October 3, 2023: Hi all. I'm covering for Andrea Gawrylewski today. Read on for the latest on the roll-out of the Nobel Prizes and the potential impact of satellites on astronomical observations.
—Robin Lloyd, Interim Newsletter Editor | | | Day Two of Nobel Prizes Week: Physics | Trailblazers in devising and using ultrafast laser pulses to study the motions of electrons have won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics. The award went to Pierre Agostini of the Ohio State University, Ferenc Krausz of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany and Anne L'Huillier of Lund University in Sweden. (L'Huillier is only the fifth woman to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics.) The laser pulses for these probes are on the scale of the attosecond, the scale over which the motions of electrons typically take place. How brief is that? There are as many attoseconds in a single second as there have been seconds in the entire history of the universe (!).
What they did: In 1987, L'Huillier discovered that passing an infrared laser through a noble gas, such as argon, led to a pattern in the emitted light: a plateau in the frequency. This plateau would prove vital for work done in the early 2000s, when Agostini created multiple 250-attosecond-long pulses of light while Krausz, working independently, generated single 650-attosecond-long pulses.
The impact: Today's researchers hope to use ultrafast lasers to get clearer views of otherwise blurry atomic processes. Probes with ever shorter pulses could deepen scientists' understanding of electron dynamics and could lead to the development of novel semiconductors and medical diagnostics.
Read More: An explainer that compares attoseconds with other units in the vast span of time measurements. | 5 min read
Some of the wildest tales and factoids associated with the Nobel Prizes. | 4 min read | | | First Satellite I See Tonight | A telecommunications satellite called BlueWalker 3 is one of the brightest objects in the sky. At times, this satellite outshines 99 percent of the stars visible from a dark location on Earth, according to newly published observations. And it's not alone. The sky is swarming with satellites. SpaceX has launched more than 5,000 satellites into orbit, and companies around the globe have collectively proposed launching more than half a million satellites in the coming years.
Why this matters: The growing horde of such space probes could hamper observations of the Universe. The International Astronomical Union, a group of professional astronomers, recommends that artificial satellites in low-Earth orbit have a maximum brightness of magnitude +7. BlueWalker 3 can be hundreds of times brighter.
What the experts say: "I'm concerned that we're going to see a very large number of large satellites launched in the next decade, and it will change the appearance of the night sky forever," says Patrick Seitzer, an emeritus astronomer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who was not involved in the new study. | | | A time-lapse image of the BlueWalker 3 satellite as a bright trail of light over Kitt Peak National Observatory. Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/IAU/SKAO/NSF/AURA/R. Sparks | | | • Two species of fungus that flourish in moist air pose a growing threat, called Valley fever, to farmworkers and other outdoor laborers. | 7 min read | | | • Persistent stereotypes of autistic people portray them as essentially solitary. Now a growing body of research concludes that many autistic people yearn for human connections and community at least as much as their neurotypical peers. An autistic researcher at the University of Kent says that intimacy is a two-way street and uses the term "double empathy problem" to refer to the impaired ability of many neurotypicals to accurately gauge the emotional states of people with autism. Dismantling these false notions matters urgently, writes Steve Silberman, drawing on an essay in Spectrum. | 4 min read | | | It's gratifying, not to mention good for science and society, to see two women already named this week as 2023 Nobel Prize winners (Katalin Karikó for Physiology or Medicine and then Anne L'Huillier for Physics today). The wins remind me of molecular biologist Nancy Hopkins, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose advocacy for lab space for women scientists in the 1990s helped advance their visibility and access to resources crucial to their careers and scientific progress. Check out this Q&A with Hopkins that Karen Weintraub wrote up in the year when two women, Frances H. Arnold and Donna Strickland, were among eight scientists awarded Nobel Prizes. | Stay tuned for tomorrow's announcement of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Frequent readers won't be surprised if the lauded work is not squarely in the field of chemistry. To my view, that's OK. Science evolves. Send any comments or questions our way: newsletters@sciam.com. | —Robin Lloyd, Interim Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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