1. This hole will last longer than our enemy hole, /h/communism, who are posers, right-deviationists, reactionaries, and counter revolutionaries.

I got banned there for trying to offer mutual aide in the form of a medic tent, which caused me to instantly create this hole because I was mad

2. We will form a space program in the aims of achieving Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism

I don't know how this is supposed to work yet, and I'm not sure I believe in the existence of outer space ... but I do know that anything is possible if we all work together!

Our first moves on this front should be to research outer space as much as possible

3. Ministers and officers will be assigned and people's badges will be made.

They work like NFTs except for the part where there's a blockchain. They work like rdrama badges except for the part where they show up on the badge section of your profile. (unless I figure out how to do something really creative with css psuedoelements lol). Almost everyone will be able to create and assign badges themselves. We'll record who has what badges and stuff in a pinned post or something, and fakes will be hunted down and sent to gulag.

If you want to be a minister or an officer post your reason below, the following people who posted in the "What's your job in the communist society" thread have dibs:

I didn't count anyone who acted like they wanted to kill communists!

If you have dibs, say what you want your title to be and I'll put your name and title in the sidebar or make a pinned directory or something and possibly add you to the mod list

It can be as fancy sounding as you want, in fact, the more glorious the better! power to the people!

If you don't have dibs, post below what you want your job in the communist society to be.

We are notably missing:

poet , suggestion maker , someone who knows how to make lattes , story tellers , uniform makers , fortune tellers , theoretical farmers , actual farmers , astrophysicists , and rocket scientists (this may be important to creating a space program!)

https://instagram.com/p/DFDhTsbsgKK/

(link)

Astronomers have been left red-faced after announcing the discovery of a new near-Earth asteroid — only to realize that the supposed space rock was the remains of Elon Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster and its spacesuit-clad driver "Starman."

The misidentified object, which was launched into space on board a SpaceX rocket in 2018, highlights a growing problem in astronomy that could lead to costly errors, researchers say.

On Jan. 2, the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) added a new object, dubbed 2018 CN41, to its list of near-Earth asteroids. The supposed space rock was identified by an unnamed amateur astronomer in Turkey using years of publicly available data, Astronomy.com reported. However, just 17 hours later, the MPC released an editorial notice retracting the discovery after the citizen scientist realized they had made a mistake.

The Tesla Roadster, which was previously used by Elon Musk, was launched into space on Feb. 6, 2018, as the test payload for the maiden launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. The publicity stunt garnered widespread attention at the time, partly due to Starman — a mannequin in the car's driving seat that was wearing a likely defective spacesuit and "listening" to David Bowie's album "Space Oddity" on loop.

The car and its driver headed toward Mars after escaping Earth's gravity and were supposed to enter a stable orbit around the Red Planet, which raised alarms at the time that it could become a potential Martian "biothreat" if it accidentally crash-landed there. However, the pair overshot their target and instead entered a stable orbit around the sun. Now, it circles the sun and occasionally zooms past Mars.

The Tesla has now completed roughly 4.5 trips around the sun, traveling at roughly 45,000 mph (72,000 km/h), according to whereisroadster.com. This means that the car has now exceeded its initial 36,000-mile warranty around 100,00 times.

However, the car is probably unrecognizable now after being exposed to years of intense radiation from the sun and bombarded by tiny fragments of space rocks, which have likely stripped the outer layers of the car and shredded Starman.

This is not the first time that human-made objects have been mistaken for near-Earth asteroids. The MPC has temporarily listed a number of spacecraft as space rocks over the last two decades — including the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, NASA's Lucy probe, the joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission and others — as well as rocket boosters and other debris, according to Astronomy.com.

This type of confusion will also likely increase as more human-made objects are launched into space.

These misidentifications could lead to more false alarms for near-Earth asteroids, which could in turn result in costly errors, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Astronomy.com. "Worst case [scenario], you spend a billion [dollars] launching a space probe to study an asteroid and only realize it's not an asteroid when you get there," he said.

While space agencies and private companies are required to accurately track their products in orbit around Earth, there is currently no legislation that forces them to do the same for spacecraft and debris that escape Earth's gravity, like the Tesla Roadster.

