Astronomers discover a multiplanet system nearby

Jun 15, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a new multiplanet system within our galactic neighborhood that lies just 10 parsecs, or about 33 light-years, from Earth, making it one of the closest known multiplanet systems to our own. At the heart of the system lies...

Functionalizing van der Waals materials by shaping them

Jun 15, 2022 (Nanowerk News) PN junction is the elementary building block of semiconductor devices, like diode, solar cell and LED, which make up the modern (opto-)electronics. Recently, researchers from the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have proposed a novel method to fabricate two-dimensional...

Real-time imaging of dynamic atom-atom interactions

Jun 14, 2022 (Nanowerk News) In a breakthrough, Tokyo Tech researchers have managed to observe and characterize dynamic assembly of metallic atoms using an ingenious combination of scanning transmission electron microscopy and a video-based tracking (Nature Communications, "Dynamic hetero-metallic bondings visualized by sequential atom imaging"). By visualizing short-lived molecules, such...

Scientists on the hunt for planetary formation fossils reveal unexpected eccentricities in nearby debris disk

Jun 14, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have imaged the debris disk of the nearby star HD 53143 at millimeter wavelengths for the first time, and it looks nothing like they expected. Based on early coronagraphic data, scientists expected ALMA to confirm the debris...

New, highly tunable composite materials

Jun 14, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Watch for the patterns created as the circles move across each other. Those patterns, created by two sets of lines offset from each other, are called moiré (pronounced mwar-AY) effects. As optical illusions, moiré patterns create neat simulations of movement. But at the atomic scale,...