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A team at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has found the largest recorded black hole, one that swallows an unprecedented amount of its home galaxy, potentially requiring a rethink in our understanding of galactic formation. The huge hole has been spotted in the heart of the disk system NGC 1277, a smallish galaxy about 10 per cent of the size of the Milky Way and situated around 220 million light-years from Earth, in the constellation Perseus. Almost all galaxies have black holes at their centers, but they typically only take up around 0.1 per cent of the total galactic...

The first steps towards interstellar travel have been taken, but the stars are very far away. Voyager 1 is about 17 light-hours distant from Earth and is traveling with a velocity of 0.006 percent of light speed, meaning it will take about 17,000 years to travel one light-year. Fortunately, the elusive "warp drive" now appears to be evolving past difficulties with new theoretical advances and a NASA test rig under development to measure artificially generated warping of space-time. The warp drive broke away from being a wholly fictional concept in 1994, when physicist Miguel Alcubierre suggested that faster-than-light (FTL) travel...

Credit: CERN Still too soon to know. That's the latest word from particle physicists working with the world's largest atom smasher—Europe's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland—as they try to figure out whether the particle they discovered in July is precisely the long-sought Higgs boson or something a tad different. The key question is whether the new particle decays into combinations of familiar particles at the rates that physicists' standard model predicts. So far, the measured decay rates generally match expectations, but the statistical uncertainties are too large to say anything conclusive, physicists working with the gargantuan particle detectors known...

Please remember that this app works only in Google Chrome Screenshot from 100,000 Stars Want to explore the Milky Way? A new visualization tool from Google called 100,000 Stars lets you take a tour of our cosmic neighborhood, and with a few clicks of your mouse you can zoom in, out and around and do a little learning along the way. Zoom in to learn the names of some of the closest stars; click on the names to find out more information about them. Playing with it is great fun, and I’ve been experimenting with it for a while. The...

Explanation: Could you tell the story of human existence in a minute? This thrilling video culls together multiple teasing snippets in an attempt to do just that. And sets it to music. Briefly depicted, from start to finish, is an artistic animation of the Big Bang, a trip across the early universe, the formation of the Earth and Moon, the emergence of multi-celled life and plants, the rise of reptiles and dinosaurs, a devastating meteor strike, the rise of mammals and humans, and finally the rise of modern civilization. The minute movie ends with a flyover of the modern skyscraper...

LONDON (Reuters) - An international team of astronomers has produced the first map of the universe as it was 11 billion years ago, filling a gap between the Big Bang and the rapid expansion that followed. The study, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, shows the universe went through a phase roughly three billion years after the Big Bang when expansion actually started to slow, before the force of so-called 'dark energy' kicked in and sent galaxies accelerating away from each other. Much is known about the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang from studies of its afterglow in...

It’s not only possible to get light to tie itself in knots: given the right conditions, it will do so spontaneously, according to a paper published last week in Nature. El Reg has no possible hope of fully understanding this paper (published in full, an emerging trend we welcome), but one really interesting idea is right there in the abstract: “We anticipate similar spontaneous knot topology to be a universal feature of waves whose phase front is twisted and nonlinearly modulated, including superfluids and trapped matter waves.” [Emphasis added] In other words, this research has the potential to be replicated...

(Phys.org)—David Ruffner and David Grier of New York University have developed a technique for using Bessel beams to draw a particle toward a source. In their paper published in Physical Review Letters they describe how they used their technique to pull 30 micrometer sized silica spheres suspended in water, towards a laser source. A device that uses energy to pull an object towards a source is known as a "tractor beam" after the fictional technology of Star Trek fame. To date no such device exists, but this new work by Ruffner and Grier shows that it might be possible. Their...

3D image shows ginormous filament of Big Bang batter Dark matter can't really be "seen" as such, it can only be detected by looking at the gravitational effects it has on the space around it. But by collating images from the Hubble Space telescope, the researchers now have a picture of dark matter (shown in blue above) extending 60 million light-years away from one of the most massive galaxy clusters astrophysicists know about – MACS J0717. Big Bang theories predict that when the universe was first created, dense matter condensed into a web of tangled dark matter filaments throughout the...

