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Everything, apparently, has a second life on TikTok. At least this keeps us skeptics busy – we have to redebunk everything we have debunked over the last century because it is popping up again on social media, confusing and misinforming another generation. This video is a great example – a short video discussing the “incorruptibility’ of St. Teresa of Avila. This is mainly a Catholic thing (but also the Eastern Orthodox Church) – the notion that the bodies of saints do not decompose, but remain in a pristine state after death, by divine intervention. This is considered a miracle, and for a time was a criterion for sainthood.

The video features Carlos Eire, a Yale professor of history focusing on medieval religious history. You may notice that the video does not include any shots of the actual body of St. Teresa. I could not find any online. Her body is not on display like some incorruptibles, but has been exhumed in 1914 and again recently. So we only have the reports of the examiners. This is where much of the confusion is generated – the church defines incorruptible very differently than the believers who then misrepresent the actual evidence. Essentially, if the soft tissues are preserved in any way (so the corpse has not completely skeletonized) and remains somewhat flexible, that’s good enough.

The case of Teresa is typical – one of the recent examiners said, “There is no color, there is no skin color, because the skin is mummified, but you can see it, especially the middle of the face.” So the body is mummified and you can only partly make out the face. That is probably not what most believers imagine when the think of miraculous incorruptibility.

This is the same story over and over – first hand accounts of actual examiners describe a desiccated corpse, in some state of mummification. Whenever they are put on display, that is exactly what you see. Sometimes body parts (like feet or hands) are cut off and preserved separately as relics. Often a wax or metal mask is placed over the face because the appearance may be upsetting to some of the public. The wax masks can be made to look very lifelike, and some viewers may think they are looking at the actual corpse. But the narrative among believers is often very different.

It has also been found that there are many very natural factors that correlate with the state of the allegedly incorruptible bodies. A team of researchers from the University of Pisa explored the microenvironments of the tombs:

“They discovered that small differences in temperature, moisture, and construction techniques lead to some tombs producing naturally preserved bodies while others in the same church didn’t. Now you can debate God’s role in choosing which bodies went into which tombs before these differences were known, but I’m going to stick with the corpses. Once the incorrupt bodies were removed from these climates or if the climates changed, they deteriorated.”

The condition of the bodies seems to be an effect of the environment, not the saintliness of the person in life.

It is also not a secret – though not advertised by promoters of miraculous incorruptibility – that the bodies are often treated in order to preserve them. This goes beyond controlling the environment. Some corpses are treated with acid as a preservative, or oils or sealed with wax.

When you examine each case in detail, or the phenomenon as a whole, what you find is completely consistent with what naturally happens to bodies after death. Most decay completely to skeletons. However, in the right environment, some may be naturally mummified and may partly or completely not go through putrefaction. But if their environment is changed they may then proceed to full decay. And bodies are often treated to help preserve them. There is simply no need for anything miraculous to explain any of these cases.

There is also a good rule of thumb for any such miraculous or supernatural claim – if there were actually cases of supernatural preservation, we would all have seen it. This would be huge news, and you would not have to travel to some church in Italy to get a few of an encased corpse covered by a wax mask.

As a side note, and at the risk of sounding irreverent, I wonder if any maker of a zombie film considered having the corpse of an incorruptible animate. If done well, that could be a truly horrific scene.

The post Incorruptible Skepticism first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Sometimes, the best innovative ideas come from synthesizing two previous ones. We’ve reported before on the idea of having a balloon explore the atmosphere of Venus, and we closely watched the progress of the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) as part of the Perseverance rover on Mars. When you combine the two, you can solve many of the challenges facing balloon exploration of Venus’ upper atmosphere – the most habitable place in the solar system other than Earth. That is the plan for Dr. Michael Hecht, the principal investigator of the MOXIE system and professor at MIT, and his team for the Exploring Venus with Electrolysis (EVE) project, which recently received as NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I grant as part of the 2025 NIAC awards.

Current ideas for balloon missions to Venus face two challenges. First, the buoyant gas they must use to stay afloat leaks out over time, limiting the mission duration. Second, they must carry large amounts of batteries to ensure their electronics (and, in some ways, the gases) can endure Venus’s 50-hour night cycle. If the gases inside the balloon get too cold, they depressurize, decreasing the balloon’s altitude.

