studying exoplanets. Equipped for both imaging and spectroscopy, the coronagraph will suppress the overwhelming glare of distant stars, potentially making much fainter planets orbiting nearby visible. According to NASA, Roman’s powerful Coronagraph will be the first instrument deployed on a space observatory to leverage “numerically optimized, precision-fabricated coronagraph masks.”

By suppressing the overwhelming glare of distant stars so that much fainter planets around them become visible, Roman’s Coronagraph could achieve as much as 100 times the performance of existing facilities, offering a promising chance that some of the faintest planets in the cosmos—some as much as a billion times fainter than their host stars—could become visible.

With a little luck, Roman could also break new ground with the first direct imagery of an exoplanet possessing rings. Going beyond its immediate discoveries, the coronagraph will also demonstrate technologies that could eventually be incorporated into future observatories, including NASA’s proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory.

A New Era of Planet Hunting

Presently, astronomers have confirmed roughly 6,000 planets beyond our Solar System. However, once Roman’s mission gets underway, that number could see a dramatic increase.

One of the ways it will achieve such landmark detections will be with the help of gravitational microlensing, which relies on detecting how the gravity of a foreground object can magnify light from a source much farther away. Using microlensing alone, there is a good chance Roman may discover several hundred—but more likely thousands—of planets, which may include worlds small enough that they have eluded previous detection using existing methods.

Along with the planets it discovers, astronomers anticipate that Roman will also find several new additions to the growing catalog of “rogue planets,” mysterious planetary bodies that wander through the cosmos without orbiting a star.

Additionally, NASA says that anywhere from 60,000 to 200,000 additional candidate planets could be revealed through transit observations, though only a fraction of these are expected to be confirmed through additional observations.

Mapping the Dark Universe

Arguably, one of the most significant components of Roman’s mission involves its study of the unseen side of the cosmos: the mysterious phenomena known as dark energy and dark matter.

In search of answers to such mysteries, Roman will soon begin scanning more than a billion galaxies as it maps the structure and evolution of the universe throughout cosmic history, providing data that will at the very least help researchers narrow down the most promising interpretations among a range of competing explanations for dark energy.

Simultaneously, the telescope will probe dark matter, the unseen material whose gravitational effects are currently needed to explain phenomena in our universe that include the motions of galaxies, as well as the evolution of some of the largest structures in the cosmos.

Hubble’s Vision, But at Far Greater Scale

In many ways, what Roman is expected to achieve will be comparable to its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, although at a far greater scale.

At some wavelengths, Roman will be capable of producing images that approach the clarity of Hubble’s iconic views of our universe, all while capturing as much as 100 times more of the sky with each observation. By capturing more of the sky with each image it produces, Roman’s efforts to map the universe could occur at a remarkable pace—perhaps a thousand times faster than those of its predecessor.

A Historic Mission Lifts Off This Sunday

If all goes according to plan, Roman will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. EDT this Sunday, Aug. 30. NASA will begin live coverage of Roman’s launch on Sunday at 6:20 a.m. Eastern Time, and you can follow the updates online with NASA’s free streaming platforms.

Once it lifts off, Roman will be carried 930,000 miles from Earth to the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 region, which is the same location where the James Webb Space Telescope is currently operating. After it reaches orbit, for the next 90 days, Roman will undergo commissioning, after which science operations are expected to begin sometime in early 2027.

The observatory’s primary mission will last five years, although Roman could potentially remain operational for more than a decade, offering astronomers an unprecedented look at our universe and possibly a few answers to some of the most baffling questions about our universe.

That concludes this week’s installment of The Intelligence Brief. You can read past editions of our newsletter at our website, or if you found this installment online, don’t forget to subscribe and get future email editions from us here. Also, if you have a tip or other information you’d like to send along directly to me, you can email me at micah [@] thedebrief [dot] org, or reach me on X: @MicahHanks.

Here are the top stories we’re covering right now…

In the 1970s, astronomer Vera Rubin analyzed a series of observations of how quickly different galaxies rotated around their centers. She found that these galaxies rotated much faster than they should have, given the amount of material visible through starlight. She concluded that a large fraction of these galaxies’ masses must therefore consist of some kind of unseen material.

Scientists have since observed galaxies to more precisely measure this unseen material, which they now call dark matter. They’ve shown that dark matter moves much more slowly than the speed of light. Unlike most celestial objects, it can’t emit or block any light, meaning it doesn’t interact with the electromagnetic force. Even though it doesn’t interact with a fundamental force in the universe, dark matter constitutes over 80% of the mass of an average galaxy.

In the prevailing model of cosmology, known as ΛCDM (pronounced “Lambda-CDM”), dark matter determined where galaxies formed. The theory is that gravity pulled dark matter together more quickly than regular matter in the primordial universe. This redistribution led to regions of space with greater mass density, which collected chaotic, regular matter into pools that eventually formed galaxies, stars, and planets. 

In the present universe, dark matter and regular matter coexist in galaxies, though generally separated. Regular matter pools in the very center of galaxies, forming the more familiar galactic disks. Dark matter stays towards the edges of galaxies, enveloping the regular matter disks in what are known as dark matter halos. Because these halos make up so much of the mass of the average galaxy, researchers Guangze Sun, Fangzhou Jiang, and Jing Wang conducted a series of simulations to test how dark matter halos affect regular matter in galaxies. Specifically, they examined what characteristics of dark matter halos determine galaxy sizes. 

