Wednesday 12 July 2017

Trilobites: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Gets Its Close-Up

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NASA’s Juno spacecraft passed a few thousand miles above the gargantuan storm, revealing intricate patterns of swirling clouds.
via New York Times

Moon Express Sets Its Sights on Deliveries to the Moon and Beyond

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The Florida start-up is not just aiming to win $20 million in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. It plans to be a payload delivery company.
via New York Times

Planet Nine hypothesis supported by new evidence

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Last year, the existence of an unknown planet in our Solar system was announced. However, this hypothesis was subsequently called into question as biases in the observational data were detected. Now astronomers have used a novel technique to analyze the orbits of the so-called extreme trans-Neptunian objects and, once again, they point out that there is something perturbing them: a planet located at a distance between 300 to 400 times the Earth-Sun separation.
via Science Daily
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Signature analysis of single molecules using their noise signals

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Unique noise signatures have been obtained from single molecules interacting with carbon nanotube-based electronic devices.
via Science Daily

Unusual galaxy in distant universe

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MACS2129-1 is dead in the sense that it no longer produces stars. But what makes this galaxy particularly significant is the fact that, unlike many dead galaxies, which tend to be elliptical or oval-shaped, this galaxy is disk or spiral-shaped, like the Milky Way, and its stars rotate in a flattened disk, much like the Milky Way's stars.
via Science Daily
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Messier 63: The Sunflower Galaxy

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A bright spiral galaxy of the northern sky, Messier 63 is about 25 million light-years distant in the loyal constellation Canes Venatici. Also cataloged as NGC 5055, the majestic island universe is nearly 100,000 light-years across. That's about the size of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Known by the popular moniker, The Sunflower Galaxy, M63 sports a bright yellowish core in this sharp composite image from space- and ground-based telescopes. Its sweeping blue spiral arms are streaked with cosmic dust lanes and dotted with pink star forming regions. A dominant member of a known galaxy group, M63 has faint, extended features that are likely star streams from tidally disrupted satellite galaxies. M63 shines across the electromagnetic spectrum and is thought to have undergone bursts of intense star formation.

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Spin control in graphene at room temperature

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Researchers have created a room-temperature spin transistor from graphene and molybdenum disulfide. A spin transistor is an essential component of future spintronic devices that will manipulate electron spin instead of charge for information processing. Using the spin degree of freedom instead of shuttling around charged carriers will lead to orders of magnitude energy savings for all our electronic devices.

Graphene has long been recognized as an interesting spintronic material due to its long spin lifetime. A research team from Chalmers University in Sweden experimentally demonstrated two years ago that graphene preserves its spin longer than any other known material, up to nanoseconds. The long lifetime  is a result of weak spin-orbit interaction. Contrary to graphene, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), another 2D material of growing importance in recent years, has a very strong spin-orbit interaction which results in extremely short spin lifetimes. Now the same team of researchers stacked these two materials and created spin valves that control transport between the graphene and the MoS2. When the valve is “open”, carriers tunnel to MoS2 and lose their spin properties. When the valve is “closed”, carriers stay in graphene and preserve their spins. The valve is opened and closed by simple electrostatic gating. Electrostatic gate control of spin currents in 2D material devices is a milestone achievement towards practical realizations of spintronics. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Coloured Scanning Electron Microscope Image of a Fabricated MoS2/Graphene 2D Materials Heterostructure Spintronic Device. Credit: Spin FET@Chalmers

The scientists are part of the Graphene Flagship, a 10-year, billion-euro project of the European Commission for bringing graphene from fundamental research to market products. It is through Flagship meetings that the researchers started collaborating with Graphenea, who provided the high-quality graphene films for this device. The MoS2 was mechanically exfoliated from large single crystal pieces and transferred on top of the graphene.

Other than use in spin transistors, the device could have imaginative new applications in electronic technology, because it contains magnetic memory elements, semiconductors and graphene, as well as having the capability of performing spintronic switching.


via Graphenea