Using a system akin to MOXIE would solve both of those problems. MOXIE famously created oxygen on Mars by splitting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into carbon monoxide and oxygen by using a process called solid oxide electrolysis (SOE). Despite that project coming to an end, it showed the proof of concept that where there is carbon dioxide, we can make oxygen, even on other planets.

Technology has to be tough to last on Venus, as Fraser explains.

There is plenty of carbon dioxide in Venus’ upper atmosphere – in fact, that is primarily what the atmosphere there is composed of. Notably, both carbon monoxide and oxygen, the components the SOE process creates, are lighter than the carbon dioxide they’re created from. In other words, in Venus’ atmosphere, the outputs of the SOE process are buoyant.

But that’s not all – in an interview with Fraser, Dr. Hecht describes another advantage of using the SOE system. “When people ask me how MOXIE works, I always describe it as fuel cell running backwards” he said. But, during the Venusian night, “you could take some fraction, maybe 10% of the carbon monoxide and oxygen that you made during daytime and run it through the instrument backwards to get power a night.”

Not only would EVE get an unlimited amount of buoyant gases from the SOE process, but it would also essentially get unlimited electricity, even without sunlight and without the need for heavy batteries that would otherwise weigh it down. Other advantages include using carbon monoxide as a propellant for other powered aircraft for which the balloon could serve as a base station. Plenty of ideas come to mind when exploring the use cases of this platform.

There’s so much we don’t know about our sister planet – Fraser suggests we need to go back.

Doing this process on Venus has some added advantages as well. Given the thickness of the atmosphere, especially compared to Mars, the SOE system in Venus’ atmosphere would just need a fan rather than the miniaturized compressive pump used in the MOXIE system on Perseverance. Also, since Venus is much closer to the Sun, during the daytime, there will be abundant solar power to power the system, whereas on Mars, solar power is still an option, but the Perseverance rover ran off a radioisotope thermal generator instead.

Venus does have some unique challenges, though – there is also sulfuric acid, though not much of it, in the atmosphere. Dr. Hecht mentioned the need for a protective coating, like Teflon, on the components that would be exposed to the atmosphere. He didn’t seem worried about the mass increase either, mentioning, “How much mass is in your nonstick pan from the Teflon coating?”

However, a balancing act has to happen with the SOE process itself. Dr. Hecht mentions in his NIAC proposal the goal of a 75% conversion efficiency between CO2 and Oxygen/CO. If aiming for more than that – say 100% efficiency –  some of the CO created as part of the process is also electrolyzed, and the instrument becomes clogged with pure carbon (i.e., soot).

Fraser’s original interview with Dr. Hecht about the MOXIE system.

However, at the 75% efficiency range (which admittedly is about 3x more efficient than MOXIE was), the buoyancy of the oxygen and a combination of the leftover CO2 and CO is about equal, so you could split the two gas streams into separate chambers and have equal buoyancy, without tipping it one way or another.

Overall, this seems like an eminently practical solution to a problem with a long-standing idea in the future of Venus exploration. But why stop there? Dr. Hecht also mentioned that such a system would theoretically work on Titan and on other planets and moons with thick atmospheres. As EVE moves through the NIAC phases and the team starts detailed technical work on it, humanity will get closer to a technology that could revolutionize the exploration of our nearest planetary neighbor. 

Learn More:
NASA / Michael Hecht – Exploring Venus with Electrolysis (EVE)
UT – Perseverance Successfully Extracts Oxygen From the Martian Atmosphere. About 10 Minutes of Breathing Time for an Astronaut
UT – A Balloon Mission that Could Try to Confirm Life On Venus
UT – The Best Way to Learn About Venus Could Be With a Fleet of Balloons

Lead Image:
Artist concept highlighting the novel approach proposed by the 2025 NIAC awarded selection of Exploring Venus with Electrolysis (EVE)
Credit – NASA/Michael Hecht

The post A Balloon Mission That Could Explore Venus Indefinitely appeared first on Universe Today.

Please recognize that you are now influencing the national public health policy and understand that being in authority is a very different job than simply questioning authority

The post An Open Letter to Dr. Vinay Prasad first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The study of asteroid samples is a highly lucrative area of research and one of the best ways to determine how the Solar System came to be. Given that asteroids are leftover material from the formation of the Solar System, they are likely to contain vital clues about how several key processes took place. This includes how water, organic molecules, and the building blocks of life were distributed throughout the Solar System billions of years ago. For this reason, space agencies have attached a high importance to the retrieval of asteroid samples that are returned to Earth for analysis.

