In The News: Department of Physics and Astronomy

Big World Tale

GW Ori is a star system 1,300 light years from Earth in the constellation of Orion. But fascinatingly, it is a system with not one star, but three.

New York Times

It’s called a circumtriple planet, and evidence that one exists suggests that planet formation is less unusual than once believed.

Las Vegas Review Journal

Native American enrollment is down at Nevada colleges, a trend students and professors say reflects an unwelcoming community that’s not committed to recruiting more familiar faces on campus.

Nevada Independent

This chip manufacturing shortage presents a premier opportunity for economic development in the Silver State.

Control Engineering

A new record for the temperature at which materials have superconductivity and has developed a novel way to synthesize superconducting materials at lower pressures than previously reported.

Control Engineering

A new record for the temperature at which materials have superconductivity and has developed a novel way to synthesize superconducting materials at lower pressures than previously reported.

GE

Laser pincers that could fetch antimatter, a squishy insulator that can shapeshift into a conductor, and a 3D map of a tiny chunk of a mouse’s brain could help make AI smarter. This week’s coolest things go big by going small.

Science News

A surprisingly short gamma-ray burst has astronomers rethinking what triggers these celestial cataclysms.

Futurity

Remarkable things happen when a “squishy” compound of manganese and sulfide (MnS2) is compressed in a diamond anvil, researchers report.

The Week

Astronomers observe long bursts in association with the demise of massive stars.

Space.com

A fizzled example of a gamma-ray burst, the most powerful kind of explosion known in the universe, suggests these outbursts may not always work the way that scientists thought, and that versions of these flares can be surprisingly brief, researchers say.

SciTech Daily

As a compound of manganese sulfide is compressed in a diamond anvil cell, it undergoes dramatic transitions.