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Scattered about the Milky Way are floating, Jupiter-mass objects, which are likely to be planets wandering around the Galaxy's core instead of orbiting host stars. But these planets aren't rare occurrences in the interstellar sea: the drifters might be nearly twice as numerous as the most common stars. "This is an amazing result, and if it's right, the implications for planet formation are profound," says astronomer Debra Fischer at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. To find the wanderers, scientists turned their telescopes towards the Galactic Bulge surrounding the centre of the Milky Way. Using a technique called gravitational microlensing,...

The only way to get gravity is with mass. The more mass, the more gravity you get. Without mass, you can’t have gravity. ... The force of gravity that we feel is actually just an acceleration towards the center of the Earth at 9.8 meters per second squared, or 1G. If you were in a spacecraft and it was accelerating away from Earth at a rate of 1G, it would feel exactly the same if you were standing on the ground. ... Want to fly to Jupiter? It would only take about 80 hours of acceleration, and then 80 hours...

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Vice President Joe Biden returned to the public stage today for a speech at the White House Clean Energy Summit, blasting Republicans for denying climate change.

John Forbes Nash Jr. was a mathematical genius who had his life chronicled in the movie A Beautiful Mind. One of Nash’s colleagues says that just days before he died in a New York taxi cab accident, he had discussed his latest and possibly most brilliant discovery to date. Mathematician Cédric Villan says that Nash told him that he had replaced Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and that the new equation would further explain quantum gravity. The Daily Mail reports that on May 20, 2015, just three days before the tax cab accident that would take his life, Nash spoke to...

Mathematicians Chase Moonshine’s Shadow Researchers are on the trail of a mysterious connection between number theory, algebra and string theory. In 1978, the mathematician John McKay noticed what seemed like an odd coincidence. He had been studying the different ways of representing the structure of a mysterious entity called the monster group, a gargantuan algebraic object that, mathematicians believed, captured a new kind of symmetry. Mathematicians weren’t sure that the monster group actually existed, but they knew that if it did exist, it acted in special ways in particular dimensions, the first two of which were 1 and 196,883.McKay, of...

Explanation: Why do some places on Earth have higher gravity than others? Sometimes the reason is unknown. To help better understand the Earth's surface, sensitive measurments by the orbiting satellites GRACE and CHAMP were used to create a map of Earth's gravitational field. Since a center for studying this data is in Potsdam, Germany, and since the result makes the Earth look somewhat like a potato, the resulting geoid has been referred to as the Potsdam Gravity Potato. High areas on this map, colored red, indicate areas where gravity is slightly stronger than usual, while in blue areas gravity is...

2 Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past New theories suggest the big bang was not the beginning, and that we may live in the past of a parallel universe December 8, 2014 |By Lee Billings In the evolution of cosmic structure, is entropy or gravity the more dominant force? The answer to this question has deep implications for the universe's future, as well as its past. Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 TeamPhysicists have a problem with time.   Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s...

Quantum gravity The most exciting discovery in physics could come about thanks to telecoms satellites. Is a single theory of reality in sight? Kindle ESA’s Optical Ground Station in the Canary Islands has set a new distance world record in ‘quantum teleportation’ by reproducing the characteristics of a light particle across 143 km of open air. Photo courtesy ESA Sidney Perkowitz is professor of physics emeritus at Emory University in Atlanta. His latest books are Slow Light (2011) and Hollywood Chemistry (2014), and he is at work on a new edition of Universal Foam (2001). Watching a rocket as it...

Your physics teacher always told you this was true. You've never seen it until now. A lot of Newtonian physics happens in this hypothetical world where no outside forces act upon an object. But Earth isn't a vacuum, and outside forces are acting on objects all the time! Now, for the first time, you can see proof of what your physics teacher was telling you right in front of your eyes. Brian Cox visits NASA’s Space Power Facility in Ohio to see what happens when a bowling ball and a feather are dropped together under the conditions of outer space.

India's space programme has succeeded at the first attempt where others have failed - by sending an operational mission to Mars. The Mangalyaan satellite was confirmed to be in orbit shortly after 0800, Indian time. It is, without doubt, a considerable achievement. This is a mission that has been budgeted at 4.5bn rupees ($74m), which, by Western standards, is staggeringly cheap. The American Maven orbiter that arrived at the Red Planet on Monday is costing almost 10 times as much. Back in June, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi even quipped that India's real-life Martian adventure was costing less than the...