However, "such transparency is essential for promoting space situational awareness, reducing interference between missions, [and] avoiding interference with observations of natural objects," members of the American Astronomical Society warned in a 2024 statement.

!grillers, it's so simple! we need to abandon our both-sidery and embrace leftism.

/u/sandhillcranefan, get back to me when you pay your first tax bill.

Astronomers say they've detected a mysterious type of signal known as a fast radio burst coming from an ancient, dead galaxy billions of light years away. Figuratively speaking, it makes for one heck of a sign of life.

The findings, documented in two studies published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, upends the long held belief that FRBs — extremely powerful pulses of energy — originate exclusively from star-forming regions of space, as dead galaxies no longer support the birth of new stars.

Adding to the seeming improbability of the FRB's origin, the researchers believe that the signal's source came from the furthermost outskirts of the galaxy, about 130,000 light years from its center, with only moribund stars at the end of their stellar evolution for company.

"This is both surprising and exciting, as FRBs are expected to originate inside galaxies, often in star-forming regions," said Vishwangi Shah, lead author of one of the studies and an astronomer at McGill University, said in a statement about the work.  "The location of this FRB so far outside its host galaxy raises questions as to how such energetic events can occur in regions where no new stars are forming."

Though they're often only milliseconds in duration, FRBs are so powerful at their source that a single pulse emits more energy than our Sun does in an entire year.

What could cause such staggering outbursts? Astronomers have speculated that they originate from magnetars, a type of collapsed, extremely dense stellar object called a neutron star that maintains an unfathomably potent magnetic field, perhaps trillions of times stronger than Earth's.

But that theory is now being challenged by this latest FRB, designed FRB 20240209A, because there are no young stars in the 11.3 billion year old galaxy that could form magnetars. Only extremely massive stars, which have short lifespans as a consequence of their size and thus would need to have been recently formed, possess enough mass to collapse into neutron stars in the first place.

FRB 20240209A isn't the first to be found in such a remote location. In 2022, astronomers detected another signal originating from the outskirts of its galaxy, Messier 81, where no active star formation was taking place.

"That event single-handedly halted the conventional train of thought and made us explore other progenitor scenarios for FRBs," said Wen-fai Fong, a coauthor of both studies and an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, in the statement. "Since then, no FRB had been seen like it, leading us to believe it was a one-off discovery — until now."

Crucially, the M81 FRB was found in a dense conglomeration of stars called a globular cluster. Given their similar circumstances, it led the astronomers to believe that FRB 20240209A could be residing in a globular cluster, too. To confirm this hunch, they hope to use the James Webb Telescope to image the region of space around the FRB's origins

NO ARTICLE JUST POSTING THE PICTURES:

Scientists Just Discovered an Impossible Particle

Understanding the ins and outs of the subatomic world is a confusing process, but there are moments of surprising simplicity. For example, all fundamental particles (that we know of) can be naturally divided into two categories: fermions and bosons. Fermions contain all the particles of matter (i.e. quarks and leptons) and are characterized by their half-integer spin values whereas bosons are all force carriers—gluons, w and z bosons, photons, and of course, the Higgs boson—and have spin values in whole integers, so 0 or 1 (or possibly 2 if gravitons exist).

These different properties mean fermions and bosons also behave differently. Don Lincon, a senior scientist at the U.S. particle physics laboratory Fermilab, describes bosons as "puppies of the subatomic world" because you can have an unlimited number of bosons in the same place at the same time. This is why lasers exist, for example. However, fermions are standoffish (or "subatomic cats," according to Lincoln) because two fermions cannot be in the same place at the same time due to the Pauli exclusion principle, which states that no two electrons (each with opposite spins) can occupy the same atomic orbital.

In other words, particles in between these two states shouldn't exist, but a new mathematical study from two scientists from Rice University in Texas and Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany suggests otherwise. By using advanced mathematical techniques, the researchers found that these "paraparticles" could theoretically exist within the known confines of physics. The results of this study were published in the journal Nature.

"This is cross-disciplinary research that involves several areas of theoretical physics and mathematics," Max Planck Institute,'s Zhiyuan Wang, a former postdoctoral student at Rice University and study co-author, said in a press statement.