Forget Wimpy Plans and NIMBYs, Let's Solve the Energy Crisis by Blowing Up Mercury Posted by Derek_Mead on Wednesday, Apr 04, 2012 Save this post NextPrev Add This With all the squabbling about oil killing us all, climate change screwing with polar bears, nuclear plants falling apart, solar panels sucking on a cloudy day, and wind turbines scything through migratory birds with a gory violence best explained by an Omega Crom song, there’s a big point that all the complainers in the energy debate are ignoring: These days, we are being huge wimps. Millennia ago us humans were building...

•Political scientists from UCLA compare candidates based on 'competence' •Most students interpreted 'competence' as 'attractiveness' •Mitt Romney scored in the 99th percentile, Sarah Palin in the 95th and Paul Ryan in the 67th •'If the election were decided on looks, it would be no contest' Republican duo Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are one of the hottest tickets this nation has ever seen, and now there's proof that its not just their politics. According to professors at the University of California, Mitt Romney scores in the 99th percentile of all politicians for his looks alone, far outpacing his running mate...

New theory describes faster than light travel, could explain CERN's results Some of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, including Albert Einstein, consider the speed of light a sort of universal "speed limit".  But over the past couple decades physicists theorized that it should be possible to break this law and get away with it -- to travel faster than the speed of light. I. CERN Results Potentially Described One of several possible routes to faster-than-light travel was potentially demonstrated when researchers at CERN, the European physics organization known for maintaining the Large Hadron Collider, sent high-energy particles through the Earth's crust from Geneva, Switzerland...

Enlarge Image Light touch. Serge Haroche and David Wineland (right) won the Nobel for their work manipulating the quantum states of individual atoms. Credit: CNRS and NIST The past couple of decades have witnessed a sea change in quantum physics. Previously, scientists relied on the strange rules of quantum theory mainly to explain the odd natural behavior of masses of atoms and other quantum particles such as photons. Increasingly, however, physicists are exploiting those rules to create delicate quantum states of individual particles and to do novel things with them. This year's Nobel Prize in physics honors two experimenters...

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2012 to Serge Haroche Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France and David J. Wineland National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Colorado Boulder, CO, USA "for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems" Particle control in a quantum world Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland have independently invented and developed methods for measuring and manipulating individual particles while preserving their quantum-mechanical nature, in ways that were previously thought unattainable.

There's a hierarchy of "Star Trek" inventions we would like to see become reality. We already have voice-controlled computers and communicators in the form of smartphones. A working Holodeck is under development. Now, how about we get some impulse engines for our starships? The University of Alabama in Huntsville's Aerophysics Research Center, NASA, Boeing, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are collaborating on a project to produce nuclear fusion impulse rocket engines. It's no warp drive, but it would get us around the galaxy a lot quicker than current technologies. According to Txchnologist, the scientists are hoping to make impulse drive...

One of the most deeply rooted concepts in science and in our everyday life is causality; the idea that events in the present are caused by events in the past and, in turn, act as causes for what happens in the future. If an event A is a cause of an effect B, then B cannot be a cause of A. Now theoretical physicists from the University of Vienna and the Université Libre de Bruxelles have shown that in quantum mechanics it is possible to conceive situations in which a single event can be both, a cause and an effect...

A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television's Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say. A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, however subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy. Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would...

A pioneering team from IBM in Zurich has published single-molecule images so detailed that the type of atomic bonds between their atoms can be discerned. The same team took the first-ever single-molecule image in 2009 and more recently published images of a molecule shaped like the Olympic rings. The new work opens up the prospect of studying imperfections in the "wonder material" graphene or plotting where electrons go during chemical reactions. The images are published in Science. The team, which included French and Spanish collaborators, used a variant of a technique called atomic force microscopy, or AFM. AFM uses a...

A narrative has developed over the past several years that the Republican Party is anti-science. Recently, thanks to the ignorant remarks about rape made by Rep. Todd Akin, the Democrats have seized the opportunity to remind us that they are the true champions of science in America. But is it really true? No. As we thoroughly detail in our new book, "Science Left Behind," Democrats are willing to throw science under the bus for any number of pet ideological causes – including anything from genetic modification to vaccines. Consider California’s Proposition 37, which would require genetically modified food to carry...

Speed of light may have changed recently 19:00 30 June 04 The speed of light, one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical constants, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago - and not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth. The controversial finding is turning up the heat on an already simmering debate, especially since it is based on re-analysis of old data that has long been used to argue for exactly the opposite: the constancy of the speed of light and other constants. A varying speed of light...