Flag highlights in 2022

Gerardo Herrera Coral

Mexico City / 07/01/2023 11:16:00

Despite grim predictions that two years of the pandemic had left us, 2022 was a year full of activity. Science and Technology. Many research projects and groups around the world have produced impressive results and announced amazing results.

January

The James Webb Space Telescope has reached its final position. It was launched on Christmas 2021 and it took a month to reach a point in space where gravitational forces balance out to give the device stability. The first photos arrived in the summer, flooding social networks.

Throughout the year, the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) announced that it had detected carbon dioxide on an exoplanet located 700 light-years away from us, and showed us pictures of the oldest galaxies, as well as beautiful pictures of nebula formation. .

February

Researchers in China have reported evidence of the formation of triatomic molecules in a mixture of very cold atoms and diatomic molecules. If true, it could provide a way to study chemical reactions on atomic scales. The study will allow quantum mechanics simulations to help study the way the three objects interact on a microscopic level.

Walks

The discovery has been reported Arendelle, the most distant single star whose light would have traveled 12.9 billion years to reach our planet. In Old Anglo-Saxon, Earendil means “morning star”.

The detailed view highlights the location of Earendel’s star along a ripple in space-time. (Container)

April

We learned that the largest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider, has started operating after three years of maintenance and modernization work. During the year, the machine broke records for the energy and density of proton beams. The accelerator now produces more collisions per second giving detectors millions of events to study.

may be

Reconstructed image of Sagittarius A*: the center of our galaxy has been revealed. Already in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope EHT showed an image of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87. This year the international collaboration published on Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The mass of this noble body is 4 million suns and it is 27 thousand light years away from us.

The first images of Arch A. (Millennium Design) — First images of Arch A*. (Millennium Design)

Jun

A group of researchers in Canada has discovered the best-preserved mammoth. From his condition, it appears that he died in a peaceful sleep, which could have been his last nap in 30,000 years. It was discovered in Yukon, Canada’s northernmost province bordering the Arctic Ocean.

July

Japanese scientists have discovered the existence of neutral nuclear matter. A so-called tetra-neutron can be produced by colliding helium-8 nuclei with a liquid hydrogen target. The collisions split the original helium into an alpha particle (carrying two protons and two neutrons) and a fourth.

August

se announced the development of a coating with perfect light transmission. Scientists from the University of Austria in Vienna have produced a structure that perfectly allows light to pass through. The material has been mathematically optimized to avoid even the slightest reflection. The team of researchers also developed an arrangement of mirrors and lenses that trap light in a cavity, resulting in perfect destructive interference for coherent perfect absorption.

September

Geochemical models published this month give more confidence to the idea that the oceans of Saturn’s moon Enceladus could be inhabited or exhibit abiotic evolution.

October

A group of scientists from Stanford University grew neurons in the laboratory Then transplanted into small mice. The new neurons are integrated into the animal’s nervous system by developing synaptic connections. This experiment is part of research aimed at understanding autism, schizophrenia, and other disorders.

Images of neurons in the mouse hippocampus on different days and scales. (Stanford University)

November

IBM announced a 433-qubit Osprey chip and told us that by 2023 it will have a 1,221-qubit Condor processor. In the quantum computing development project, IBM intends to build a chip with more than 4,000 qubits by 2025. Progress in this field is so rapid that quantum computers will almost certainly be part of reality in the future.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai with a quantum computer. (The Google)

Also in November, the ALICE experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider published the first measurement of a galaxy’s transparency to antimatter. The international collaboration was able to determine for the first time the degree of adsorption of anti-helium-3 nuclei in matter. This makes it possible to predict that if one of these antimatter nuclei were produced in the center of our galaxy, it could reach our planet.

Dec

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, United States, has announced that it has achieved nuclear fusion gaining energy. With an array of nearly two hundred lasers, the hydrogen was compressed into the variants deuterium and tritium, which were frozen within a crystal structure in a small cylinder. In a very short moment, more than three kilowatt-hours were released. This would equate to just over 800 watts for one hour. You could light up eight 100-watt bulbs in one hour. Although some of that energy is needed to activate the lasers that drove them, leaving less useful energy for lighting the LEDs or producing heat. The result is not modest if we consider that this result clarifies the principle and better understands what needs to be done so that in the future we have an inexhaustible source of clean energy.