Swedish housing prices were little changed last month, with analysts split on whether a slide in home values

Ana Navarro takes over 'The View: Behind the Table' to discuss Kevin McCarthy's ousting

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 28, 2023--

By Doina Chiacu and Karen Freifeld WASHINGTON The United States restricted imports from three more Chinese companies on

Scientists have cooked up the "alien haze" of distant planets, in an effort to help with the search for alien life. The haze is a simulation of the hazy skies that appear on water-rich exoplanets, or worlds outside of our solar system. That haziness can get in the way of observations of those planets, making it difficult to understand what is happening there. Haze can also affect conditions on the planet themselves. If the atmosphere has hazes or other particles then it can drastically change the temperature, amount of light an other factors – some of which might be make or break for alien life there. Scientists hope the homemade haze will let them better understand the atmospheres of other planets, and model how the planets themselves form and grow. They could allow us to better understand how the have distorts our picture of those planets – distortions that could give us the wrong understanding of the makeup of their atmospheres. Getting that wrong could mean potentially missing habitable worlds, for instance. The observations are used to come up with the estimates about the temperature and atmospheric conditions that are then used to determine whether a planet might be able to host alien life. “The big picture is whether there is life outside the solar system, but trying to answer that kind of question requires really detailed modeling of all different types, specifically in planets with lots of water,” said co-author Sarah Hörst, from Johns Hopkins University. “This has been a huge challenge because we just don't have the lab work to do that, so we are trying to use these new lab techniques to get more out of the data that we’re taking in with all these big fancy telescopes.” The team cooked up the haze using a custom-designed chamber in Hörst’s lab. The haze they made is formed out solid particles, suspended in gas, which changes how light interacts with the gas itself. To test the hazes they made, scientists shot ultraviolet light through them, measuring how much they absorbed and reflected. They found that hate haze matched the chemical signatures of a well-studied exoplanet. Scientists hope to develop yet more hazes, with different gas mixtures, that will let them better understand different atmospheres. The work is described in a new paper, 'Optical properties of organic haze analogues in water-rich exoplanet atmospheres observable with JWST', published in the journal Nature Astronomy. Read More SpaceX rockets are punching holes in atmosphere, causing blood-red ‘auroras’ Chinese rocket that slammed onto Moon may have carried mysterious undisclosed payload Nasa’s ‘Message in a Bottle’ will send your name into space

The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter made several suicide attempts as a young man, was involuntarily committed multiple times and has schizophrenia and epilepsy, a neurologist who examined him testified at his death penalty trial Wednesday.

Republican lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers have reached a bipartisan deal to provide more funding to local governments across Wisconsin, including cash-strapped Milwaukee city and county

Dua Lipa's team wants her to be "the most streamed artist in the world".

Columbus Crew boss Wilfried Nancy praised Christian Ramirez for his professionalism over the 2023 MLS season.

Japan has hardly been tested in this Women’s World Cup and rolled with a perfect 4-0 record into the quarterfinals

Federal Reserve Bank of New York President John Williams said US monetary policy is “in a good place,”

Five years ago, scientists managed to recreate what is known as superionic ice, in lab experiments for the first time. Superionic ice is believed to form within Uranus and Neptune as familiar materials are subjected to extreme pressures and heat, with iron atoms forming hot, black, heavy ice. But just last year researchers at several universities in the United States discovered a new phase of superionic ice. The discovery helps broaden our understanding of why Uranus and Neptune have off-kilter magnetic fields with multiple poles. Different to forms of water on Earth, the oxygen atoms in superionic ice are locked in a solid cubic lattice, while the ionised hydrogen atoms are loose, flowing through the lattice. This gives superionic ice conductive properties as well as raising its melting point, meaning the frozen water remains solid at temperatures up to 4704 Degree Celsius (8500 Fahrenheit). In this latest study, Stanford University's Arianna Gleason and colleagues blasted thin slivers of water, sandwiched between two diamond layers, with some extremely powerful lasers. "Recent discoveries of water-rich Neptune-like exoplanets require a more detailed understanding of the phase diagram of [water] at pressure–temperature conditions relevant to their planetary interiors," Gleason and colleagues explain in their paper, from January 2022 X-Ray diffraction revealed the hot, dense ice's crystal structure, and confirmed the ice crystals were in fact a new phase, distinct from the superionic ice that was observed in 2019. This newly discovered superionic ice, Ice XIX, has increased conductivity compared to its 2019 predecessor. The conductivity is important because it helps us understand why certain off-kilter magnetic fields are generated on planets such as Neptune and Uranus. You can read the paper, published in Scientific Reports here. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.