Amazon has unveiled the final production version of Leo Ultra, the company’s highest-performing enterprise terminal for the satellite broadband constellation it aims to bring into service next year.

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New experiments at CERN by an international team have ruled out a potential source of intergalactic magnetic fields. The existence of such fields is invoked to explain why we do not observe secondary gamma rays originating from blazars.

Led by Charles Arrowsmith at the UK’s University of Oxford, the team suggests the absence of gamma rays could be the result of an unexplained phenomenon that took place in the early universe.

A blazar is an extraordinarily bright object with a supermassive black hole at its core. Some of the matter falling into the black hole is accelerated outwards in a pair of opposing jets, creating intense beams of radiation. If a blazar points towards Earth, we observe a bright source of light including terahertz gamma rays.

During their journey across intergalactic space, these gamma-ray photons will occasionally collide with the background starlight that permeates the universe. These collisions can create cascades of electrons and positrons that can then scatter off photons to create gamma rays in the gigaelectronvolt energy range. These gamma-rays should travel in the direction of the original jet, but this secondary radiation has never been detected.

Deflecting field

Magnetic fields could be the reason for this dearth, as Arrowsmith explains: “The electrons and positrons in the pair cascade would be deflected by an intergalactic magnetic field, so if this is strong enough, we could expect these pairs to be steered away from the line of sight to the blazar, along with the reprocessed gigaelectronvolt gamma rays.” It is not clear, however, that such fields exist – and if they do, what could have created them.

Another explanation for the missing gamma rays involves the extremely sparse plasma that permeates intergalactic space. The beam of electron–positron pairs could interact with this plasma, generating magnetic fields that separate the pairs. Over millions of years of travel, this process could lead to beam–plasma instabilities that reduce the beam’s ability to create gigaelectronvolt gamma rays that are focused on Earth.

Oxford’s Gianluca Gregori  explains, “We created an experimental platform at the HiRadMat facility at CERN to create electron–positron pairs and transport them through a metre-long ambient argon plasma, mimicking the interaction of pair cascades from blazars with the intergalactic medium”. Once the pairs had passed through the plasma, the team measured the degree to which they had been separated.

Tightly focused

Called Fireball, the experiment found that the beams remained far more tightly focused than expected. “When these laboratory results are scaled up to the astrophysical system, they confirm that beam–plasma instabilities are not strong enough to explain the absence of the gigaelectronvolt gamma rays from blazars,” Arrowsmith explains. Unless the pair beam is perfectly collimated, or composed of pairs with exactly equal energies, instabilities were actively suppressed in the plasma.

While the experiment suggests that an intergalactic magnetic field remains the best explanation for the lack of gamma rays, the mystery is far from solved. Gregori explains, “The early universe is believed to be extremely uniform – but magnetic fields require electric currents, which in turn need gradients and inhomogeneities in the primordial plasma.” As a result, confirming the existence of such a field could point to new physics beyond the Standard Model, which may have dominated in the early universe.

More information could come with opening of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory. This will comprise ground-based gamma-ray detectors planned across facilities in Spain and Chile, which will vastly improve on the resolutions of current-generation detectors.

The research is described in PNAS.

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Star Wars is back in vogue with President Trump’s executive order to establish the “Golden Dome” missile defense shield. It will feature an ambitious space-based boost-phase interceptor program in addition to terrestrial systems. While admittedly the holy grail of defense against ballistic missiles, the obstacles that plagued its discontinued predecessor, “Brilliant Pebble,” under the Strategic […]

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China conducted a pair of launches last week, adding new spacecraft to its opaque TJS and Shijian satellite series.

The post China launches TJS-21 towards Molniya orbit, lofts trio of Shijian-30 spacecraft appeared first on SpaceNews.

In this episode of Space Minds, Senior Staff Writer Jeff Foust moderates a panel at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center, the next installment of the Center’s Discovery Series.

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What skills do you use every day in your job?

One thing I can say for sure that I got from working in academia is the ability to quickly read, summarize and internalize information from a bunch of sources. Journalism requires a lot of that. Being able to skim through papers – reading the abstract, reading the conclusion, picking the right bits from the middle and so on – that is a life skill.

In terms of other skills, I’m always considering who’s consuming what I’m doing rather than just thinking about how I’d like to say something. You have to think about how it’s going to be received – what’s the person on the street going to hear? Is this clear enough? If I were hearing this for the first time, would I understand it? Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes – be it the listener, reader or viewer – is a skill I employ every day.