Mathematically proving the existence of paraparticles, the existence of which has been debated for 70 years, wasn't an easy task. The duo relied on advanced mathematics, such as Lie algebra, Hopf algebra, and representation theory to create mathematical models of dense matter systems, and found that these hypothetical paraparticles in one and two dimensions behaved differently from fermions and bosons when they exchanged their positions, allowing a certain number of particles to congregate rather than just one (fermions) or infinitely many (bosons).

"Our paper proves, for the first time, that there is actually something beyond fermions and bosons," Wang told New Scientist.

Although this new mathematical description is a huge breakthrough, its impact is still unknown, and Rice University co-author Kaden Hazzard even says he doesn't know exactly where this research will lead, but "I know it will be exciting to find out." So far, the research doesn't hypothetically show evidence for the existence of paraparticles in the third dimension (though it doesn't rule it out either) and how likely these hypothetical paraparticles occur in nature is currently unknown.

As New Scientist notes, these paraparticles are actually quasiparticles, which emerge from strong interactions between particles, and are not fundamental particles themselves. However, the discovery of the quasiparticle known as anyons could prove vital for developing future quantum computers, so the further exploration of these paraparticles could lead science into new areas previously believed to be impossible.

bonus video:

Life as we know it is based on carbon chemistry, and now the James Webb Space Telescope may have shown where much of that carbon originates. The discovery is thanks to shells of carbon dust expanding outward from a duo of massive stars.

The system in question is called WR 140, and incorporates two massive stars that will both ultimately go supernova. Located just shy of 5,000 light-years away from us in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan, one of the stars is a massive O-type behemoth — the hottest, most luminous kind of star with a powerful wind of radiation. Its partner is a Wolf–Rayet (WR) star. Such stars are massive as well, but toward the end of their life they become tumultuous as internal instabilities lead them to hurriedly shed mass in bursts and torrents, ultimately revealing their evolved interiors.

The two stars don't have perfectly circular orbits about one another. Their paths are elongated, bringing them closer and then farther away from each other every 7.9 years. At their closest point, called periastron, the two stars are just 1.3 astronomical units (AU) from each other. That's 120.8 million miles (194.5 million kilometers), which is just a little farther than Earth is from the sun.

The JWST has imaged 17 concentric shells of dust ringing the binary star system WR 140. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Emma Lieb and Jennifer Hoffman (University of Denver/Ryan Lau (NSF NOIRLab))

For several months around periastron, the sleet of material shaken off the Wolf–Rayet star crashes into the fierce radiation wind emitted by the O-type star. In the maelstrom of this fierce collision, the particles in the winds from the two stars collide, compress into clumps and ultimately cool, allowing carbon-rich dust just millionths of a meter in size to form. This dust produces a ring or shell around the two massive stars, which then begins drifting outward. Eight years later, at the next periastron, a new ring forms — and so on and so forth.

Previously, only the innermost few rings from this event had been seen in visible and infrared light. Now, however, thanks to its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), the JWST has imaged 17 clumpy, concentric ring-like shells around the WR 140 system, that are expanding into space. The clumps, some of which are the size of our entire solar system, are where dust production is at its greatest.

The expanding shells aren't sluggish either. They're racing away from the binary system at 1,600 miles per second (about 2,600 kilometers per second). That's almost 1% of the speed of light (0.87% to be precise).

"The telescope … showed that the dust shells are moving outward at consistent velocities, revealing visible changes over incredibly short periods of time," Emma Lieb, a doctoral student at the University of Denver in Colorado who has led the new research, said in a statement.

>Two JWST MIRI images of the WR 140 system taken 14 months apart, showing how the shells have expanded during that time (demonstrated in the frame on the right). (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Emma Lieb and Jennifer Hoffman (University of Denver/Ryan Lau (NSF NOIRLab).)

"We are used to thinking about events in space taking place slowly, over millions or billions of years," Jennifer Hoffman, a professor of astronomy also at the University of Denver, said in the same statement. "In this system, the observatory is showing that the dust shells are expanding from one year to the next."

The oldest visible shells are 130 years old, but these close encounters between the two stars during WR 140's Wolf–Rayet stage have been ongoing for hundreds of thousands of years. The older rings would either be too faint even for even the JWST to see, or have dissipated into space. It's expected that the system will form tens of thousands more shells too over the next few hundred thousand years.

