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Mysterious high-energy particles known as cosmic rays zip through space at a wide range of energies, some millions of times greater than those produced in the world’s most powerful atom smasher. Scientists have long thought cosmic rays from inside our galaxy come from supernova explosions, but a new study has fingered a second source: the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. With this new result, the search for cosmic ray origins, which has frustrated scientists for more than 100 years, has taken an unexpected new twist. “It’s very exciting,” says astrophysicist Andrew Taylor of the Dublin...

upermassive black holes are the most extreme objects in the known universe, with masses millions or even billions of times the mass of our sun. Now astronomers have been able to study one of these behemoths inside a strange, distant quasar and they’ve made an astonishing discovery — it’s spinning one-third the speed of light. Studying a supermassive black hole some 3.5 billion light-years away is no easy feat, but this isn’t a regular object: it’s a quasar that shows quasi-periodic brightening events every 12 years or so — a fact that has helped astronomers reveal its extreme nature. Quasars...

Comprised of a lone hexagonal honeycomb lattice layer of tightly packed carbon atoms, graphene is one of the strongest, lightest, and most conductive compounds ever discovered. Bottom line, it's an extraordinary composite. However, a scientist from New York's Clarkson University says he's found a way to manufacture hemp waste into a material "better than graphene." Moreover, the scientist -- known to his peers as Dr. David Mitlin -- says creating this graphene-like hemp material costs but a minuscule fraction of what it takes to produce graphene. Presented at an American Chemical Society Meeting in San Francisco, Dr. Mitlin described how...

Happy Pi Day! No, not National Pie Day. That's January 23. On this day, geeks go wild at the mere thought of celebrating pi — the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. pi = 3.1415926535897932384626433832795 or 3.14 for short.

Using a series of laser beams, a pair of German scientists successfully teleported classical information without the transfer or matter or energy. Researchers have previously demonstrated local teleportation within the world of quantum particles. But the latest experiment successfully translates the phenomenon for classical physics. "Elementary particles such as electrons and light particles exist per se in a spatially delocalized state," Alexander Szameit, a professor at the University of Jena, explained in a press release. In other words, these particles can be in two places at the same time. "Within such a system spread across multiple locations, it is possible...

Farthest Galaxy Yet Smashes Cosmic Distance Record By Calla Cofield, Space.com Staff Writer March 3, 2016 04:45pm ET MORE Please upgrade your Flash Plugin The Hubble Space Telescope just calculated the distance to the most far-out galaxy ever measured, providing scientists with a look deep into the history of the universe. The far-away galaxy, named GN-z11, existed a mere 400 million years after the Big Bang, or about 13.3 billion years ago. Because the light from such a distant galaxy must travel huge distances to reach Earth, scientists are seeing the galaxy as it looked over 13 billion years ago....

[S]cientists...for some time now, they have been working with a model that states that the Universe consists of 4.9% “normal” matter (i.e. that which we can see), 26.8% “dark matter” (that which we can’t), and 68.3% “dark energy”. From what they have observed, scientists have also concluded that the normal matter in the Universe is concentrated in web-like filaments, which make up about 20% of the Universe by volume. But a recent study performed by the Institute of Astro- and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck in Austria has found that a surprising amount of normal matter may live...

In tunnels deep inside a granite mountain at Daya Bay, a nuclear reactor facility some 55 kilometers from Hong Kong, sensitive detectors are hinting at the existence of a new form of neutrino, one of nature's most ghostly and abundant elementary particles. Neutrinos, electrically neutral particles that sense only gravity and the weak nuclear force, interact so feebly with matter that 100 trillion zip unimpeded through your body every second. They come in three known types: electron, muon and tau. The Daya Bay results suggest the possibility that a fourth, even more ghostly type of neutrino exists - one more...

Now that LIGO has detected their first gravitational wave signal, the part of Einstein's theory that predicts that the fabric of space itself should have ripples and waves in it has been confirmed. This brings up all sorts of interesting questions, including this one from reader (and Patreon supporter!) Joe Latone, who asks: "Are gravity waves expected to exhibit wave-particle duality, and if so, have LIGO physicists already conceived of ways to test it, like the double-slit experiment?" It started out simply enough: matter was made of particles, things like atoms and their constituents, and radiation was made of waves....

"God is a pure mathematician!" declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And one number above all others has exercised an enduring fascination for physicists: 137.03599913. Let me explain. When scientists measure any quantity they must specify the units being used. The speed of light, for example, is either 186,000 or 300,000 depending on whether it is expressed as miles per second or kilometres per second. Likewise your weight might be 150 or 68 according to whether you are measuring in pounds or kilograms. Without knowing the units being...

