I learned in October 2022’s Breakthrough that the spikes of stars in high-power photos are called diffraction spikes. Why do they appear as two crosses at 45 degrees to each other? The diffraction ...

Nobody knows what the surface of neutron stars are made of but there’s no shortage of suggestions. We know that iron must play a role because we can see its characteristics absorption lines in the ...

For more than 100 years, scientists have been using X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of crystalline materials such as metals, rocks, and ceramics. Whether sedimentary rocks store ...

What happens when a wave passes through some opening? It diffracts - or you like, you could say "bends". If the size of the opening is comparable to the wavelength of the wave, the bending can be ...

For more than 100 years, scientists have been using X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of crystalline materials such as metals, rocks, and ceramics. Whether sedimentary rocks store ...

When a laser beam is incident on many small objects such as lycopodium powder, the resulting diffraction pattern is similar to the diffraction pattern of a small circular aperture (Airy's disk pattern ...