And then — bang.

The Wolf–Rayet star currently has a mass 10 times that of our sun, and while it continues to shed mass, it's not going to slim down enough to avoid exploding as a supernova (the lower limit is eight solar masses). So, what happens then to the shells of carbon-rich dust?

There are two possibilities. One is that the supernova shockwave destroys some or all of the dust shells, and the other is that the supernova fails to detonate if the core of the star collapses under its own gravity so completely that it forms a black hole that swiftly pulls in the rest of the star inward. In the latter case, there wouldn't be a supernova, and the shells of carbon dust would be free to expand into deep space and join the interstellar medium from which the raw materials for the next generation of stars and planets comes.

"A major question in astronomy is, where does all the dust come from?" asked Ryan Lau, an astronomer at the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona, said in the statement. "If carbon-rich dust like this survives, it could help us begin to answer that question."

Carl Sagan once evocatively described us as "starstuff," in the sense that we are made from elements born in stars. If the shells of carbon-rich dust imaged by the JWST can survive the termination of the Wolf–Rayet star, we may be looking at the creation of the very starstuff that goes on to form life.

"We know carbon is necessary for the formation of rocky planets and solar systems like ours," said Hoffman. "It's exciting to get a glimpse into how binary star systems not only create carbon-rich dust, but also propel it into our galactic neighborhood."

The new JWST imagery and findings was presented at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society on 13th January, and have been published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

If we compare overall PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) scores of China and the US, China comes out 9.3% ahead of the US. This might seem like a big number but in practice this is a big enough number that makes it possible for China to completely surpass the US no matter what moves the US makes.

The reason for this is simple. It is akin to 115-130 IQ person competing with a 100 IQ person and both are going all out. The 115-130 IQ person is obviously going to win barring a car accident.

The intelligence gap also makes China smart enough to create the next generation of global technology where the US has hit the wall. China already owns Epic Games ( the company with the most used video game engine in current year ), and has already taken over the minds of the American zoomer with Chinese content. Today, when a US company wants to make an actually successful product for the market, they go to the Chinese.

Singapore for comparison is 14.3% smarter than the US, and while being a very small tiny Island nation, has a quality of life and Per capita PPP income that is 71% higher than that of the average American. Which is to say, small percentage superiority in intelligence has very vast real world effects.

China is 32% smarter than Mongolia, which guarantees that China is going to own Mongolia no matter what happens.

China is also guaranteed to dominate Russia and South East Asia and practically own them.

Conclusion:

The Chinese have become too smart to stop and had too high a starting population. Which means they are going to completely dominate global trade followed by surpassing Europe and the US in nominal GDP terms followed by surpassing these territories by nominal per capita GDP terms.

https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfrick/comments/1i34g7y/my_pov_of_the_recent_starship_fall/

As I have been telling you guys, American technological capabilities appear to have peaked, and the starship exploding repeatedly is just more evidence to support that theory. A starship is just too big to get out of atmosphere safely with today's cutting edge technology. What they should do instead is to use the falcon rockets to set up a manufacturing space station and build the giant rockets out in space itself where they do not need to deal with moving through the atmosphere.

With the US failing to make a successful starship and there being 3-6 months gap between launches, China has ample time to catch up to the US, as they are already halfway through having reusable rockets of their own, meanwhile the US is unable to get any further ahead.

Conclusion:

US tech has stalled. China catch up and surpasses because they have higher IQ than Americans. Next generation of technology expected to come out of the US in the 2030s comes out of China instead.

Elon Musk's net worth has gotten stuck in the 400 billions. If it was going to go up higher it would have done so by now, taking into account that his team is in the white house right now.

SpaceX has also clearly peaked as they got their reusable rocket working, but beyond that there is not much else to be done in terms of technological revolution for SpaceX, and moon mining is still many decades away.

Tesla has also peaked as their vehicles aren't getting any cheaper, and they are now facing global competition in the electric vehicle market from BYD, significantly limiting their future expansion outside of the US.

The social media company X also appears to be holding on to its market share when it comes to users, and does not really have any further scope for growth, unless Elon were to actually buy tiktok.

