All articles tagged with #asymmetry
Research shows that the side of initial motor symptom onset in Parkinson's disease influences non-motor symptom progression, with right-side onset linked to cognitive decline and dementia risk, and left-side onset associated with psychiatric issues like depression and anxiety, emphasizing the need for personalized treatment approaches.
Scientists from Spain and Germany have discovered a fundamental asymmetry showing that heating is consistently faster than cooling, challenging conventional expectations in thermodynamics. They introduced the concept of "thermal kinematics" to explain this phenomenon, which involves the exchange and redistribution of energy among individual particles within a system. The researchers used optical tweezers to observe and quantify the dynamics of microscopic systems undergoing thermal relaxation, and their findings could have implications for the development of new general theories for the dynamics of Brownian systems driven far from equilibrium.
Meticulous observations of the motion of stars around the central supermassive black hole in the M87 galaxy have revealed that it is highly asymmetrical, with a shape more like a potato than a symmetrical blob. The galaxy's shortest axis is about three-fourths the length of its long axis, while the intermediate axis is about seven-eighths that of the long axis. The black hole at the galaxy's core has a mass of 5.37 billion times that of the sun, which could help astrophysicists learn about its spin. The observations were made using the Keck Cosmic Web Imager, which allowed researchers to measure the spectra of stars in the center of the galaxy.
An explosion in a galaxy 180 million light-years away, named AT2018cow, has challenged our understanding of how stars die, appearing to represent the flattest explosion of its kind on record. The explosion belonged to an extremely rare class of cosmic blasts known as fast blue optical transients (FBOTs) and seems to have only exploded out sideways, resulting in an eruption shaped like a disk. The research has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.