Plans by a Turner Prize-nominated artist to drop a piano off an iconic east London tower block have been thwarted by residents, who were concerned over the “danger and utter stupidity” of the stunt. Catherine Yass had been scheduled to hurl the instrument off the top of the 26-storey Balfron Tower in Poplar – but a petition signed by 254 locals forced organisers to change their tune. Retired nurse Jean Brown, 66, of nearby Burcham Street, was concerned about the “danger and utter stupidity”, and amazed the idea had even been suggested. “People seem to have finally come to their...

American Antigravity interviewed Eugene Podkletnov to discuss recent (2004 to 2013) experimental antigravity research in gravity modification and superconductors. For nearly two decades Dr. Podkletnov has been researching the link between gravitation and high-temperature superconductors, and just recently published the peer-review results of new experiments he’s conducted to measure the speed of a force-beam projected by a stationary superconducting apparatus he’s developed. Podkletnov is well-known for his experiments involving YBCO superconductors, which produced a gravity-shielding effect that was investigated by NASA and has been the subject of many peer-review papers. He describes continuing his experiments in this area, and indicates...

The road uniting quantum field theory and general relativity -- the two great theories of modern physics -- has been impassable for 80 years. Could a tool from condensed matter physics finally help map the way?

I am pleased to announce the publication of my new novel Nation Of One. Some here at FR have already read a draft version and I received some very good comments. This fictional story is one of a great discovery and great responsibility, of science and insanity. There are no aliens, weird weapons, or paranormal activities. This a great escapist, lazy day at the beach kind of novel that I know you'll enjoy. So if you have a mind to help my efforts, click on the link above and help spread the word! Thank you very much and CONSTRUCTIVE criticism...

There’s no end to it. Gravity appears to be madly greedy and long armed. Members of the Virgo Super cluster are connected to each other, and they’re dozens of millions of light-years apart. Objects in the Pisces-Cetus Super cluster complex are even connected to each other by our invisible and obnoxiously possessive friend. And they are hundreds of millions of light years apart… In fact, you’re so popular that you are gravitationally pulled towards even most distant object in the observable Universe. And they, in turn, are linked to you. As a result, without the outward expansion and acceleration of...

http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-First-Test-That-Proves-General-Theory-of-Relativity-Wrong-20259.shtml According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a moving mass should create another field, called gravitomagnetic field, besides its static gravitational field. This field has now been measured for the first time and to the scientists' astonishment, it proved to be no less than one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein's General Relativity predicts. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a moving mass should create another field, called gravitomagnetic field, besides its static gravitational field. This field has now been measured for the first time and to the scientists' astonishment, it proved to be no less than...

It has been revealed by the British astronomer Patrick Moore that, on the morning of January 4th 2014, an extraordinary astronomical event will occur. At exactly 9:47 am, the planet Pluto will pass directly behind Jupiter, in relation to the Earth. This rare alignment will mean that the combined gravitational force of the two planets would exert a stronger tidal pull, temporarily counteracting the Earth’s own gravity and making people weigh less. Moore calls this the Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect. Astronomers have long been aware that there would be an alignment of the planets on that date, when Mercury, Venus, Earth,...

Sonner then set about to create quarks to see if he could watch what happens when two are entangled with each other. Using an electric field, he was able to catch pairs of particles coming out of a vacuum environment with a few “transient” particles in it. - Once he caught the particles, he mapped them in terms of space-time (four-dimensional space). Note: gravity is believed to be the fifth dimension because it can bend space-time [5th Dimension?], as you can see in these images of galaxies below. - Sonner then tried to figure out what would happen in the...

We no longer have to play at goblins and ghosts on Halloween. We've got real snoops and authentic spooks, and they're plenty scary, reading our mail and tracing us through social media. Safety and security are the crucial domestic interests in the high-tech world where we all live. We feel helpless in trying to keep control over our most minute musings; we're sure that Big Brother is watching us, and not necessarily to watch over us. It's the season when doubts and fears, some real and some not, assail. We're frustrated with the breakout of Obamacare, which betrayed its...