nuclear
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Science
Nuclear rockets may reach Mars in half the time, but designing the reactors to power them is not easy
Nuclear-powered rockets may one day enable faster space travel. Credit: NASA NASA plans to send a crewed mission to Mars over the next decade, but the 140 million mile (225 million kilometer) journey there could take months or years round trip. This relatively long flight time is a result of the use of conventional chemical rocket fuel. The agency is…
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Earth
Tonga’s volcanic eruption was caused by an explosion equivalent to ‘five underground nuclear bombs,’ new study reveals
Mr. Jinyin Hu and Dr. Thanh-Son Phạm. Credit: Jamie Kidston/ANU Two years on, new research from the Australian National University (ANU) has revealed the main trigger of one of the largest volcanic eruptions in history, the Hunga Tonga submarine volcano. The study is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Until now, the cause of this disaster has remained a…
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Physics
Nuclear theorists use supercomputers to map the building blocks of matter in 3D
Nuclear theorists from the HadStruc Collaboration have been working on a mathematical description of parton interactions using supercomputers, including machines in Jefferson Laboratory’s Data Center. Credit: Jefferson Laboratory/Eileen Devlin Deep within what we perceive as solid matter, the landscape is far from static: The interiors of the particles called hadrons that make up atomic nuclei are made up of a…
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Physics
Findings from the experimental setup indicate the feasibility of a small, portable nuclear clock.
(Left) VUV signal versus exposure time immediately after X-ray beam irradiation of a 229Th-doped CaF2 crystal. The VUV signal as a function of exposure time reaches a saturation value about 10 times faster than the expected decay half-life. (Right) Observed time profile of an isomeric decay signal with a half-life of about 450 seconds. This suggests that the isomeric state…
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