news 2023

For decades, science fiction authors have imagined scenarios in which life thrives on the harsh surfaces of Mars or our Moon, or in the oceans below the icy surfaces of Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa. But the study of habitability-the conditions required to support and sustain life-is not just confined to the pages of fiction.

A low carbon abundance in planetary atmospheres, which the James Webb Space Telescope can detect, could be a signature of habitability. Scientists at MIT, the University of Birmingham, and elsewhere say that astronomers' best chance of finding liquid water, and even life on other planets, is to look for the absence, rather than the presence, of a chemical feature in their atmospheres.

From creating new navigation systems to remixing old experiments, here are Imperial's top five quantum moments from 2023. Throughout 2023 Imperial has had many quantum breakthroughs. From wavefunction experiments to satellite-free navigation systems, this is 2023's round-up of quantum research at Imperial and how it's making its way out of the lab.

Carbon is the building block of biological life on Earth. The element is present in many compounds, such as the sugars, proteins, and carbohydrate molecules that make up everything from animals to plants to bacteria. One particular carbon-based molecule, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), is both ubiquitous on Earth and abundant in space.

Researchers at TU Graz have developed a new measuring system that can statically and dynamically monitor the condition of buildings using just a few antennas. From the outside, the Kölnbrein water dam, operated by Verbund in Carinthia, which is Austria's highest dam, and the DC Tower in Vienna, Austria's tallest building, do not have much in common, but for a research group around Caroline Schönberger and Werner Lienhart from the Institute of Engineering Geodesy and Measurement Systems at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), they are equally interesting from a scientific point of view.

Toys aren't just sitting under the Christmas tree patiently waiting to be opened, they are also playing a significant role in scientific research at Cardiff University. Right across the University, the gifts old and young might receive this year are helping further our understanding of human development, democratising biomedical research, or helping shed light on some of the universe's unanswered questions.

Researchers at Graz University of Technology have developed a new measuring system that can monitor the static and dynamic condition of buildings using just a few antennas. From the outside, the Kölnbrein Dam in Carinthia, which is operated by Verbund and is Austria's highest dam, and the DC Tower in Vienna, Austria's highest building, do not have much in common, but for a research group led by Caroline Schönberger and Werner Lienhart from the Institute of Engineering Geodesy and Measurement Systems at TU Graz, they are of equal scientific interest.

  Searching for signs of alien life in our own solar system    Scientists have long been captivated by the possibility of discovering evidence for extraterrestrial life in the universe. While many of the world's largest telescopes are pointed toward distant galaxies and star systems, some think there's a strong possibility that life could be detected much closer to home.

International research team models the different signatures of a kilonova explosion simultaneously for the first time Neutron stars are the end products of massive stars and gather together a large part of the original stellar mass in a super-dense star with a diameter of only around ten kilometres.

International research team succeeds for the first time in analysing different signals simultaneously A new method to study the signals associated with merging neutron stars can help researchers to collect data through multiple channels in parallel. The method was developed by an international team of scientists, including the Institute for Gravitational and Subatomic Physics (GRASP) , Utrecht University, and Nikhef.

Researchers have charted vast areas of the dense, cold gas of star nurseries in a neighboring galaxy for the first time. An international research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and involving the University of Bonn has mapped the cold, dense gas of future star nurseries in one of our neighboring galaxies with an unprecedented degree of detail.

At Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) in 2023, important discoveries were made, new insights gained and exciting information gleaned. An end-of-year review. TU Graz in Space In 2013, the small satellite TUGSAT-1 was Austria's first satellite in space. It was built at TU Graz and has been observing the earth from low earth orbit ever since.

As we close out the year and look ahead to the next, we take this opportunity to reflect on the groundbreaking research findings that emerged from Caltech in 2023. From furthering humanity's knowledge of and response to viruses, to refining the use of autonomous technologies, to leveraging advanced instrumentation to bring greater clarity on our universe and our place within it, Caltech continues to powerfully and meaningfully shape understanding of and interaction with the world.

A team of astronomers has used asteroseismology, or the study of stellar oscillations, to accurately measure the distance of stars from the Earth. Their research examined thousands of stars and checked the measurements taken during the Gaia mission to study the near Universe. For most of us, the countless bright spots in the nighttime sky all seem to be stars.

We put ChatGPT 4 to the test, asking it to read two scholarly studies produced at the university and summarize them in a pair of newsy articles for UdeM Nouvelles. The results were.. mixed. Credit: Miriam Beauchamp (Marc Antoine Charlebois) and Laurence Perreault-Levasseur (Mila Quebec) How good is ChatGPT at reading and synthesizing science, specifically the highly detailed science published as peer-reviewed studies in scholarly journals? To find out, we put the chatbot to the test, twice.

Snow measurement has never been so fast and accurate: researchers have developed an artificial intelligence capable of determining snow depth across Switzerland using satellite images. How much snow is there up in the mountains, and where exactly is it? The answer is of just as much interest to the winter tourism industry and operators of hydropower plants as it is to winter sport enthusiasts looking to gauge the risk of avalanches.

Water from the subsurface ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus sprays from huge fissures out into space. NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which captured this image in 2010, sampled icy particles and scientists are continuing to make new discoveries from the dat. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute" A study zooms in on data that NASA's Cassini gathered at Saturn's icy moon and finds evidence of a key ingredient for life and a supercharged source of energy to fuel it.

The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) to the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation's Division of Physics has approved and released the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) report , which outlines recommendations for U.S. particle physics priorities for the next 20 years and funding for the next 10 years.

Discovery of giant exomoons around the planets Kepler-1625b and Kepler-1708b called into question Just as it can be assumed that the stars in our Milky Way are orbited by planets, moons around these exoplanets should not be uncommon. This makes it all the more difficult to detect them. So far, only two of the more than 5300 known exoplanets have been found to have moons.

Study: Element abundance patterns in stars indicate fission of nuclei heavier than uranium In studying how the rich diversity of elements in the universe came to exist, University of Michigan research has put a number on how heavy an atom nature can produce-and it happens under extreme conditions in specific types of stars and supernovae.