China develops electric ‘Matrix’ flying Taxi

 The Matrix, 10-passenger electric aircraft, developed by China 

China's burgeoning development of an advanced electric aircraft, the ‘Matrix,’ hints at a future where aerial taxis could become a common sight in cities. Currently undergoing testing in the southeastern city of Kunshan, this 10-passenger electric aircraft is considered the largest of its kind in China capable of Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL). In a hangar in Kunshan, more than 60 km's (about 37 miles) west of the port of Shanghai, a sort of gigantic drone was preparing for a demonstration. Called the Matrix, it’s a 5-ton electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle, or eVTOL, considered the largest electric aircraft built so far, at least in China. The Chinese company AutoFlight, founded in 2017, developed the Matrix, which can carry up to 10 passengers. It has a 20-meter (about 66 foot) wingspan, and is 17.1 meters long and 3.3 meters tall. (56 feet long and 11 feet tall). It can travel for an hour without charging.

Recently showcased at a hanger near the Shanghai port, the ‘Matrix’ resembles a giant drone, weighing around five tons. It signals the possibility of urban air taxi services in the future, promising faster and more efficient city transit. Developed by Chinese firm AutoFlight, established in 2017, the Matrix can carry up to 10 passengers. It boasts an operational flight time of approximately one hour. The idea is that eventually it could become a flying taxi, although the industry and experts think it will take some time. On a recent chilly afternoon, AutoFlight conducted a flying demonstration at its low-altitude flight test facility. The eVTOL was ready: the propellers were turned on, and after a few minutes of checks to ensure everything was working, it began rising. It was noisy, but less so than a helicopter. Around 10 minutes later, and after two laps around the heliport, the Matrix returned and landed smoothly with no problems. “This is a good question, but this is very tough question for me to answer,” said Steven Yang, senior vice president of AutoFlight.

While promising, widespread adoption of this technology remains several years away. According to Steven Yang, it’s still uncertain when flying taxis will operate as regular services. The company has already developed a two-ton capacity VTOL aircraft awaiting certification. They expect to receive a ‘Type Certificate’ from regulators by 2027, which confirms the aircraft’s safety standards. However, operator certifications and other approvals will also be necessary for passenger services. The company already has a 2-ton passenger eVTOL version, awaiting certifications. Yang said AutoFlight hopes to get a type certificate, meaning that authorities would confirm that the aircraft design complies with safety standards. But other regulatory approvals would still be required for an operator certificate allowing the aircraft to carry passengers.

AutoFlight demonstrated the aircraft's capabilities during a live flight at their low-altitude flight test center. During the cold-weather test, staff prepared the aircraft from its hanger to the helipad, then initiated the propellers and conducted system checks. After confirming all systems were functioning well, the Matrix ascended smoothly, producing a quieter noise compared to traditional helicopters. The aircraft flew for about 10 minutes, performing two circles around the helipad before safely returning and landing. Currently, the Matrix remains in the prototype phase, with other Chinese companies also developing VTOL aircraft. For instance, Guangdong-based Ehangan has secured certification for their aircraft intended for commercial passenger use, though commercial services have yet to launch. Apart from permits, flying taxis are not yet cruising the skies because they need facilities to support them. As part of what is known as the “low-altitude economy,” what is already a reality is the use of drones for food delivery, like in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. Experts caution that obtaining permission alone isn’t enough. Infrastructure, flight routes, safety systems and operational management must all be developed to support urban air mobility.

China has been actively promoting the ‘Low-Altitude Economy’ concept, expanding the use of drones and small flying devices. Garry Ang, a senior economist at Natixis Corporate & Investment Banking, emphasizes that the growth of the flying taxi industry involves overcoming significant challenges related to safety, infrastructure and airspace management. He notes that technological development alone isn’t sufficient; a comprehensive ecosystem needs to be built, which could take at least three more years to fully realize. China needs to overcome various hurdles, including guaranteeing safety, building required infrastructure and sorting out logistics such as routing. “All of this ecosystem surrounding the technology itself is also still underdeveloped at this point,” he said. “I would say it would take at least another three years to see something more viable.” Watching the Matrix demonstration, it seems possible to see such aircraft in the skies. But can we really foresee a future with electric flying aircraft? “We really believe it will happen,” Yang said. “But this is not (only) AutoFlight’s job, it’s the whole ecosystem,” he added. Nevertheless, the test flights of the Matrix project clearly indicate that electric urban air taxis could become a reality in the coming years. Auto Flight firmly believes that electric air taxis will eventually become a practical mode of city transportation, but achieving this will require collaborative efforts across industries and extensive infrastructural development before fully operational.

Muhammad (Peace be upon him) Name

 

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Collision of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe

If everything in the universe is expanding, can galaxies still merge? 

You might think galaxies can’t ever find each other in our runaway cosmos, but it turns out gravity can sometimes overcome even the stretching of space itself.  If the universe is expanding, how can galaxies collide? Shouldn’t they be flying away from each other, not toward one another? The force of gravity can win out and hold structures together. The Andromeda Galaxy has long been predicted to collide with our Milky Way in about 5 billion years. However, a paper published in the June 2025 issue of Nature Astronomy questioned the likelihood of that merger, depending on interactions with other Local Group galaxies. How is it that galaxies merge and collide but the universe is expanding and everything is moving away from everything else?