This leaves Grok the AI, which is left attached to Tesla products and to be used on twitter. Which limits the number of users to the number of people already using Elon Musk's products and services. That is, Grok AI itself is less a product, and more an accessory to Tesla products.

Elon Musk has also been talking of opening up a video game company, but by the looks of it, it is pretty much apparent that the video gaming industry is going to be far more competitive than it was when Amazon tried to get into it.

All in all, it becomes apparent that Elon Musk's net wealth has peaked in the 400s of billions and that the market share of his companies is also soon going to peak due to the limited size of the American market, and the amount of competition from other companies in the global market. That is to say, Elon Musk and his companies have peaked, and we are unlikely to see anything else truly revolutionary come out of them. Including the robotics side of things, where the humanoid robots if they make it, would still end up being overpriced in relation to international product prices, and likely even middle income American budgets.

In conclusion:

The US is not going to lead in any further tech revolutions or new era of technological innovation or ideas. What the US is going to lead in at best is iterative improvements so for the next 30-50 years the only thing we can expect from America is improvements in products and ways of doing things that already exist but better.

This would also mean that the global market is going to continue eating up the US share of the global market, as the US market fails to add additional layers of complexity and income brackets to its own economy, due to all wealth accumulating in a few hands.

US market is reaching its peak global market share. It will not expand beyond this point, but will always be at risk of shrinking beyond this point, until one day it finally does. US economic growth will remain slower than the global economic growth, as that is the only way that the US can remain competitive in the market. Cutting costs forever until there are no more costs left to cut.

The last innovative billionaire in the US is done. It is over now. The CEO of Nvidia doesn't count, as he is currently doing more marketing than actual product to match the advertised quality. OpenAI also doesn't count because we do not have AGI yet. They can be counted if they ever manage to actually make smarter than human AI which is very likely to be never.

For the first time, scientists have observed a quasiparticle—referred to as a semi-Dirac fermion—that behaves uniquely: it is massless when moving in one direction but possesses mass when moving in another. First theorized 16 years ago, this quasiparticle was recently identified within a crystal of a semi-metal material known as ZrSiS. Researchers believe this discovery could pave the way for advancements in emerging technologies, including batteries and sensors.

The research team, led by scientists from Penn State and Columbia University

Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in New York City that was established in 1754. This makes it the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest in the United States. It is often just referred to as Columbia, but its official name is Columbia University in the City of New York.

" data-gt-translate-attributes="[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]" tabindex="0" role="link" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: dotted; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; font-size: 15px; font-family: inherit; text-decoration: none !important; color: rgb(102, 102, 102) !important;">Columbia University, published their findings in the journal Physical Review X.

"This was totally unexpected," said Yinming Shao, assistant professor of physics at Penn State and lead author on the paper. "We weren't even looking for a semi-Dirac fermion when we started working with this material, but we were seeing signatures we didn't understand — and it turns out we had made the first observation of these wild quasiparticles that sometimes move like they have mass and sometimes move like they have none."

What Are Semi-Dirac Fermions?

A particle can have no mass when its energy is entirely derived from its motion, meaning it is essentially pure energy traveling at the speed of light. For example, a photon

A photon is a particle of light. It is the basic unit of light and other electromagnetic radiation, and is responsible for the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. Photons have no mass, but they do have energy and momentum. They travel at the speed of light in a vacuum, and can have different wavelengths, which correspond to different colors of light. Photons can also have different energies, which correspond to different frequencies of light.

A photon or particle of light is considered massless because it moves at light speed. According to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, anything traveling at the speed of light cannot have mass. In solid materials, the collective behavior of many particles, also known as quasiparticles, can have different behavior than the individual particles, which in this case gave rise to particles having mass in only one direction, Shao explained.

>The quasiparticle, called a semi-Dirac fermion, was first theorized 16 years ago, but was only recently spotted inside a crystal of semi-metal material called ZrSiS. The observation of the quasiparticle opens the door to future advances in a range of emerging technologies from batteries to sensors, according to researchers who made the discovery. Credit: Yinming Shao/Penn State

Semi-Dirac fermions were first theorized in 2008 and 2009 by several teams of researchers, including scientists from the Université Paris Sud in France and the University of California, Davis. The theorists predicted there could be quasiparticles with mass-shifting properties depending on their direction of movement — that they would appear massless in one direction but have mass when moving in another direction.