This includes NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission. This spacecraft rendezvoused with asteroid (101955) Bennu on December 3rd, 2018, returning 121.6 grams of material (the largest sample ever) to Earth by September 2023. A recent analysis by scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center revealed molecules key to life on Earth, including all five nitrogen bases – molecules required for building DNA and RNA. These findings support the theory that asteroids could have delivered the building blocks of life to Earth in the distant past.

The research was led by Daniel P. Glavin and Jason P. Dworkin, two senior scientists with the Solar System Exploration Division (SSED) at NASA Goddard. They were joined by multiple colleagues from the SSED, the Goddard Center for Research and Exploration in Space Science and Technology (CRESST), the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division (ARES) at the NASA Johnson Space Center, and multiple universities and institutes. Their findings were presented in papers that appeared in Nature and Nature Astronomy.

A poster depicting all the compounds discovered in the OSIRIS-REx sample. ©NASA

Their results represent the first in-depth analyses of the minerals and molecules in the Bennu samples. Among the most compelling detections (reported in the Nature Astronomy paper) were 14 of the 20 amino acids life on Earth uses to make up protein cells. They also detected five nucleobases vital to DNA and RNA, which most complex lifeforms on Earth use to store and transmit genetic instructions, including how to arrange amino acids into proteins. As Associate Administrator Nicky Fox of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters explained in a NASA press release:

“NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission already is rewriting the textbook on what we understand about the beginnings of our solar system. Asteroids provide a time capsule into our home planet’s history, and Bennu’s samples are pivotal in our understanding of what ingredients in our solar system existed before life started on Earth.”

The teams also reported exceptionally high abundances of ammonia in the Bennu samples and formaldehyde. Ammonia is an important component in biology since it can react with formaldehyde to form complex molecules like amino acids. These building blocks have previously been detected in other rocky bodies, including meteorites retrieved on Earth. However, the way OSIRIS-REx found them in pristine condition on an asteroid supports the theory that objects that formed far from the Sun could have delivered the raw material for life throughout the Solar System. Said Glavin:

“The clues we’re looking for are so minuscule and so easily destroyed or altered from exposure to Earth’s environment. That’s why some of these new discoveries would not be possible without a sample-return mission, meticulous contamination-control measures, and careful curation and storage of this precious material from Bennu.”

Illustration of the asteroid Bennu. Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Glavin and Dworkin’s team analyzed the Bennu samples for hints of compounds related to life on Earth. Meanwhile, Tim McCoy and Sara Russell, the curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington and a cosmic mineralogist at the Natural History Museum in London (respectively), looked for evidence of where these molecules formed. As they reported in the study appearing in Nature, they discovered hints that they came from an ancient prebiotic environment.

These included traces of 11 minerals ranging from calcite to halite and sylvite, compounds that form from salts dissolved in water that become solid crystals (brines) once the water dissolves. Evidence of similar brines have been detected on Ceres, Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and other bodies in the Solar System. While scientists have also detected brines in meteorites that fell to Earth, they have never seen a complete set created by an evaporation process that could have lasted thousands of years or more. Moreover, some minerals found in Bennu have never been detected in other extraterrestrial samples.

Another analysis was carried out by members of the OSIRIS-REx sample analysis team, including researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), Hokkaido University, Keio University, Kyushu University, and Tohoku University. Together, they analyzed a 17.75 mg sample using high-resolution mass spectrometry for organic molecules with a ring structure containing carbon and nitrogen (N-heterocycles). This revealed a concentration of N-heterocycles 5-10 times higher than that reported from the sample taken from Ryugu (~5 nmol/g) by the Hayabusa2 mission.

In addition to the five nitrogenous bases, their analysis showed evidence of the purines xanthine, hypoxanthine, and nicotinic acid (vitamin B3). “In previous research, uracil and nicotinic acid were detected in the samples from asteroid Ryugu, but the other four nucleobases were absent,” said team member Dr. Toshiki Koga of JAMSTEC. “The difference in abundance and complexity of N-heterocycles between Bennu and Ryugu could reflect the differences in the environment to which these asteroids have been exposed in space.”