There are actually two reasons galaxies can collide in an expanding cosmos. One is that the expansion only dominates on very large scales, and the other is that the expansion competes against gravity. The universe is in fact expanding. We’ve known this for more than a century now, and it’s the basis for modern cosmology. This idea is called the big bang model, which is an unfortunate name because it brings to mind a cosmos expanding like an explosion, with galaxies moving away from each other through space like shrapnel. But in fact space itself is expanding, and that’s different. It’s not that galaxies are moving through space; it’s that the expansion of space is carrying them along with it. This has a lot of deeply strange implications. One is that the farther away a galaxy is from us, the faster it appears to be receding. Whether or not galaxies merge depends on how strong the gravitational attraction is between the galaxies and whether the universe’s expansion is more powerful than gravity. Gravity affects everything in the universe. The Milky Way Galaxy is gravitationally pulling on NGC 3370, nearly 100 million light-years away. The catch, however, is that the gravitational attraction between the Milky Way and NGC 3370 is so tiny that the universe’s expansion can overcome it.

Imagine a meterstick that’s made of some extremely flexible material. The two endpoints are, of course, one meter apart. At the center, you can mark two points which are one cm apart. Now grab each end of this pretend meterstick and stretch them out so that the stick is now two meters long. The two endpoints have moved a meter farther apart, traveling at, say, one meter/second. But those marks you made earlier that were one cm apart are now two cm apart because the whole meterstick stretched. This means those two points moved away from each other at a velocity of only one cm/second, much slower than the endpoints. In other words, the farther away two points are in an expanding scale, the faster they move away from each other. Over small scales, the force of gravity can beat out cosmic expansion and hold structures together, such as galaxy groups and galaxy clusters. Our Local Group of galaxies is an example of a grouping held together by mutual gravitation. And actually, the gravitational attraction between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy is strong enough which we’re moving toward each other and may collide in some 5 billion years.

That’s the universe in a nutshell. We see more distant galaxies receding from us more rapidly, and we can even measure that change of velocity over distance. Very roughly speaking, for every megaparsec in distance (3.26 million light-years, a convenient unit for astronomers), space is expanding at an additional 70 or so km/second. So a galaxy that’s, say, 10 megaparsecs away from us is receding at about 700 km/sec. It’s pretty fast. But a galaxy one megaparsec away is only moving away at 70 km/sec. While that’s still speedy, a quarter of a million km/hour!, it’s possible for galaxies to travel faster than that through space, shrapnel-style. If two objects have sufficient mass and are moving at relatively slow speeds, they can be gravitationally bound, meaning their velocities can’t overcome gravity, and they stay close together in what’s called a closed orbit. A moon orbiting a planet is like that, or two galaxies, such as the Milky Way and Andromeda. This is where things get weird. According to relativity, if space is expanding, it cannot expand inside that bound region. The mutual gravity of the objects inside that region holds them together; space expands around that volume but not inside it. It means if two galaxies swoop sufficiently close together, they can still collide. For a deeper dive into this, Ethan Siegel has written about this as well.

The Andromeda galaxy offers a great example. It’s the closest large spiral to our Milky Way, and we both belong to a regional clump of galaxies called the Local Group. At 2.5 million light-years from us, Andromeda should be receding at 50 km/sec or so, but in fact it is heading our way at approximately 110 km/sec. This is because both galaxies are close enough together that each is pulled by the gravity of the other, pulled so hard, in fact, that their mutual velocity is far larger than the universe’s ability to pry them apart. This is also why Andromeda and the Milky Way may someday collide and even merge, though not for perhaps another 5 billion years. And this brings us to the second reason galaxies can still collide in an expanding universe. We think of gravity as a force pulling things together. But according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravity is actually a bending of spacetime, like a dimple in a sheet. If an object passes by something with a lot of mass, such as a planet or a galaxy, that warping causes the object’s path to bend, to curve.

It gets even weirder than this, however, because we now know the expansion of the universe isn’t constant. In 1998 two teams of astronomers announced that the expansion is accelerating, getting faster all the time, caused by a still-mysterious entity called dark energy. This could mean, for some still-theorized behaviors of dark energy, that even space inside a bound region can expand. This effect would be strongest over the largest-distance scales, so, for example, the slowest-moving galaxies near the edge of a galaxy cluster would be lost to the expansion, stripped away from the cluster like the outermost leaves on a head of lettuce. Given enough time and incessant cosmic acceleration, every bound structure would get ripped apart, even ones bound by forces other than gravity, like molecules and even atoms themselves! Astronomers call this idea the big rip, for obvious enough reasons, and it’s not a very reassuring fate. But we really don’t know what dark energy is or how it behaves over long periods of time, so the big rip is only one possible scenario for the extremely distant future. So whether we’re talking about the big rip or a collision with Andromeda, the timescales at play are so immense that these events won’t happen for eons, so they don’t really affect your daily life, unless you’re an astronomer. But we enjoy thinking about such things and relaying these thoughts around the world. 

Muhammad (Peace be upon him) Name