Tag: stars

The brilliant art amongst our stars

The brilliant art amongst our stars

On 15 January 2025, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from NASA’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida bound for the Mare Crisium basin of the moon—carrying with it 47 artistic creations, including MAX IV colleague Filip Persson’s artwork, ‘MAX IV Control System’. The art will be part of humanity’s galactic impression to live for millions of years.

According to Persson, his artwork represents a new genre of art with requirements yet to be defined. “The idea with the genre ‘Technical Art’ is that a sufficiently complex machine can create art by being run in normal operation. So, no deliberate special run in order to create the art. It can, for example, be instabilities or other things creating a beautiful pattern.”

The work, curated for the MoonMars Museum project, was created with Python and Gephi software. All devices of the full control system of MAX IV along with all interconnections were extracted as a huge table. The table was then imported into Gephi as a node network and evolved using gravitational parameters, creating beautiful patterns resembling galaxies—a bit like a Big Bang but with the very different behaviour that all information about the control system and the connections remain intact.

“I have over the years seen a lot of beautiful graphs at MAX IV and I thought quite early, due to having a somewhat artistic mind, that it would be fun to do something with these images,” explained Filip Persson, who is MAX IV’s Assistant Head of Accelerator Operations.

The artworks are packaged both digitally, on a very resilient memory card, and analogue as laser etched into a nickel plate using state-of-the-art Nanofiche technology with 300 000 DPI resolution. The art is part of the company LifeShip’s payload called ‘Pyramid on the Moon’.

How does one define technical art? The parameters are something that Persson aims to classify so that more people from around the world can contribute to the genre.

Read more on MAXIV website

A star is born

A star is born

Swiss Light Source SLS reveals complex chemistry inside ‘stellar nurseries’

An international team of researchers has uncovered what might be a critical step in the chemical evolution of molecules in cosmic “stellar nurseries.” In these vast clouds of cold gas and dust in space, trillions of molecules swirl together over millions of years. The collapse of these interstellar clouds eventually gives rise to young stars and planets.

Like human bodies, stellar nurseries contain a lot of organic molecules, which are made up mostly of carbon and hydrogen atoms. The group’s results, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, reveal how certain large organic molecules may form inside these clouds. It’s one tiny step in the eons-long chemical journey that carbon atoms undergo—forming in the hearts of dying stars, then becoming part of planets, living organisms on Earth and perhaps beyond.

“In these cold molecular clouds, you’re creating the first building blocks that will, in the end, form stars and planets,” said Jordy Bouwman, research associate at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at University Colorado Boulder.

For the new study, Bouwman and his colleagues took a deep dive into one stellar nursery in particular: the Taurus Molecular Cloud (TMC-1). This region sits in the constellation Taurus and is roughly 440 light years (more than 2 quadrillion miles) from Earth. The chemically complex environment is an example of what astronomers call an “accreting starless core.” Its cloud has begun to collapse, but scientists haven’t yet detected embryonic stars emerging inside it.

Read more on the PSI website

Image: Using PEPICO spectroscopy at the SLS, researchers discovered how hexagonally-shaped ortho-benzyne molecules can combine with methyl radicals to form a series of larger organic molecules, each containing a ring of five carbon atoms.

Credit: Henry Cardwell