What do you like best and least about your job?

The best thing is the variety. I ended up in this business and not in scientific research because of a desire for a greater breadth of experience. And boy, does this job have it. I get to talk to people around the world about what they’re up to, what they see, what it’s like, and how to understand it. And I think that makes me a much more informed person than I would be had I chosen to remain a scientist.

When I did research – and even when I was a science journalist – I thought “I don’t need to think about what’s going on in that part of the world so much because that’s not my area of expertise.” Now I have to, because I’m in this chair every day. I need to know about lots of stuff, and I like that feeling of being more informed.

I suppose what I like the least about my job is the relentlessness of it. It is a newsy time. It’s the flip side of being well informed, you’re forced to confront lots of bad things – the horrors that are going on in the world, the fact that in a lot of places the bad guys are winning.

What do you know today that you wish you knew when you were starting out in your career?

When I started in science journalism, I wasn’t a journalist – I was a scientist pretending to be one. So I was always trying to show off what I already knew as a sort of badge of legitimacy. I would call some professor on a topic that I wasn’t an expert in yet just to have a chat to get up to speed, and I would spend a bunch of time showing off, rabbiting on about what papers I’d read and what I knew, just to feel like I belonged in the room or on that call. And it’s a waste of time. You have to swallow your ego and embrace the idea that you may sound like you don’t know stuff even if you do. You might sound dumber, but that’s okay – you’ll learn more and faster, and you’ll probably annoy people less.

In journalism in particular, you don’t want to preload the question with all of the things that you already know because then the person you’re speaking to can fill in those blanks – and they’re probably going to talk about things you didn’t know you didn’t know, and take your conversation in a different direction.

It’s one of the interesting things about science in general. If you go into a situation with experts, and are open and comfortable about not knowing it all, you’re showing that you understand that nobody can know everything and that science is a learning process.

The post Ask me anything: Jason Palmer – ‘Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is a skill I employ every day’ appeared first on Physics World.

Col. Brian Chatman: The volume is here to stay. The next step is making sure the infrastructure can keep up

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A new German military space policy outlines the ambitions the country has fueled by tens of billions of euros of new spending over the next several years.

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Recent findings reveal that even simple pricing algorithms can make things more expensive.

A member of the European Parliament said there is widespread support there for the proposed European Union Space Act, while acknowledging that the draft released this summer can be refined.

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Where is the center of the universe? Learn why researchers say the rules may not apply to the center of the universe.

My dog contributes to climate change. I love him anyway.

The first booster in the new generation of Starship vehicles suffered significant damage during a Nov. 21 test, adding to doubts about the vehicle’s development schedule.

The post First next-generation Starship booster damaged in testing appeared first on SpaceNews.

Loss of federal support leads to staff layoffs and fewer committees of outside experts

The company is pitching Blue Ring as a workhorse for military missions that demand aggressive maneuvering in orbit

The post Blue Origin advances Blue Ring spacecraft toward 2026 national security mission appeared first on SpaceNews.

Learn more about loggerhead turtles’ ability to feel the magnetic field throughout their migrations — an ability that they’ve revealed to researchers through dancing.

Learn how dolphins have fun by blowing bubble rings underwater, using clever tricks to play games. 

Europe must move quickly to craft a large-scale strategy for space-based data centers or risk ceding a potential pillar of future digital infrastructure to global competitors, according to the European Space Policy Institute.

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WARSAW, Poland — Finnish SAR constellation operator Iceye and Japan’s aerospace and defense company IHI Corporation recently signed a deal to develop an Earth observation satellite constellation for security, civilian and commercial use.  Under the latest deal, IHI Corporation ordered four satellites and an associated image acquisition system from Iceye, with the option to purchase […]

The post Finland’s Iceye secures Japanese contract as it advances international expansion, new satellite ranges appeared first on SpaceNews.

Starting in 2025, this year’s flu season is spreading early, and with vaccination rates low and a novel virus strain, health experts are warning that it could be a rough one.

Learn how stress inside a volcano can make gas bubbles form early, helping explain why some eruptions stay quiet instead of exploding.

With China’s surge in renewable energy, greenhouse gases are reaching a turning point

Studies raise questions about the benefits of adjusting flight paths to minimize heat-trapping clouds

Learn how Bigfoot hunters are turning to high-tech science to prove their case, and what their quest can tell us about citizen scientists creating knowledge.