The force of gravity works such that more massive dark matter halos draw in more regular matter and produce larger galaxies. So these researchers fixed the total mass of the galaxies they simulated at 100 billion times that of the Sun to determine which properties of the dark matter halos would produce the widest galaxies. They selected 4 variables to test: the total density of dark matter in the galactic halo, the density of dark matter in the innermost 1% of the halo, how fast the halo spun, and the ratio of regular matter to dark matter in the entire galaxy. For each variable, they tested 3 to 4 inputs representing low, moderate, and high values against a standard reference value and ran 132 total simulations to generate enough data for statistical analyses.

To simulate the complex physics of dark matter halos, the team used the modeling software GIZMO to model gravity, magnetism, and fluid dynamics. They combined this with a second model, called FIRE-3, which modeled how stars explode at the end of their lives, how much metal these explosions produce, and how gases heat up and cool down over time. The researchers ran the dynamic simulations for 3 billion model years, then used a program they developed based on the existing Pynbody to measure the radii of the simulated galaxies. 

The team found that the faster a dark matter halo spun around a simulated galaxy, the larger the galaxy became, as shown in scenario 1 in the figure below. By contrast, in scenario 2, increasing the halo’s total dark matter concentration caused the central galaxy to shrink. Increasing only the innermost dark matter density in the halo had a smaller effect but generally reduced the galaxy’s size, as shown in scenario 3. And lastly, increasing the ratio of regular matter to dark matter in galaxies resulted in smaller galaxies that formed stars closer to their centers, as shown by a greater concentration of stars in scenario 4. 

The team’s results suggest a previously unknown connection between the properties of dark matter halos and galactic disks. However, they cautioned that their simulations were all run on galaxies in isolation, unlike in the actual ΛCDM universe, where their interactions are complicated by galaxies tugging on one another or by material moving from one to another. To further test their results for single galaxies, the researchers plan to run follow-up experiments with halos of different sizes, as well as with galaxies with different shapes and features, such as clumps, gaps, and lopsidedness.

The post Dark matter influences the size of galaxies appeared first on Sciworthy.

Indian scientists searching for clues to the oldest signs of life on Earth have discovered evidence of organic matter in a 3.5-billion-year-old sample of Paleoarchean volcanic–hydrothermal chert.

If confirmed, the team said the ancient chert would represent one of the oldest signs of life emerging on Earth, less than a billion years after the planet’s formation.

Searching for the Oldest Signs of Life on Earth

According to a press release announcing the discovery, some of the earliest known traces of life on Earth have typically been preserved as carbonaceous matter. Although many have been discovered in marine and hydrothermal vents, others have been unearthed in black cherts and volcanic-sedimentary rock formations.

“Kerogen, insoluble organic matter preserved in sediments, represents some of the earliest known terrestrial biosignatures which have provided important insights into the origin of life and planetary habitability,” the researchers write.

However, they also note, directly dating these ancient materials is often complicated by a lack of “suitable geochronometers.” Instead, dating ancient cherts and other early traces of life on Earth has relied on indirect constraints from surrounding materials. These include dating the ages of cross-cutting lithologies.

Ancient Organic Material Dated to 3.497 Billion Years Ago

To date, the newly discovered 3.5-billion-year-old chert, T. Mark Harrison, Trisrota Chaudhuri, and colleagues examined samples of “banded” cherts collected from the Singhbhum Craton in eastern India. Under microscopic analysis, the team found that the cherts contained “submillimeter-scale layers” alternating between carbonaceous matter and quartz-rich sedimentary material.

“The chert exhibits micron-scale alternating layers of carbonaceous and siliceous materials,” the study authors explained.

To date the material, the team analyzed a specific combination of zircon grain characteristics. This analysis indicated that the grains were “emplaced” as part of a ‘tuff.’ The team said a tuff is a volcanic ashfall “that settled on the sediments at the time of their deposition.”

Next, they tested the lead isotopes found within the zircon crystals. The team said this analysis of the material in the banded cherts suggested the organic cherts formed about 3.497 billion years ago. This date places them in the Paleoarchean Eon.

“Here, we report a 3.5-billion-year-old carbonaceous chert from eastern India containing what are interpreted to be contemporaneous tuffaceous zircons,” they write.

The team said the carbon isotope analysis yielded a value “consistent with a biological origin of relatively sophisticated metabolism.”

“Isotope data of carbonaceous matter (CM) together with stratigraphic relationships indicate a biogenic origin of the kerogen, marking this, to our knowledge, as the oldest directly dated rock with a confirmed biosignature,” they write.

Among the Earliest Known Occurrences of Biologically Generated Organic Matter

When discussing the significance of the findings, the team said the ancient Indian cherts “count among the earliest known occurrences of biologically generated organic matter.”

The research team also noted that the findings suggest Archaean-age cherts “may contain records of early life and further suggest that key biological processes were active on Earth by around 3.5 billion years ago.”

The study “Direct dating of 3.5 Ga biogenic carbon in a microbial mat remnant, Singhbhum Craton, India,” by Trisrota Chaudhuri et al. was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org