A mosaic image of asteroid Bennu, composed of 12 PolyCam images collected by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft from a range of 24 kilometers. Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

While these findings have provided compelling evidence of where the building blocks of life on Earth came from, several unanswered questions remain. For starters, amino acids can be created in “mirror-image” versions, similar to how complex lifeforms have a left and right side – hands, feet, brains, lungs, heat chambers, etc. While life on Earth almost exclusively exhibits the left variety, the Bennu samples contain an equal mixture of both. This could mean amino acids started in equal mixtures on Earth billions of years ago but made a left turn along the way.

This is not unlike theories regarding matter and antimatter in the early Universe and how “normal” matter came to be predominant. In any case, these findings are a key piece in the ongoing study of how and where life may have emerged in the Solar System. “OSIRIS-REx has been a highly successful mission,” said Dworkin. “Data from OSIRIS-REx adds major brushstrokes to a picture of a solar system teeming with the potential for life. Why we, so far, only see life on Earth and not elsewhere, that’s the truly tantalizing question.”

Further Reading: NASA, Hokkaido University, Nature Astronomy

The post The Building Blocks for Life Found in Asteroid Bennu Samples appeared first on Universe Today.

Though it’s a cold, dead planet, Mars still has its own natural beauty about it. This image shows us something we’ll never see on Earth.

Mars has only a thin, tenuous atmosphere, and most of it (95%) is carbon dioxide. When Martian winter arrives, CO2 freezes and forms a thick coating on the ground in the polar regions. It lies there dormant for months.

As Spring approaches, temperatures gradually warm. Sunlight passes through the translucent frozen layer of CO2, warming the ground beneath it.

The warming ground sublimates frozen CO2 into vapour that accumulates under the solid CO2. Eventually, the gas escapes through weak spots in the ice. It can erupt into geysers that spread darker material out onto the frozen surface.

Artist’s impression of geysers at the Martian south polar icecap as southern spring begins. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University/Ron Miller

The HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this image of these geysers on Mars in October 2018. It has also captured other images of Martian CO2 geysers.

This HiRISE image shows different dark shapes and bright spots on sand dunes in Mars’ north pole region. The bright spots are where frozen CO2 sublimated into gas and erupted, spreading darker material on the surface. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Some of Mars’ CO2 geysers erupt and create dark spots as large as 1 km across. They are fueled by considerable power and can erupt at speeds up to 160 km/h.

Sometimes the eruptions create dark regions under the ice which look like spiders.

This NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image, acquired on May 13, 2018, during winter at the South Pole of Mars, shows a carbon dioxide ice cap covering the region and as the sun returns in the spring, “Mars spiders” begin to emerge from the landscape. Image Credit: NASA

Scientists are calling these features araneiform terrain or spider terrain. They are found in clusters that give the surface a wrinkled appearance. NASA scientists recreated these patterns in lab tests to understand the processes behind their formation. “The spiders are strange, beautiful geologic features in their own right,” said Lauren McKeown of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

The process that explains how the CO2 cycle creates these features is called the Keiffer model. Hugh Keiffer was with the US Geological Survey when he and his colleagues published a paper explaining the model in 2006 in Nature titled “CO2 jets formed by sublimation beneath translucent slab ice in Mars’ seasonal south polar ice cap.”

“We propose that the seasonal ice cap forms an impermeable, translucent slab of CO2 ice that sublimates from the base, building up high-pressure gas beneath the slab. This gas levitates the ice, which eventually ruptures, producing high-velocity CO2 vents that erupt sand-sized grains in jets to form the spots and erode the channels,” Keiffer and his co-authors wrote in their paper.

This simple illustration shows what happens when Spring comes and frozen CO2 is warmed by solar insolation. As the CO2 sublimates into gas, pressure builds, and it erupts through weaknesses in the seasonal cap, carrying dust with it that creates dark spots on the surface. Image Credit: By BatteryIncluded – Own work by uploader: I scanned, cropped and resized the original image from a paper by Sylvain Piqueux. JGR, VOL. 108, no. E8, 5084, doi:10.1029/2002JE002007, 2003, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7736765

Maybe humans are biased, but there’s nothing as beautiful and splendorous as Earth. Generations of poets have acclaimed its beauty to the point where it borders on the spiritual. However, when it comes to CO2 geysers and the natural patterns they create, Mars has something that Earth doesn’t.

