Flying To New Heights With The Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission

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Anyone wanna hire Cylinder before we snatch them up for an unpaid internship? You have until March 4, when we air! CV available upon request.

If Saturn was close to earth

Black Hole Caught Devouring Star For An Entire Decade

“Normally lasting weeks or months, a new record has just been set for TDEs. XJ1500+0154, 1.8 billion light years away, is the largest, longest-lasting one ever seen. First detected in July of 2005, the X-rays from this distant source brightened by a factor of 100 over 3 years. They remain bright even today. Although dozens of TDEs have been observed since the 1990s, none have lasted this long. It may be caused by the most massive star ever observed creating a TDE.”

When any object passes too close to the event horizon of a black hole, the tidal forces acting on it can become so strong that they’ll tear the entire object apart in a spaghettification disaster. While most of the matter will get ejected from the encounter, a significant fraction can be accreted, absorbed and used to fuel the black hole’s growth. These tidal disruption events have been seen numerous times since the launch of our X-ray observatories, and are now known to come in a wide variety of magnitudes, at a variety of distances and to last a variable amount of time. So when you see the largest, longest-lasting one ever, you sit up and take notice! That’s exactly what’s happened with XJ1500+154, which is now in its second decade of X-ray signals.

Come get the full story on this amazing object, and learn how it might solve the puzzle of supermassive black hole growth on today’s Mostly Mute Monday!

There will be drink. There will be science. There will be funny.

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Chemistry valentines again

Magnetic hard drives go atomic

Physicists demonstrate the first single-atom magnetic storage.

Chop a magnet in two, and it becomes two smaller magnets. Slice again to make four. But the smaller magnets get, the more unstable they become; their magnetic fields tend to flip polarity from one moment to the next. Now, however, physicists have managed to create a stable magnet from a single atom.

The team, who published their work in Nature on 8 March1, used their single-atom magnets to make an atomic hard drive. The rewritable device, made from 2 such magnets, is able to store just 2 bits of data, but scaled-up systems could increase hard-drive storage density by 1,000 times, says Fabian Natterer, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, and author of the paper.

“It’s a landmark achievement,” says Sander Otte, a physicist at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. “Finally, magnetic stability has been demonstrated undeniably in a single atom.”

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