Sixteen years later, Shao and his collaborators accidentally observed the hypothetical quasiparticles through a method called magneto-optical spectroscopy. The technique involves shining infrared light on a material while it's subjected to a strong magnetic field and analyzing the light reflected from the material. Shao and his colleagues wanted to observe the properties of quasiparticles inside silver-colored crystals of ZrSiS.

Accidental Discovery Through Magneto-Optical Spectroscopy

The team conducted their experiments at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Florida. The lab's hybrid magnet creates the most powerful sustained magnetic field in the world, roughly 900,000 times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. The field is so strong it can levitate small objects such as water droplets.

The researchers cooled down a piece of ZrSiS to -452 degrees Fahrenheit -- only a few degrees above absolute zero, the lowest possible temperature — and then exposed it to the lab's powerful magnetic field while hitting it with infrared light to see what it revealed about the quantum interactions inside the material.

"We were studying optical response, how electrons inside this material respond to light, and then we studied the signals from the light to see if there is anything interesting about the material itself, about its underlying physics," Shao said. "In this case, we saw many features we'd expect in a semi-metal crystal and then all of these other things happening that were absolutely puzzling."

When a magnetic field is applied to any material, the energy levels of electrons inside that material become quantized into discrete levels called Landau levels, Shao explained. The levels can only have fixed values, like climbing a set of stairs with no little steps in between. The spacing between these levels depends on the mass of the electrons and the strength of the magnetic field, so as the magnetic field increases, the energy levels of the electrons should increase by set amounts based entirely on their mass — but in this case, they didn't.

Using the high-powered magnet in Florida, the researchers observed that the energy of the Landau level transitions in the ZrSiS crystal followed a completely different pattern of dependence on the magnetic field strength. Years ago, theorists had labeled this pattern the "B^(2/3) power law," the key signature of semi-Dirac fermions.

An illustration of the calculated structure of ZrSiS near the crossing points of its structure, showing a semi-Dirac point as a black sphere on the left. Data points as purple dots support the existence of semi-Dirac fermions in ZrSiS material with the characteristic B2/3 power-law behavior on the right. Credit: Yinming Shao/Penn State

To understand the bizarre behavior they observed, the experimental physicists partnered with theoretical physicists to develop a model that described the electronic structure of ZrSiS. They specifically focused on the pathways on which electrons might move and intersect to investigate how the electrons inside the material were losing their mass when moving in one direction but not another.

"Imagine the particle is a tiny train confined to a network of tracks, which are the material's underlying electronic structure," Shao said. "Now, at certain points the tracks intersect, so our particle train is moving along its fast track, at light speed, but then it hits an intersection and needs to switch to a perpendicular track. Suddenly, it experiences resistance, it has mass. The particles are either all energy or have mass depending on the direction of their movement along the material's 'tracks.'"

The team's analysis showed the presence of semi-Dirac fermions at the crossing points. Specifically, they appeared massless when moving in a linear path but switched to having mass when moving in a perpendicular direction. Shao explained that ZrSiS is a layered material, much like graphite that is made up of layers of carbon atoms that can be exfoliated down into sheets of graphene that are one atom thick. Graphene is a critical component in emerging technologies, including batteries, supercapacitors, solar cells, sensors and biomedical devices.

"It is a layered material, which means once we can figure out how to have a single layer cut of this compound, we can harness the power of semi-Dirac fermions, control its properties with the same precision as graphene," Shao said. "But the most thrilling part of this experiment is that the data cannot be fully explained yet. There are many unsolved mysteries in what we observed, so that is what we are working to understand."

"The division between light and dark over the north pole of Mercury, viewed from the BepiColombo spacecraft"

"The vast volcanic plains on Mercury known as Borealis Planitia"

"Nathair Facula, thought to be a remnant of Mercury's largest ever volcanic eruption, is seen as a bright patch in this image"

BepiColombo just flew by Mercury, which it is supposed to start orbiting next year

Since its launch on Christmas Day, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has proven its worth year after year. 2024 is no exception. Here are just five times the ultrapowerful telescope has reshaped our understanding of the universe.

