Academic Awards

An exoplanet has been discovered orbiting the nearest single star to Earth (apart from the Sun), only 6 light-years away. The nearest stars to our solar system are in the Alpha Centauri system at just 4.2 light-years away. This triple star system is in the Centaurus constellation. The closest exoplanets to Earth were discovered orbiting one of the Alpha Centauri stars, Proxima Centauri, in 2016. But the new exoplanet has been found orbiting Barnard’s star – the nearest lone star to our solar system. Barnard’s star has long been thought to be a prime candidate for the detection of Earth-like exoplanets. A false alarm in 2018 might have dashed hopes. But astronomers are a patient bunch. “Even if it took a long time, we were always confident that we could find something,” says Jonay González Hernández, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, lead author of the Astronomy & Astrophysics paper announcing the planet’s discovery. The planet, Barnard b, is about

Supermassive black holes are some of the most impressive (and scary) objects in the universe – with masses around one billion times more than that of the Sun. And we know the’ve been around for a long time. In fact, astronomers have detected the extremely luminous compact sources that are located at the centres of galaxies, known as quasars (rapidly growing supermassive black holes), when the universe was less than 1 billion years old. Now our new study, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, has used observations from the Hubble Space Telescope to show that there were many more (much less luminous) black holes in the early universe than previous estimates had suggested. Excitingly, this can help us understand how they formed – and why many of them appear to be more massive than expected. Black holes grow by swallowing up material that surrounds them, in a process known as accretion. This produces tremendous amounts of radiation. The pressure from this radiation places a fundament

Stargazers and astronomers around the world continue to gaze toward the Corona Borealis constellation 3,000 light-years from Earth, where a long-dead star is expected to reignite in an explosion so powerful it will briefly rival the brilliance of Polaris, the North Star. The stellar corpse last turned on almost 80 years ago and will not reignite for another 80 years, making this a nearly once-in-a-lifetime experience . Already, the stellar remnant, a white dwarf called T Coronae Borealis that's feasting on material from a nearby red giant star, has revealed a tell-tale dip in brightness that "is right on top" of the one that preceded its previous outburst in 1946. Astronomers don't yet know for sure what's causing the dip, but they say it's just a matter of time before the nova satiates its hunger and explodes into a spectacular nova. "We know it's going to go off — it's very obvious," Edward Sion, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at

The supply chain has undergone rapid changes, with climate change emerging as one of the most critical disruptors. As extreme weather events rise in both frequency and intensity, they pose an unparalleled threat to global supply chains. According to the World Meteorological Organization, weather-related disasters have increased fivefold over the past 50 years, leading to global economic losses exceeding US$3.64 trillion. These disruptions are forcing companies to return to the drawing board and rethink their risk management strategies, adopting more advanced, resilient approaches that go beyond traditional methods. Climate Risk Challenges in the Supply Chain Sector Climate change affects supply chains in numerous ways, including through extreme weather, rising temperatures, and shifting precipitation patterns. These changes disrupt manufacturing processes, delay transport, and complicate logistics. A stark example is the 2021 Texas winter storm, which caused widespread supply chain dis

An international group of researchers from Fujitsu Limited and the Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology at Osaka University has announced the development of two new technologies for a space-time efficient analog rotation quantum computing architecture. These innovations are expected to significantly advance the realization of practical quantum computing. The first technology improves the accuracy of phase angle adjustments during phase rotations, while the second automatically generates effective qubit operation procedures. With these advancements, Fujitsu and QIQB have demonstrated that a quantum computer could theoretically perform a calculation in 10 hours that would take a classical computer five years to complete. The specific computation, which involved estimating material energy, was shown to be achievable with only 60,000 qubits—a much smaller number than typically considered necessary for fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC) to surpass classical computing sp

  An international team of astronomers, led by a researcher from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), has shown that the sun's magnetic activity has a significant influence on its seismic characterization, contrary to predictions in previous studies. Important data such as its size, age and chemical composition depend on it. These results pave the way for in-depth research to better understand the nature of the magnetic activity and its impact on stellar oscillations. The study is published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Asteroseismology, or helioseismology in the case of the sun, is a fascinating branch of astronomy that studies the oscillations of stars. "To understand it, you must imagine a star as a big ball of gas in constant motion. Inside this star, there are waves or pulsations that make it vibrate, rather like the sound that resonates in a musical instrument," explains Jérôme Bétrisey, a postdoctoral researcher in the Astronomy Department of the Facult