“These processes are unlike any observed on Earth,” the authors of the 2006 paper stated.

Source: Geyser Season on Mars

The post These Bizarre Features on Mars are Caused by Carbon Dioxide Geysers appeared first on Universe Today.

How can the latest technology, such as solar cells, be improved? An international research team is helping to find answers to questions like this with a new technique. For the first time, the formation of tiny, difficult-to-detect particles -- known as dark excitons -- can be tracked precisely in time and space. These invisible carriers of energy will play a key role in future solar cells, LEDs and detectors.

Scientists have developed a new method for measuring temperature extremely accurately by using giant 'Rydberg' atoms. This atomic thermometer provides accurate measurements 'out of the box,' without needing initial factory adjustments, because it relies on the basic principles of quantum physics. By using Rydberg atoms' sensitivity to environmental changes, this technique could simplify temperature sensing in extreme environments, from space to high-precision industries.

What would you do for fun on another planet? Go ballooning in Venus’ atmosphere? Explore the caves of Hyperion? Hike all the way around Mercury? Ride a toboggan down the slopes of Pluto’s ice mountains? Or watch clouds roll by on Mars?

All those adventures, and more, are offered in a new book titled “Daydreaming in the Solar System.” But the authors don’t stop at daydreaming: York University planetary scientist John E. Moores and astrophysicist Jesse Rogerson also explain why the adventures they describe would be like nothing on Earth.

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Moores says the idea behind the book was to tell “a little story that is really, really true to what the science is, and then give the reader an idea of what science there is that actually enables that story to take place.”

Trips to other worlds have been the stuff of science fiction for more than a century — going back to Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” and continuing today with shows like “For All Mankind.” But most of those tales are told from the perspective of intrepid explorers who have to deal with life-threatening dramas.

In contrast, most of the stories in “Daydreaming in the Solar System” have to do with space travelers having fun, or handling the day-to-day challenges of living in an otherworldly locale.

John E. Moores and Jesse Rogerson tell tales of interplanetary adventures. (Credits: John E. Moores and York University)

“Often you’re visiting a place for the very first time, and of course it’s an amazing, awe-inspiring place, but you’re also very concerned about not dying,” Moores said. “So, we wanted to take that away — that bit of danger — so that people dive into the environment. Everywhere we went, we needed the right combination of an interesting activity, an interesting environment.”

Moores and Rogerson also use a second-person perspective. You’re the one riding a submarine through the hidden seas of Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. You’re the one spelunking on Hyperion, a spongy Saturnian moon that appears to contain 40% empty space.

The end of each chapter takes a deeper dive into the peculiarities of each extraterrestrial environment. For example, riding a balloon around Venus makes sense because the surroundings at an altitude of 30 to 40 miles are similar to Earth’s when it comes to temperature and atmospheric pressure. In contrast, the surface of Venus is hellishly hot.

Ballooning on Venus is much more than a daydream. More than a decade ago, NASA engineers came up with a concept that called for sending habitable airships into the Venusian atmosphere. More recently, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been looking into a mission that would use robotic balloons to study the clouds of Venus.

“Daydreaming in the Solar System,” by John E. Moores and Jesse Rogerson. (Cover art by Michelle D. Parsons)

Similarly, the idea of sending mini-subs through Europa’s subsurface ocean is being considered as a follow-up to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. A robotic submarine has also been proposed for exploring Titan’s hydrocarbon seas — although NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Titan, which relies on a rotorcraft, will be taking precedence.

The authors don’t shy away from the important issues: In one chapter, they describe in depth how to brew a delicious cup of coffee on Titan — and then explain why you could conceivably put on a pair of mechanical wings and flap your way through the Saturnian moon’s dense atmosphere after your morning cup of joe.

Will humans ever be able to experience the adventures described in the book? “I hope so,” Moores says.

“One thing that our publisher pointed out when we submitted our final manuscript, which wasn’t actually intentional, was that they felt that the book was actually very optimistic and very hopeful — just the framing of it, that you could imagine the future in a way that actually allows these things to happen,” he says. “So many other works are a little bit apocalyptic right now.”

My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, DominicaPhetteplace.com.

Check out the original version of this posting on Cosmic Log to get Moores’ recommendations for further reading, and stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.

The post Science Points Out Paths to Interplanetary Adventures appeared first on Universe Today.

