Lifeboat Foundation

Update: China´s Moon Mission Returned Now Samples from the #Moon to #Earth. Why this is important, specially for the origin of life:

On June 1, China’s Chang’e-6 lander touched down in the South Pole-Atkin Basin — the largest, deepest, and oldest impact crater on the Moon. The probe almost immediately set to work drilling into the ground to collect about 2 kilograms of lunar material, which is already headed back to Earth, with a landing in Mongolia planned for June 25. It isn’t just planetary geologists who are excited at what the returning rocks and soil might reveal. If we’re lucky, the first samples from the lunar farside could also include some of the oldest fossils ever found.

The SPA basin, as it’s sometimes called, is the result of a gigantic impact that occurred between 4.2 and 4.3 billion years ago, at a time when the Moon and Earth were very close neighbors. The crater is roughly 2,500 kilometers (1,600 miles) in diameter and between 6.2 km and 8.2 km (3.9 to 5.1 mi) deep, encompassing several smaller craters like the Apollo basin, where Chang’e-6 landed, and Shackleton crater, parts of which lie in perpetual shadow.

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Article 39 Why an electron does not fall into the nucleus in terms of the strong and weak nuclear forces.

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It can be shown one may able to derive the strong and weak nuclear forces and the internal geometry of protons and neutrons in terms of the orientation of…

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After its “birth” in the Big Bang, the universe consisted mainly of hydrogen and a few helium atoms. These are the lightest elements in the periodic table. More-or-less all elements heavier than helium were produced in the 13.8 billion years between the Big Bang and the present day.

Stars have produced many of these heavier elements through the process of nuclear fusion. However, this only makes elements as heavy as iron. The creation of any heavier elements would consume energy instead of releasing it.

In order to explain the presence of these heavier elements today, it’s necessary to find phenomena that can produce them. One type of event that fits the bill is a gamma-ray burst (GRB)—the most powerful class of explosion in the universe. These can erupt with a quintillion (10 followed by 18 zeros) times the luminosity of our sun, and are thought to be caused by several types of event.

In the realm of fusion research, the control of plasma density, temperature, and heating is crucial for enhancing reactor performance. Effective confinement of plasma particles and heat, especially maintaining high density and temperature at the core where fusion occurs, is essential.

Chinese startup takes the lead in nuclear fusion by building a tokamak that is smaller and cheaper than conventional fusion reactors.

A commercial ‘artificial sun’ has achieved its first plasma discharge, the developer says © Getty Images / mesh cube.

The Chinese privately run fusion company Energy Singularity has built the world’s first fully high-temperature superconducting tokamak, and used it to produce plasma, state media outlets have reported, citing the firm.

The creation of the device, dubbed HH70 and located in Shanghai, is seen as a major step in the development of fusion technology to potentially generate clean energy.

Why are neutrinos so light?

Did you know that every second more than 100 trillion tiny particles called neutrinos pass through your body without causing any harm? These mysterious particles are produced abundantly throughout the universe in events like nuclear reactions in the sun, radioactive decays in the Earth’s crust, and in high-energy collisions in space. In particular, these subatomic particles play a crucial role in the explosive deaths of stars known as supernovae, where they act as the driving force behind the explosion. Despite their abundance in the universe, they are incredibly difficult to detect directly in experiments since they pass right through any matter and only interact extremely rarely. At the LHC, their existence can only be inferred indirectly by summing up the energy of all other particles produced from the proton collisions and looking for missing energy that has been carried away by the neutrino, which escaped the experiment undetected.

Neutrinos are a type of fundamental particle known as a lepton and they are electrically neutral. They stand out among fundamental particles because of their peculiar characteristics. Not only do they interact exceptionally rarely, but they also possess a minuscule mass, approximately 500,000 times lighter than that of an electron. One possible explanation for the smallness of their mass is given by the “seesaw” mechanism. According to this theory, there exist additional new fundamental particles that are electrically neutral. The mechanism postulates that the masses of these new particles, known as “heavy neutral leptons” (HNLs), are mathematically linked to those of the normal neutrinos, like two sides of a seesaw. The theory also predicts that the HNLs will “mix” with their known cousins, neutrinos. This means that a neutrino, produced in an LHC collision, can change into an HNL, and the HNL can then decay back into known particles that the LHC experiments can detect!

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Big atoms demand big energy to construct. A new model of quantum interactions now suggests some of the lightest particles in the Universe might play a critical role in how at least some heavy elements form.

Physicists in the US have shown how subatomic ‘ghost’ particles known as neutrinos could force atomic nuclei into becoming new elements.

Not only would this be an entirely different method for building elements heavier than iron, it could also describe a long-hypothesized ‘in-between’ path that sits on the border between two known processes, nuclear fusion and nucleosynthesis.

Engineers discovered a new way to manage the intense heat in nuclear reactors.