Researchers tested a "sunflower" antenna layout on AAVS3, a full-scale prototype station built for the SKA-Low radio telescope. Computer simulations predicted the layout would lose sensitivity directly overhead at around 125 MHz. Real sky observations confirmed this loss and traced the problem to the layout's repeating geometry. As a result, the Observatory decided not to adopt the design for the telescope's final configuration and selected a modified layout instead.

A team of scientists from Arizona State University (ASU) and Raman Research Institute (RRI) has discovered observational evidence of how supermassive black holes lying at the very centers of galaxies impact the entire galaxy within and beyond its visible boundary, and dictate their ultimate fate.

Contrary to conventional wisdom holding that early galaxies were composed of mostly hydrogen and helium, new observations suggest that galaxies were seeding the cosmos with heavy elements just 500 million years after the Big Bang.

The Human Genome Project was launched in 1990, preceded by decades of breakthroughs in genetics. It eventually gave us a sequence of the human genome. Yet, while the physical rules behind the genome’s organization remain an active area of research, many questions are still largely unanswered. Among these is the impact of an omnipresent force influencing life on Earth: gravity. A new study, which appears in the journal Science Advances, addresses some of these weighty questions by using an innovative technique: creating a zero-gravity, or microgravity, environment in order to reveal gravity’s impact on a human cell. 

New sample analyses by researchers at ETH Zurich point to a surprising origin for the asteroid Bennu: rather than forming far out in the Solar System, Bennu's parent body probably emerged in a special transition zone near the water-ice line, where temperatures were cold enough for water to freeze, at a time when Jupiter itself was still growing.

With heavy reusable launch vehicles becoming a key technology for low-cost and high-frequency space exploration, cable-net recovery schemes have attracted considerable attention due to their strong adaptability to landing dispersion and attitude deviations. However, under multiple sources of interference—including engine plume impingement, trolley motion, and flexible vibrations—the dynamic state information of the flexible cable-net recovery system is difficult to acquire directly, severely constraining the accuracy of closed-loop control and capture reliability. Although Kalman filtering combined with multibody dynamics models can achieve state estimation for complex systems, the flexible cable-net system is inherently a high-dimensional, nonlinear, strongly rigid-flexible coupled constrained multibody system, whose dynamic equations are formulated as index-3 differential-algebraic equations (DAEs). Conventional methods require the conversion of DAEs into ordinary differential equations (ODEs) followed by linearization, a process that is complex and lacks generality; conventional numerical integration methods converge slowly when dealing with such stiff problems, with the Jacobian matrix becoming severely ill-conditioned under large time steps and constraints being prone to violation. Therefore, developing a filtering method that does not require model transformation, can directly utilize the multibody DAE for state prediction, and can maintain constraint satisfaction has become a key technical challenge for state estimation in flexible cable-net recovery.