The US Congress is expected to vote on whether to confirm Robert F Kennedy Jr to lead the nation’s public health institutions in the coming days – he would be taking over during a time of turmoil

AI agents trained in simulations that differ from the environments where they are deployed sometimes perform better than agents trained and deployed in the same environment, research shows.

AI agents trained in simulations that differ from the environments where they are deployed sometimes perform better than agents trained and deployed in the same environment, research shows.

Researchers have pioneered a new approach to simulate turbulent systems, based on probabilities.

Many materials store information about what has happened to them in a sort of material memory, like wrinkles on a once crumpled piece of paper. Now, a team of physicists has uncovered how, under specific conditions, some materials seemingly violate underlying mathematics to store memories about the sequence of previous deformations.

A new technique to trap clusters of platinum atoms in nanoscale islands could lead to more efficient catalysts for the chemical industry.

Turning environmental waste into useful chemical resources could solve many of the inevitable challenges of our growing amounts of discarded plastics, paper and food waste, according to new research.

New research has combined cosmological data from two major surveys of the universe's evolutionary history and found hints that it may be less clumpy at certain points than previously thought. Their findings suggest that the universe may have become more complex with advancing age.

A new collaboration has unlocked new potential for the field by creating a novel high-performance organic electrochemical neuron that responds within the frequency range of human neurons.

Researchers have developed a new optical sensor that provides a simple way to achieve real-time detection of extremely low levels of arsenic in water.

The asteroid is unlikely to be cause for concern, but its detection has triggered planetary defence response procedures for the first time

When astronomers detected the first long-predicted gravitational waves in 2015, it opened a whole new window into the Universe. Before that, astronomy depended on observations of light in all its wavelengths.

We also use light to communicate, mostly radio waves. Could we use gravitational waves to communicate?

The idea is intriguing, though beyond our capabilities right now. Still, there’s value in exploring the hypothetical, as the future has a way of arriving sooner than we sometimes think.

New research examines the idea and how it could be applied in the future. It’s titled “Gravitational Communication: Fundamentals, State-of-the-Art and Future Vision,” and it’s available on the pre-press site arxiv.org. The authors are Houtianfu Wang and Ozgur B. Akan. Wang and Akan are both with the Internet of Everything Group, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK.

“Gravitational waves can maintain consistent signal quality over immense distances, making them suitable for missions beyond the solar system.”

Houtianfu Wang and Ozgur B. Akan.

“The discovery of gravitational waves has opened a new observational window for astronomy and physics, offering a unique approach to exploring the depths of the universe and extreme astrophysical phenomena. Beyond its impact on astronomical research, gravitational waves have also garnered widespread attention as a new communication paradigm,” the authors explain.

Traditional electromagnetic communications have definite drawbacks and limitations. Signals get weaker with distance, which restricts range. Atmospheric effects can interfere with radio communications and diffuse and distort them. There are also line-of-sight restrictions, and solar weather and space activity can also interfere.

What’s promising about gravitational wave communication (GWC) is that it could overcome these challenges. GWC is robust in extreme environments and loses minimal energy over extremely long distances. It also overcomes problems that plague electromagnetic communication (EMC), like diffusion, distortion, and reflection. There’s also the intriguing possibility of harnessing naturally created GWs, which means reducing the energy needed to create them.

“Gravitational communication, also known as gravitational wave communication, holds the promise of overcoming the limitations of traditional electromagnetic communication, enabling robust transmission across extreme environments and vast distances,” the authors point out.

Artist’s impression of gravitational waves. Image credit: NASA

To advance the technology, researchers need to create artificial gravitational waves (GWs) in the lab. That’s one of the primary goals of GW research. GWs are extremely weak, and only enormous masses moving rapidly can generate them. Even the GWs we’ve detected coming from merging supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which can have billions of solar masses, produce only miniscule effects that require incredibly sensitive instruments like LIGO to detect.

Generating GWs that are strong enough to detect is a necessary first step.

“The generation of gravitational waves is pivotal for advancing gravitational communication, yet it remains one of the foremost challenges in contemporary technological development,” the authors write. “Researchers have explored various innovative methods to achieve this, including mechanical resonance and rotational devices, superconducting materials, and particle beam collisions, as well as techniques involving high-power lasers and electromagnetic fields.”

