Dark scent

The hand of creation by John Byrne from Green Lantern: Ganthet's Tale
The XENON1T experiment at Gran Sasso's laboratories in Italy is a liquid xenon detector designed for serach of the mysterious dark matter. About one year ago researchers observed an excess of events: 53 more than the 232 predicted(1).
There are several explanations: an unexpected noise' source; the passage of some axions, an hypothetical particle predicted by Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn in 1977; some neutrinos that interact with matter in a new way.
Or dark matter's traces(2). There are two new articles suggesting this; in particular the second suggests that the detected excess in XENON1T is dued by chameleons(3).
The chameleon is an(other) hypothetical particle proposed in 2003 by Justin Khoury and Amanda Weltman, that couples to matter more weakly than gravity, and so a candidate for dark matter. It has a variable mass, so the hypothetical fifth force mediated by the chameleons can evade the constraints deduced by experiments on the equivalence principle. In this way chameleons could drive the observed acceleration of the universe's expansion, but it's very difficult to verify experimentally.
  1. XENON collaboration. (2020). Excess electronic recoil events in XENON1T. Physical Review D, 102(7). doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.102.072004 ↩︎
  2. Aboubrahim, A., Klasen, M., & Nath, P. (2021). Xenon-1T excess as a possible signal of a sub-GeV hidden sector dark matter. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2021(2), 1-21. doi:10.1007/JHEP02(2021)229 ↩︎
  3. Vagnozzi, S., Visinelli, L., Brax, P., Davis, A. C., & Sakstein, J. (2021). Direct detection of dark energy: the XENON1T excess and future prospects. Physical Review D, 104(6). doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.104.063023 ↩︎

The Case for Dwarf K Stars

61 Cygni, a binary K-type star system - via commons
The stellar main-sequence is a strip that cuts diagonally the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, a star's plot of stellar color versus brightness. The main feature of main-sequence stars is that they burn hydrogen. In this group the K dwarfs, or orange dwarfs, are intermediate stars in size between red M stars (red dwarfs) and yellow G stars. Their mass is between 0.5 and 0.8 times the Sun's mass and surface temperature is bewteen 3900 and 5200 K.
In the last few years these type of stars have become particularly interesting to astronomers, as they appear to have the characteristics to host life-as-we-know:

Uchuu: Universes' creator

If you are a superheroes' comics readers, you probably know All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (if you want, I could publish a review of this comic). At some point in the story, Superman designs a small cubic universe to see what would happen on a planet like Earth without his presence. The development of intelligent life was also included in the Superman's simulation, but in essence even those of astronomers are structured in the same way: a cube of space of finite dimensions whose evolution is driven by a network of dark matter and dark energy.
At the end of the july 2021 it was realased Uchuu, presented as a suite of large high-resolution cosmological N-body simulations, in practice, a simulation that shows the evolution of dark matter structures in a cube of 9.63 billion light years on each side and made up of 2.1 trillion particles.
Uchuu's main goal is to shed light on the dark matter halos surrounding galaxies, but the researchers think that another field of use for their simulation is the study of gravitational lenses.
In any case, it is a tool that could be very useful for improving the algorithms generally used in astronomy to process the data collected by instruments such as satellites and telescopes.
Ishiyama, T., Prada, F., Klypin, A. A., Sinha, M., Metcalf, R. B., Jullo, E., ... & Vega-Martínez, C. A. (2021). The Uchuu simulations: Data Release 1 and dark matter halo concentrations. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 506(3), 4210-4231. doi:10.1093/mnras/stab1755 (arXiv)
Read also:
Skies & Universes
Uchuu project on Git-Hub

The dog-bone asteroid

Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), a team of astronomers have obtained the sharpest and most detailed images yet of the asteroid Kleopatra. The observations have allowed the team to constrain the 3D shape and mass of this peculiar asteroid, which resembles a dog bone, to a higher accuracy than ever before. Their research provides clues as to how this asteroid and the two moons that orbit it formed.
Kleopatra also possesses another characteristic: a two-moon system discovered in 2008 by Franck Marchis' team at the Keck Observatory.
It is interesting to observe that the dynamics of Kleopatra's three-body system and its moons turn out to be chaotic. I hope to soon publish an article on the problem of the three bodies to clarify this aspect.

Read ESO's press release
Marchis, F., Jorda, L., Vernazza, P., Brož, M., Hanuš, J., Ferrais, M., ... & Yang, B. (2021). (216) Kleopatra, a low density critically rotating M-type asteroid. Astronomy&Astrophysics, 653. doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202140874
Broz, M., Marchis, F., Jorda, L., Hanuš, J., Vernazza, P., Ferrais, M., ... & Yang, B. (2021). An advanced multipole model for (216) Kleopatra triple system. Astronomy&Astrophysics, 653. doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202140901
Descamps, P., Marchis, F., Berthier, J., Emery, J. P., Duchêne, G., De Pater, I., ... & Macomber, B. (2011). Triplicity and physical characteristics of Asteroid (216) Kleopatra. Icarus, 211(2), 1022-1033. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2010.11.016

Professor Politzer and the Rho Mesons: Simple Harmonic Oscillator

I want to talk today about things that shake and I hope my words aren't too opaque. One degree of freedom moving to and fro just how it moves we'd like to know we can represent all kinds of things by a single mass between ideal springs. Each spring's connected to a wall so the outer ends don't move at all
Let the mass be $m$ spring constant $k$ but don't let friction get in the way use Newton's laws and what have we got $F$ equals $m$ psi double dot that is also minus escape psi times 2 so now we have a diff eq and we can write down the general solution for the simple harmonic time evolution
Let omega be root 2 $k$ over $m$ here's the answer won't repeat again size a cosine omega t plus a phase call it $b$ so it's all very simple and you can see for any initial psi and velocity we can find the constants $a$ and $b$ and the equations exact for all time $t$
Now look again at the diff eq. It's homogeneous and linear too so if you add two solutions together there sums a solution that's even better. We call it the principle of superposition. You can use it to fit the boundary condition in fact there is no contradiction if we use it in a system that does have friction
In a real system nothing's perfect of course we have to include the frictional force suppose it goes as the velocity right minus $m$ gamma d psi dt now if the damping is not too strong our old solution is close but wrong see it starts out with some amplitude $a$ but after a while it just dies away
The amplitude decays exponentially as you can see experimentally as $e$ to the minus half gamma $t$. Now it's almost right but you see the frequency is lower as we can compute omega is now given by the square root of the quantity $k$ over $m$ times two minus quarter gamma squared now we're through
So now we have the complete solution for an oscillator's time evolution and when there's damping as everyone knows the amplitude decays and the frequency slows if we have two solutions no matter how chose you know we can always superpose and since you all find physics such fun to problems 12 18 and 21.

Class dismissed
In the video I use the notation used on en.wiki (audio source)