Big galaxies

The James Webb telescope was designed, in part, to hunt for the universe's first galaxies. Those galaxies are so distant from us that the expansion of the cosmos has shifted their light into the redder, or infrared portion, of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Astronomers have used the observatory to find those ancient galaxies, and what they found, time and again, were galaxies that were larger and brighter than we expected them to be. What's at stake here is our understanding of galaxy formation. The early universe appears to be a much more active place than we thought.

Galaxies appear and grow very quickly, within only a few hundred million years. Cosmologists don't understand how the processes that grow galaxies could evolve so rapidly, and astronomers hope that future James Webb telescope observations will reveal the clues needed to solve that riddle.

Big black holes

JWST spotted some gigantic black holes this year. In May, astronomers witnessed two massive beasts, each weighing roughly 50 million times the mass of the sun, mid-collision when the cosmos was about 740 million years old.

Big black holes in the early universe are even harder to explain than big galaxies. That's because the only known way black holes form is through the deaths of massive stars, which leave behind black holes weighing up to a few times the mass of the sun. From there, those tiny seeds have to consume surrounding material at an astounding rate, and merge quite frequently, to reach supermassive status at such an early cosmological age.

Astronomers don't know what astrophysical processes can explain how these black holes got so big so early — but JWST could also help answer that question.

Hubble tension

In the past decade, cosmologists have lost sleep over a problem known as the Hubble tension. Different methods for estimating the present-day expansion rate of the universe, known as the Hubble rate or Hubble constant, are returning slightly different numbers.

The main difference is that measurements taken from the early universe are slightly larger than the measurements taken from the later universe. Astronomers have floated hundreds of proposals to resolve the tension, from mundane measurement errors to rewriting our understanding of dark energy.

At this time, there is no commonly accepted explanation for the tension. And this year, the James Webb telescope didn't help after confirming that yes, Virginia, the Hubble tension is very real. So…thanks?

Carbon neutral

Life as we know it requires at least five key ingredients: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. Take one away, and the basic biochemical processes that make life possible would cease. Hydrogen was forged in the first few minutes of the Big Bang. The rest can only be made in the hearts of stars. These ingredients only make their way into interstellar space — where they can participate in the forming of new stars and new solar systems — once those stars die.

A planet like Earth, rich enough in those elements to make life possible, is the product of multiple generations of stellar lives and deaths spanning billions of years. So it was a surprise when astronomers used the James Webb telescope to find a cloud of carbon that formed just 350 million years after the Big Bang.

This pushes the clock way back on when life could have first appeared in the cosmos. If a large amount of carbon was present in a cloud, then the other key ingredients were likely floating around as well. And all those elements could have fashioned a planet before the universe was even half a billion years old. We don't know yet if life existed back then, but this discovery is a major clue that it was possible.

The First Generation

The James Webb telescope is an instrument of firsts: first galaxies, first black holes, first building blocks of life. But the real cosmic holy grail is to find the first stars. In the peculiar nomenclature of astronomy, the first generation of stars is known as Population III stars. No known Population III stars exist in the present-day universe, and astronomers suspect that no stars from that generation lived long.

Those stars would be much different than modern-day populations, which need heavier elements to moderate their fusion reactions. But the first generation had only primordial hydrogen and helium to work with. Those stars formed before even the first galaxies, and they introduced the cosmic dawn — the cosmos's first starlight.

Finding the first stars would be monumental, and this year, astronomers may have done it. Researchers discovered subtle hints of Population III stars in the combined light from galaxy GN-z11, a galaxy living just 430 million years after the Big Bang. Even though this galaxy existed long after the appearance of the first stars, it may retain a remnant population of those ancient sparklers. The discovery is still tentative, but if it holds up, it may go down in history as the James Webb telescope's most important discovery.

Lumpenproles should sit down and not question glorious Xi.

Dark matter could be the result of fermions pushed into a warped fifth dimension

This theory builds on an idea first stated in 1999, but is unique in its findings.

Dark matter makes up 75 percent of matter but has never been observed ... yet.

>theory from 1999

I don't trust ANY "science" from 1999

https://pastebin.com/4m6gqsK6

Stupidpollers belong in gulags

but there is thunderstorms