One of the most spectacular discoveries of the 20th century was that the Universe itself was expanding. When Einstein put forth his general theory of relativity, he swiftly recognized that there was a consequence he was unhappy about: a Universe that was filled with matter in all directions would be unstable against gravitational collapse. Einstein’s fix for this was to make up an invisible, outward-pushing force that prevented this collapse from occurring, a cosmological constant. But if you didn’t include this cosmological constant, others soon realized, you’d wind up with a Universe that wasn’t static in time, but where the...

Anthony Watts / 3 days ago February 17, 2016 Last week, the science world was abuzz with the news that gravitational waves had been discovered thanks to the LIGO project and the team of international scientists that made it possible. At WUWT, I covered the story here, saying that it was a “triumph of science”. Indeed it was, and still is, and the effects of this discovery on science will ripple into the future for decades and centuries to come.I woke in the middle of the night as I sometimes do, for no particular reason except that my brain doesn’t...

A new photograph of galaxy NGC 4889 may look peaceful from such a great distance, but it’s actually home to one of the biggest black holes that astronomers have ever identified. The Hubble Space Telescope allowed scientists to capture photos of the galaxy, located in the Coma Cluster about 300 million light-years away. The supermassive black hole hidden away in NGC 4889 breaks all kinds of records, even though it is currently classified as dormant. So how big is it, exactly? Well, according to our best estimates, the supermassive black hole is roughly 21 billion times the size of the...

Pondering Gravitational Wavesby Paul Gilster on February 11, 2016 "Einstein would be beaming," said National Science Foundation director France Córdova as she began this morning's news conference announcing the discovery of gravitational waves. I can hardly disagree, because we have in this discovery yet another confirmation of the reality of General Relativity. Caltech's Kip Thorne, who discussed black hole mergers way back in 1994 in his book Black Holes and Time Warps, said at the same news conference that Einstein must have been frustrated by the lack of available technologies to detect the gravitational waves his theory predicted, a lack...

Explanation: Just press play to watch two black holes merge. Inspired by the first direct detection of gravitational waves by LIGO, this simulation video plays in slow motion but would take about one third of a second if run in real time. Set on a cosmic stage the black holes are posed in front of stars, gas, and dust. Their extreme gravity lenses the light from behind them into Einstein rings as they spiral closer and finally merge into one. The otherwise invisible gravitational waves generated as the massive objects rapidly coalesce cause the visible image to ripple and slosh...

From the site: "One of the most simplest and interesting ways to explain Gravitational Waves" See video link below.

It took a century, but the theory from Albert Einstein handwritten neatly on paper that is now yellowing has finally been vindicated. Israeli officials on Thursday offered a rare look at the documents where Einstein presented his ideas on gravitational waves, a display that coincided with the historic announcement that scientists had glimpsed the first direct evidence of his theory. [...] In a landmark discovery for physics and astronomy, international scientists announced in Washington on Thursday that they had glimpsed the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. Einstein's theory states that mass warps space and time,...

In a breakthrough in quantum physics, scientists were able to create the phenomenon of quantum entanglement macroscopically using large magnets at room temperature. ... scientists working at the University of Chicago and the Argonne National Laboratory revealed that they were able to create quantum entanglement at a macroscopic level at room temperature on a semiconductor chip, using atomic nuclei and the application of relatively small magnetic fields. Their breakthrough, which is published in Science Advances, is not only significant in what they accomplished but also how they accomplished it. In quantum physics, the creation of entanglement in particles larger and...

Bursts of gamma rays from the center of our galaxy are not likely to be signals of dark matter but rather other astrophysical phenomena such as fast-rotating stars called millisecond pulsars, according to two new studies, one from a team based at Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another based in the Netherlands. Previous studies suggested that gamma rays coming from the dense region of space in the inner Milky Way galaxy could be caused when invisible dark matter particles collide. But using new statistical analysis methods, the two research teams independently found that the gamma ray...

Chemistry teachers recently had to update their classroom decor, with the announcement that scientists have confirmed the discovery of four new elements on the periodic table. The as-yet unnamed elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 filled in the remaining gaps at the bottom of the famous chart-a roadmap of matter's building blocks that has successfully guided chemists for nearly a century and a half. The official confirmation, granted by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), was years in the making, as these superheavy elements are highly unstable and tough to create. But scientists had strong reason to...