There is plenty of theoretical work behind GWC but less practical work. The paper points out what direction research should take to bridge the gap between the two.

Obviously, there’s no way to recreate an event as awesome as a black hole merger in a laboratory. But surprisingly, researchers have been considering the problem as far back as 1960, long before we’d ever detected GWs.

An artistic image inspired by a black hole-neutron star merger event. Credit: Carl Knox, OzGrav/Swinburne

One of the first attempts involved rotating masses. However, the rotational speed required to create GWs was impossible to achieve, partly because the materials weren’t strong enough. Other attempts and proposals involved piezoelectric crystals, superfluids, particle beams, and even high-power lasers. The issue with these attempts is that while physicists understand the theory behind them, they don’t have the right materials yet. Some attempts generated GWs, scientists think, but they aren’t strong enough to be detectable.

“High-frequency gravitational waves, often generated by smaller masses or scales, are feasible for artificial production under laboratory conditions. But they remain undetectable due to their low amplitudes and the mismatch with current detector sensitivities,” the authors explain.

More advanced detection technologies or some method to align generated GWs with existing detection capabilities are needed. Existing technologies are aimed at detecting GWs from astrophysical events. The authors explain that “Research should focus on designing detectors capable of operating across broader frequency and amplitude ranges.”

While GWs avoid some of the problems that EM communications face, they aren’t without problems. Since they can travel vast distances, GWC faces problems with attenuation, phase distortion, and polarization shifts from interacting with things like dense matter, cosmic structures, magnetic fields, and interstellar matter. These can not only degrade the signal’s quality but can also complicate decoding.

This conceptual illustration shows what effects GWs are subjected to as they propagate. “The signal first experiences large-scale influences such as gravitational and cosmological frequency shifts, followed by broad-scale amplitude attenuation due to cosmic expansion and weak scattering. Next, more region-specific factors induce polarization changes, and finally, localized distortions arise in the form of phase variations and fading effects caused by gravitational lensing and other fine-scale phenomena. Additive noise is introduced near the receiver end,” the authors write. Image Credit: Wang and Akan, 2025.

There are also unique noise sources to consider, including thermal gravitational noise, background radiation and overlapping GW signals. “Developing comprehensive channel models is essential to ensure reliable and efficient detection in these environments,” the authors write.

In order to ever make use of GWs, we also need to figure out how to modulate them. Signal modulation is critical to communications. Look at any car radio and you see “AM” and “FM.” AM stands for “Amplitude Modulation” and FM stands for “Frequency Modulation.” How could we modulate GWs and turn them into meaningful information?

“Recent studies have explored diverse methods, including astrophysical phenomena-based amplitude modulation (AM), dark matter-induced frequency modulation (FM), superconducting material manipulation, and nonmetricity-based theoretical approaches,” the authors write. Each one of these holds promise as well as being choked with obstacles.

For example, we can theorize about using dark matter to modulate GW signals, but we don’t even know what dark matter is. “Frequency modulation involving ultralight scalar dark matter (ULDM) depends on uncertain assumptions about dark matter’s properties and distribution,” the authors write, addressing an elephant in the room.

It might seem as if GWC is out of reach, but it holds so much promise that scientists are unwilling to abandon it. In deep space communications, EM communication is hamstrung by the vast distances and interference from cosmic phenomena. GWC offers solutions to these obstacles.

This image shows how GWC can be used in our own Solar System and in interstellar communications. Where conventional communications would simply fade away on the long journey between stars, GWC will not. Image Credit: Wang and Akan, 2025.

A better method to communicate over long distances is critical to exploring deep space, and GWC is exactly what we need. “Gravitational waves can maintain consistent signal quality over immense distances, making them suitable for missions beyond the solar system,” the authors write.

Practical gravitational wave communication is a long way off. However, what was once only theoretical is gradually shifting into the practical.

“Gravitational communication, as a frontier research direction with significant potential, is gradually moving from theoretical exploration to practical application,” Wang and Akan write in their conclusion. It will depend on hard work and future breakthroughs.

The pair of researchers know that much hard work is needed to advance the idea. Their paper is deeply detailed and comprehensive, and they hope it will be a catalyst for that work.

“Although a fully practical gravitational wave communication system remains unfeasible, we aim to use this survey to highlight its potential and stimulate further research and innovation, especially for space communication scenarios,” they conclude.

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